One More Spring. 1935. USA. Directed by Henry King. With Janet Gaynor, Warner Baxter, Walter Woolf King, Grant Mitchell. DCP. 87 min.
One of the last films to be released by Fox Film Corporation, before the financially endangered studio merged with Darryl Zanuck’s upstart Twentieth Century Productions, One More Spring was a personal project for its director, Henry King, who considered it “probably his best picture, in a way,” according to a 1937 interview in The New York Times. Adapted from a novel by Robert Nathan, the film is set in a studio-stylized Central Park, where a shed becomes a shelter against the raging Depression for a group of assorted outcasts, including an unemployed actress (Janet Gaynor), a bankrupt antiques dealer (Warner Baxter), a Jewish musician in exile from Hitler’s Europe (Walter Woolf King), and a banker who has defaulted on his depositors (Grant Mitchell). Staged with King’s characteristic simplicity and sincerity, this gently uplifting comedy has some of the flavor of the Popular Front films emerging simultaneously in France. Restored by The Museum of Modern Art and The Film Foundation, with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.