The Toast of New York
A stockbroker's rise and fall mirrors the excesses of the Gilded Age financier James Fisk.
The Story
A fictionalized account of the notorious Gilded Age financier James Fisk, The Toast of New York follows Fisk (Edward Arnold) and his loyal partner Nick Boyd (Cary Grant) as they parlay wartime cotton smuggling into a Wall Street fortune, manipulating markets and railroads while both men fall for the same actress, Josie Mansfield (Frances Farmer). The story follows Fisk's spectacular rise and eventual downfall amid financial scandal and personal betrayal.
Production Context
Released by RKO Radio Pictures in July 1937 and directed by Rowland V. Lee, The Toast of New York was based on Bouck White's The Book of Daniel Drew and Matthew Josephson's "Robber Barons," with a screenplay credited to Dudley Nichols, John Twist and Joel Sayre. The film was one of RKO's more ambitious prestige productions of the year, built around Edward Arnold's blustering star turn as Fisk, with Grant in a secondary romantic and dramatic role opposite Frances Farmer, shortly before Grant's career-defining run of RKO and Columbia comedies.
Why It Mattered Then
Biographical dramas about American finance were a recognizable genre in Depression-era Hollywood, offering audiences cautionary spectacle about wealth and excess. The film mattered less for box-office success — it underperformed — than for placing Grant within RKO's stable just as the studio and Columbia were about to discover his gift for sophisticated comedy in The Awful Truth, released later that same year.
Why It Matters Today
The Toast of New York is seldom revived today, remembered mainly by historians of Frances Farmer and of Gilded Age Hollywood biopics. For students of Cary Grant, it is a useful marker of a pivotal year: 1937 found him still working in conventional dramatic supporting roles even as his signature comic style was about to emerge just months later.
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