One Sunday Afternoon is a 1933 American pre-Code romantic comedy-drama film directed by Stephen Roberts and starring Gary Cooper and Fay Wray.

Based on the 1933 Broadway play by James Hagan,[1][2] the film is about a middle-aged dentist who reminisces about his unrequited love for a beautiful woman and his former friend who betrayed him and married her.

The now-wealthy Hugo has a dental emergency and comes to see Grimes, who—under the influence of several drinks with his buddy, Snappy—comes close to killing his old rival while administering a blend of nitrous oxide and oxygen.

[3] Mordaunt Hall reviewed the film for The New York Times in September 1933, while the play was still running, and it suffered by comparison to the original: Hollywood loses no time in picturing a good play...One might venture that the studio chieftains have been a little too hasty in this case, for, although the shadow conception of "One Sunday Afternoon" is not without merit, it often fails in the dramatic impact given in the original, especially in the closing episodes.

[4] Leonard Maltin gives it three out of four stars, praising Cooper's performance in a "Touching and lovingly made piece of Americana, exuding period charm and atmosphere, though darker in tone than the two Warner Bros. remakes by Raoul Walsh: "[5] The hit play One Sunday Afternoon, starring Lloyd Nolan, ran on Broadway from Feb. 15 to November 1933.

[7] Film director Raoul Walsh made two versions, the smash hit Strawberry Blonde (1941) with James Cagney as Biff, and a Technicolor musical starring Dennis Morgan titled One Sunday Afternoon (1948).