A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
December 5, 1930
Original Title:
Only Saps Work
Genres:
Comedy | Crime
Production Companies:
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Publix Corp.
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
Runtime: 77
Rubber-legged comedian Leon Errol made his talkie starring bow in Paramount's Only Saps Work. Based on a play by Owen Davis Sr., the film casts Errol as James Wilson, a kleptomaniac who starts with picking pockets and ends up robbing a bank. Wilson's friend Lawrence Payne (Richard Arlen) inadvertently aids our hero during one of his heists, ending up in deep doo-doo with the law. Before Wilson is able to extricate Payne from his dilemma for the sake of heroine Barbara Tanner (Mary Brian), he pauses long enough to pose as a private eye -- and even gives bellboy Oscar (Stu Erwin) tips on how to spot a crook! If only all of Leon Errol's feature films had been as consistently hilarious as Only Saps Work.
Adaptation:
Sam Mintz
Percy Heath
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Director:
Cyril Gardner
Edwin H. Knopf
Director of Photography:
Rex Wimpy
Editor:
Edward Dmytryk
Music Director:
Leo Reisman
Presenter:
Adolph Zukor
Screenplay:
Percy Heath
Sam Mintz
Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Songs:
Ballard MacDonald
Dave Dreyer
Sound:
Earl S. Hayman
Sound Engineer:
Earl S. Hayman
Theatre Play:
Owen Davis
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.