Let's Make A Million (1936)

Stars:

Charlotte Wynters, Edward Everett Horton, Porter Hall

After the U.S. Senate allocates two billion dollars for veteran bonuses, Harrison Gentry, owner of Gentry Machinery and Supply Co. in Gentry, Oklahoma, plans to use his $1,100 bonus to marry his secretary and fiancée of five years, Caroline Williams. Harrison's maiden aunts, with whom he lives, however, hope to use his bonus to erect a granite shaft in honor of their father on twenty acres they purchased eleven years before as "Ezra Gentry Park." Harrison's aunts inveigle him into traveling to Kansas City to buy the slab, but the granite salesman has gone out of business. Upon returning home, Harrison, acting on a tip from his drunken sales manager, Sam Smith, buys stock from crooked oilmen Spencer and Gilbert. Harrison hopes Spencer and Gilbert will purchase equipment from his shop for a Gentry oil well, but is unaware they are being investigated for tax evasion. News of Harrison's stock purchase travels quickly around town, and soon most of Gentry's veterans have spent their bonuses on S & G stock. The well goes up, but after digging 6,000 feet and not hitting oil, Spencer and Gilbert dissolve their company and leave town. The stockholders, including Caroline's father, blame Harrison for their losses, and vote him out of the American Legion and boycott his store. Determined to help his friends, Harrison hires Sam's friend, geologist Cliff Spaulding of Texas, to investigate the dry well. Spaulding discovers S & G actually drilled only to 950 feet and suspects the property adjacent to the well, Gentry Park, is oil-filled. Harrison then contacts an old army friend who is now a detective, and he and his friends help Harrison blow up S & G's safe, forcing Spencer and Gilbert to release the Gentry oil lands to him. With S & G's money, Harrison builds a new well and, after his aunts sell him Gentry Park, strikes oil. The townsmen buy stock in Harrison's new oil company and dedicate the new well by making him president of the American Legion. Harrison then once again proposes to Caroline and they kiss.