Ice-Capades

Newsreel cameraman Bob Clemens, an avowed woman hater, is assigned to cover the Lake Placid exhibition of Karen Vadja, the Swiss ice Queen. He misses his plane and fails to get the footage needed for a newsreel. Deciding that if you’ve seen one ice skater, you’ve seen them all, he goes to Central Park to film a skater picked at random. He selects Marie Bergin who is wanted by the immigration people for having over-stayed her visa. Bob does not adjust his newsreel camera for a long shot and she shows very clearly in close-ups. Promoter Larry Herman sees the newsreel and seeing that she is very talented and very pretty, decides to star her in an ice-spectacle to be called the “Ice-Capades.” He sends for Karen Vadja’s agent, since that is the name the skater is identified as in the newsreel, draws up and signs a contract and invites the press to join him when he meets her. Dismay mildly describes his feeling when he learns that he has obligated himself to build a show around a horse-faced, eccentric woman whose ability to skate is her only saving grace. He calls off the show, and brings suit against the National Newsreel Company for this hoax. The boss, Ellis, blames Bob and his assistant Colonna, who propose that they find her and let Ellis “discover” and star her. She evades them as she thinks they are immigration agents trying to find and deport her, but they find her in the chorus of the ice show they want her to star in. Deportation looms with marriage to an American citizen being the only alternative. Bob, the only woman-hating confirmed bachelor in the cast, becomes the prime candidate.