Fifty Roads to Town (Twentieth Century-Fox) is an unambitious but consistently pleasant little farce, designed to exhibit as fetchingly as possible the qualifications of Producer Darryl Zanuck's latest discovery, Indian-blooded Don Ameche, whose fan mail at Twentieth Century-Fox has lately been second only to Shirley Temple's. Ameche is Peter Nostrand, a good-humored playboy who, while trying to escape from a bench warrant in a divorce suit, encounters Millicent Kendall (Ann Sothern') trying to escape from an undesirable suitor. By the time both have been chased by the same motorcycle policeman into refuge at the same Adirondack cabin, Nostrand thinks Millicent is a summons server, she thinks he is a gangster. It takes the arrival at the cabin of a shaggy local trapper (Slim Summerville), a real gangster, a machine-gun posse led by the local sheriff (John Qualen), a blizzard and a tame rabbit to relieve their misapprehensions.
Produced by onetime Comedian Raymond Griffith, directed by Norman Taurog. Fifty Roads to Town's principal claim to a permanent niche in cinema history is that it includes Hollywood's first exposition of "the match game"—in which each player holds three or less matches in his right hand and all players guess at the total held. Good shot: Peter, Millicent and the trapper playing to see who sleeps in the cabin's only bed. Son of a Kenosha, Wis. saloon keeper, Don Ameche attended Columbia (Iowa), Marquette, Georgetown and Wisconsin Universities in quick succession. In his vacations he worked. His easiest job was testing the finished product of a mattress factory. His hardest was in a cement factory, loading trucks. When he left college he joined the Jackson Stock Company whose leading man a week later conveniently broke his leg. Substituting for him, Ameche played a year in stock, took a vaudeville tour with the late Texas Guinan, made good on a Chicago radio hour. He did so well as a radio actor that he got a screen test from Producer Darryl Zanuck who, the day Ameche got to Hollywood, cast him in a tedious epic called Sins of Man.
Don Ameche (rhymes with peachy) lives on a San Fernando Valley ranch, drives ten miles into town for dinner because he finds his home "too lonely." He is almost 6 ft. tall, 170 lb., fond of practical jokes of which his fellow professionals frequently make him the victim. Accused of being dull in his love scenes, Ameche has given cinemagazines the following alibi: "Valentino was the impetuous type . . . then he would slow up and make the ladies chase him. Mrs. Ameche would not care for this type of lover. . . ."