Reaching For The Sun (1941)

Stars:

Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, Eddie Bracken

Wessel Smitter's semicomic novel {-FOB Detroit} was the source material for Reaching for the Sun. Joel McCrea plays a North Woods clam digger who orders an outboard motor for his business. Figuring he'll save shipping money by picking the motor up himself, he heads for Detroit. Here he decides to take a job at an auto plant, the better to support wife Ellen Drew and the couple's baby. Paramount remembered that Joel McCrea's fans expected a few action scenes, and obligingly included a sequence in which a jealous coworker tries to kill McCrea with a grappling iron. Reaching for the Sun is easy to take, though not quite on the level of Joel McCrea's later work with director Preston Sturges.