Plot
Mark MacLene IV is a millionaire playboy who is irresponsible with his money, accumulating $5 million in debt. Judge Coulter, the executor of his estate, places Mark's finances in the hands of penny-pinching lawyer Lucy Duncan.
Mark is aghast when Lucy limits him to a $50-per-week allowance. However, he continues to spend wildly. When Lucy closes his access to his funds, Mark becomes angry and intrudes upon her personal life, moving into her apartment and upsetting her routine. She wants to quit but Coulter doubles her pay.
Lucy's fiancé Tom Winters has delayed proposing marriage until he can afford to wed. Mark owns a construction company where Tom works, so he secretly plots to secure a huge pay raise for Tom, but Lucy sees through the ruse. But after spending more time with Mark, she begins to see a different side of him, and they begin to fall in love. She breaks things off with Tom.
Mark proposes, but Lucy refuses him, saying she can't marry a man who doesn't work. Mark announces that he will find a job, and Lucy responds with enthusiasm. Later he calls to tell her he has found a job in a chemistry lab. But it's a ruse--he plays golf every day, and then when he sees her, he talks nothing but technical chemistry talk gleaned from a textbook. Finally she discovers the deception and dismisses him from her life. But when Tom comes back, and then immediately starts talking about the details of his job, she realizes she's made a mistake.
Inquiring after Mark, Lucy finds out he has asked for active duty in the Naval Reserve. She desperately tries to find him before he's shipped out. They reunite, and he tells her that he's being stationed in Washington, D.C., in charge of Naval expenditures.
Reception
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther wrote: "'Just This Once' is the title of the new Metro comedy ... It is also a fair expression of the measure of tolerance that a person of generous disposition might afford to adopt towards it. For there's no denying the obvious: the people who made this film had better do better next time. Meanwhile, what they've done will pass—for now. ... [W]e must caution Sidney Sheldon, who wrote it, and Don Weis, who put it on. Their boyish flippancy and nonsense had better henceforth be curbed." [1]
According to MGM records, the film earned $707,000 in the U.S. and Canada and $352,000 elsewhere, returning a profit of $89,000. [2]
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