Danger – Love at Work 1937

Henry Throckmorton MacMorrow, a junior partner at Parsons, Hilton, Trent and MacMorrow, is tasked with obtaining the signatures of the Pemberton family so they can sell their land. While riding a train toward the Pemberton home in Aiken, South Carolina, he meets Junior Pemberton, a precocious ten-year-old whose lively mischief prompts Henry to kick him at the station, much to the dismay of the boy’s sister, Antoinette “Toni” Pemberton.

Henry arrives at the Pemberton residence, and the family mistakes him for Toni’s fiancé, Howard Rogers. Toni quickly clears up the confusion and, despite their rocky first meeting, begins to warm to the agreeable lawyer. She believes Henry is impoverished and supporting a widowed mother, and she offers to help him, but Howard convinces the family that Henry is a fraud. The attorney heads back to New York City and soon finds himself out of a job.

Still determined to locate Henry, Toni convinces the Pembertons that their town is under quarantine, and the entire clan heads to New York. When Toni learns Henry has lost his job, she vows to help him regain it. She urges her family to sign the papers letting the land be sold, and then she and Henry travel to the countryside to collect the signatures of Aunt Pitty and Aunt Patty as well as Uncle Goliath.

Howard, convinced Henry is a con artist, evaluates the Pemberton property and discovers oil seeping from his own car, not realizing the leak is from him. Believing the land to be worth a fortune, he convinces the family to sell it to him for $125,000 and arranges the sell while sowing doubt that Henry was deceiving them. Believing Henry deceived her, Toni ends their relationship.

Howard later discovers the oil came from his car and tries to recoup his money, only to find the Pembertons have already spent it. When Howard attempts to buy the land back from Henry, Toni tries to warn him, but he won’t listen until Aunt Pitty and Aunt Patty reveal that Toni and Henry spent the night in their barn, and Toni pretends he took advantage of her. The family storms Henry’s apartment, demanding that he marry Toni, and he agrees to do so.