The Jackpot

Bill Lawrence wins a heap of prizes on a radio quiz: a pony, a washing machine, the services of an interior decorator and more. The pleasure ends when he learns the tax on all of it is his to pay, and he has to sell whatever he has won. Walter Lang directed, with James Stewart in the lead and Barbara Hale, James Gleason, Fred Clark and Alan Mowbray around him, plus a very young Natalie Wood. The screenplay comes from a John McNulty piece published in The New Yorker on 19 February 1949, about a man from Rhode Island named James P. Caffrey who won twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of goods on a CBS radio quiz. The disaster in the film actually happened to somebody.