Brewster’s Millions 1945

Montague L. Brewster (played by Dennis O’Keefe), a newly discharged American soldier returning from Europe, rushes home to New York City to marry his sweetheart, Peggy Gray (portrayed by Helen Walker). Soon after, a strange windfall reshapes his plans: his late uncle has left him a staggering $8 million, but to inherit it he must spend exactly one million dollars before his 30th birthday on October 13, 1944, without telling anyone what he’s up to. The legal safeguard is blunt: no one can be told about the spending, and failure to meet the deadline means the fortune stays out of reach. Brewster accepts the bizarre conditions, determined to outsmart the odds and secure his future.

To carry out the plan, he starts Brewster & Company and brings in his wartime friends as his executives—Hacky Smith ([Joe Sawyer]) and Nopper Harrison ([Herbert Rudley])—with Peggy serving as his private secretary. Despite his best efforts to shed money, many of Brewster’s schemes to lose cash somehow end up turning a profit, turning his grand test into a complicated juggling act of spending, recapture, and reinvestment. Peggy, meanwhile, grows increasingly wary as Brewster spends long hours with Barbara Drew ([Gail Patrick]) and later with the flashy showgirl Trixie Summers ([June Havoc]), all under the guise of the grand financial experiment. Brewster insists he’s merely using these social moves to fuel the plan, but the strain begins to wear on their relationship. Peggy’s worried mother even nudges her to rethink the romance, urging her to see if there’s a real future beyond the money game.

As the pressure mounts, Peggy’s jealousy collides with Brewster’s stubborn ingenuity. His pals, convinced he’s losing touch with reality, step in to disrupt some of the more reckless gambits. Yet Brewster’s public image remains intact, and the tension between affection and obligation wires itself tightly around the countdown to the deadline. Eventually Peggy and Brewster are nudged toward one last extravagant attempt: a costly cruise, enriched by the cast of a failed stage production Brewster financed after Smith and Harrison close it down. Peggy agrees, partly out of loyalty and partly out of a stubborn hope that the journey might bring them closer before the clock runs out.

The voyage becomes a turning point. Hacky Smith and Nopper Harrison stage a mutiny, locking Brewster in his quarters and steering the chartered yacht back toward New York. The vessel is then knocked off course by the remnants of a World War II patrol—an old U-boat mine—forcing Brewster to improvise under pressure. He discovers that a tow from a passing Brazilian freighter to a Florida port would cost him a massive salvage fee of $450,000, a sum that oddly aligns with his overarching goal: the expense would drain enough cash to balance the books, potentially exhausting the entire million and thus satisfying the condition.

Back in New York a few days later, Brewster returns to Peggy’s home with a stack of receipts from the spending spree, certain that the million-dollar mark has been met. In a dramatic twist, his friends reveal they’ve recovered $40,012 from the failed ventures and other misadventures. Brewster scrambles to use every last cent—settling the executor’s fee, paying a tiny old debt of ten dollars, and even tossing in $2 for cab fare—so that the deadline passes with the books seemingly balanced. The plan succeeds in securing the anticipated inheritance, and Brewster races with Peggy toward the nearest justice of the peace for a quick, jubilant wedding.

Just as they step toward the doorway, a final small interruption arrives in the form of a door-to-door salesman. The encounter is a comic reminder of the world Brewster has almost conquered with numbers and risk: the salesman tries to push an item for two cents more than its store price, and Brewster, with a knowing shrug, ejects him from the premises. In the end, the pair heads off to marry, their future buoyed by a fortune won and lost in equal measure, and by the stubborn persistence that brought them to this moment.