Allan Dwan's The Inside Story (1948)

At least one can't say that Allan Dwan makes films as if D.W. Griffith never lived, since Dwan worked with Griffith on Intolerance (1916).  Dwan was one of the best at knowing where to put the camera and how to cut and edit a scene; he directed over 400 movies, starting in 1911 and directing his last in 1961.  During the sound period his movies were mostly low-budget for smaller studios such as Republic but they were always intelligent and observant, often about small town America (see my post of June 11, 2014), as is the case with The Inside Story.

The Inside Story flashes back to 1933, when Uncle Ed (Charles Winniger) worked at a small inn in Silver Creek, Vermont.  Everyone in the town is struggling financially and many are about to go under, since Geraldine (Florence Bates) was forced to close the mill.  Then Eustace Peabody (Roscoe Karns) shows up on the train from New York with $1000 for farmer AG Follensbee (Tom Fadden).  Uncle Ed, who can't see too well without his glasses, puts the money in an envelope which Waldo Williams (William Lundigan) had received with a letter from a New York gallery rejecting his paintings.  When inn owner Horace Taylor (Gene Lockhart) opens the safe he assumes that the money was a payment to Waldo, his son-in-law, and uses the money to pay his grocery supplier Jay Jay Johnson (Will Wright), who uses the money to pay his back rent to Geraldine, who uses the money as a retainer to lawyer Tom O'Conner(Robert Shayne), who was about to shoot himself because he couldn't support  his wife Audrey (who has to spend the week in New York to make money as a model) and to whom Tom gives the $1000, which Audrey gives to Waldo to pay for a portrait he paints of her.  Waldo returns the money to Follensbee, whose wife had just given birth to twins.

This particular version of La Ronde includes a great deal of humor and confusion, with Geraldine ("I'm not Uriah Heep") even having a chance to give a history of depressions in America, of which this is only the latest, and Eustace Peabody and Uncle Ed sharing knock-knock jokes with each other, i.e, like most comedies it is basically serious. Dwan does a superb job of creating a small town with just a few sets and the distinctive personalities of Silver Creek's denizens, played by an impressive ensemble of character actors (there are even a couple of fish-out-of-water gangsters, played by Allen Jenkins and William Haade).  Whether Uncle Ed makes the case that money should stay in circulation and not in safe deposit boxes is an intriguing question, though rather beside the point here.