Stand-In is a 1937 American screwball comedy directed by Tay Garnett and starring Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell and Humphrey Bogart.

During the Great Depression, Fowler Pettypacker, a Wall Street banker, is debating whether or not to accept an offer from Ivor Nassau to buy "Colossal Pictures," a fictional film studio on Poverty Row.

[4] Colossal's star actress, Thelma Cheri, eccentric foreign director Koslofski, and press agent Tom Potts are conspiring with Nassau to sabotage the studio.

They are deliberately running up costs on producer Douglas Quintain's jungle feature, Sex and Satan, so that the film flops and the studio goes bankrupt.

Despite acknowledging director Tay Garnett, screenwriters Graham Baker and Gene Towne, and producer Walter Wanger as not being known for having leftist leanings,[5] author Matthew Kennedy wrote that the film's "respect for the little people of Hollywood [is] reflected in its anti-capitalist, leftist ideology as rendered by original story writer Clarence Budington Kelland, the man who was also behind the 1936 populist classic Mr.

[3] Kennedy also refers to a scene in which a group of below-the-line crew members throw Nassau over the studio walls as an allegory for revolution, and concludes that, "it is the stand-in, not the star, who ultimately gets the man.

Subsequently, suggestions by the PCA were accepted by Walter Wanger Productions, including changing the character of "Thelma Cheri" to that of an unmarried woman; deleting a speech about the stifling of competition in the industry and the crushing of independent companies by the majors; and deleting a speech by Atterbury at the end, in which he says he is going to start a Senate investigation of the motion picture business.

[1] A reviewer for Life called the film "a pretty good one", and praised Howard's role as Dodd as "a comic part like nothing he has ever done before," and "one of his most engaging performances.