Lucky Don Ameche (1937) 🇬🇧

One warm night last summer I sat in a London kinema watching a private showing of a new film — “Sins of Man.”

by Guy Beacon

Gregory Ratoff had told me about it nearly a year before; he had bought the screen rights of a book called "Job," and was going to direct it himself, somewhere, somehow; the details didn't bother him.

Ratoff is like that.

And how he had done it, with Jean Hersholt giving an unforgettable performance in the lead; but what interested me more was the performances of a couple of young newcomers playing the two brothers, Karl Fregman and Maria Singarelli.

I was still more impressed when at the end of the picture it was announced that both parts had been played by the new Fox "discovery," Don Ameche.

This was a remarkable performance for a young actor in his first screen appearance, and I predicted a considerable future for him; and the prediction has been justified.

In fact, young Don has begun to loom so large in the Hollywood scene that it behoves us to make some inquiry into his origin, background, nature, achievements and probable future.

Thirty or forty years ago old Grand-daddy Ameche migrated to America from his native Italy, bringing his son Felix with him, and set up in business as a “horse-kidnapper” — Don's kindly expression to describe an occupation that was then punishable by shooting at sight.

However, they didn't catch Grand-daddy, whose business thrived well enough to enable him to start son Felix as a taxi-driver — the advantage of this being that you mustn't shoot taxi-drivers.

Felix married a girl named Barbara, who also had been born in Italy, and soon he gave up taxi-driving for saloon-keeping — in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in case you have any idea where that is.

There a film star was born to them.

They didn't know it, of course; they saw only a little brown bambino with warm dark eyes, whom they handicapped with the name Dominic Felix Ameche. What, after all, was one bambino more or less? They had eight.

But saloon-keeping, like horse-stealing, was a sufficiently profitable occupation to provide for even so large a family, and Dominic Felix (shortened to "Don" for economy of breath) was sent to college.

Actually he was sent to four colleges in all.

The reason he left Columbia University was called Honore Prendergast.

He was taken by a parish-priest to call on a family named Prendergast, because the padre decided Don had been studying too hard and needed relaxation.

And Don took one look at daughter-of-the-house Honore and decided that here was precisely the relaxation he needed.

But Papa Ameche held other views. He was set on son Don becoming a lawyer (perhaps to offset Grand-daddy), and figured that Honore might distract the young man's thoughts from his studies.

So he packed the boy off to Marquette University, after which his natural roving disposition took him in turn to Georgetown and the University of Wisconsin.

All completely wasted on a film actor.

He had been interested in dramatics since before he left school; and before he graduated from university his series of "lucky breaks" began. (He says it began with meeting Honore, but that wasn't so apparent at the time.)

An important member of a local theatrical company at Madison, Wisconsin, whose lucky day it was not, was seriously injured in a motor-accident. (It was Thanksgiving Day — what a touch of irony!)

The manager, frantic, remembered seeing Don in a college show, and rang him up; and Don made his first professional appearance — and signed a twenty-weeks' contract. So the lawbooks were tumbled under the bed, and Don became an actor.

Luck? Listen! Don had a friend who broadcast regularly, and one day he went to the studio to see him; and while he was hanging about, an official who happened to know he was an actor suggested his having an audition.

Result — a contract to feature in radio plays.

As a matter of fact there was an element of luck in connection with his engagement by Twentieth Century-Fox also.

He had made a screen test in New York for another company, and it was seen by an agent who immediately realised the young man's possibilities and 'phoned through to Darryl Zanuck in Hollywood — with the consequence that Don was on the first 'plane to Hollywood and began rehearsals for Sins of Man two hours after he landed.

Originally he was to have played only one of the brothers, but Zanuck evidently decided you couldn't have too much Ameche, and gave him both parts.

In his second appearance, opposite Loretta Young in the colour film "Ramona," he was again "lucky," inasmuch as the film was well received and he came triumphantly through the ordeal by colour.

But... luck? Well, I don't know so much. Don himself, a modest guy as ever walked the Hollywood floors, declares that he has "never had a bad break"; but yoa've got to be good to take advantage of the good breaks.

He is reported to be a terrific worker, who takes great pains to improve himself; and this marches well with what we know of his private life.

Don Ameche (known to his family and staff as "Daddy") is a conscientious and serious-minded young man who has inherited the patriarchal tradition and disposition of his Italian ancestors.

His great aim has always been to have a home and children, and this he has achieved, for he and Honore (oh, yes, he came back and married his Miss Prendergast six years later; Don is nothing if not thorough) have a ranch in the San Fernando Valley and two sturdy small sons, Don Junior and Ronald, with whom he romps on Sunday afternoons — "wrestling time," as he calls it. They have also bought a small farm for Mr. and Mrs. Ameche, sen.

In his latest film, “You Can't Have Everything,” Don has been determinedly glamourised. Having already made terrific inroads on the world's feminine susceptibilities (as his fan mail testifies), his lady-killing potentialities are now to be heavily capitalised.

The studio has even "cracked down" on his private-life publicity; there are to be no more stories about his home, his wife, his sons. He is to qualify for the Great Lover Stakes.

But, bless you, Honore has no qualms about it. "Nothing can change Don at heart," she declares confidently.

In short, Don Ameche has a wife who believes in him; perhaps that's the greatest luck of all.

Don looks the thoughtful young man he is.

As the younger brother in "Sins of Man" — would you have recognised him?

Collection: Picturegoer Magazine, August 1937