Lady Luck (1936) User Reviews

Good and Bad Varieties

[boblipton · 5/10 · 27 December 2018]

Manicurist Patricia Farr draws a horse in the Sweepstakes... at least everyone thinks she has. It's actually another woman with the same name, happy to let the star of this movie have the publicity.

It's a decent but uninspiring movie directed by Charles Lamont. Everyone seems to be competent at their jobs, whether it's the actors in front of the camera or the technicians behind them. It's simply that none of the performances seem interesting, and Miss Farr seems to be better suited to best friend roles than this one. Eventually there's a murder in order to keep the moving from dying in its tracks.

The actress playing the sidekick. the other woman with the same name, is Vivien Oakland. She seems to have aged enormously in the ten years since she played in the classic silent short, MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE The most interesting performance is by the ever-reliable Charles Lane, playing a publicity man.

Chesterfield strikes with a real winner!

[mark.waltz · 7/10 · 25 January 2019]

This mix of crime drama and screwball comedy is perhaps one of the best films to come out of the short-lived poverty row studios, Chesterfield, which released dozens of films in the mid-1930s and suddenly went out of business. With better-than-average sets and some truly terrific comical performances, this is an absolute delight from start to finish. Patricia Farr, an actress I am not familiar with and William Bakewell, an actor I am, play the leads and have a terrific chemistry as a wise-cracking, tough manicurist (who has movie star ambitions) and her reporter boyfriend. She believes because of a lucky streak due to horse race betting that she has a shot at greater luck, but this ends up resulting in murder which could easily make her run out of luck.

Ray Turner, one of the busiest black character actors in the 1930s, gets a terrifically funny line in a stereotypical role as a rich man's valet when he says "Them white folks all look the same to me!". However, the bulk of the great lines go to Lulu McConnell, an outrageous Marie Dressler look-alike, playing Farr's wisecracking and flirtatious aunt. With Duncan Renaldo as a Mexican gangster and Iris Adrian (in a black wig!) as his Latina (!) mistress, Charles Lane as a shady agent and Vivien Oakland as a socialite, this has every aspect which makes for fantastic entertainment, more than just a simple diversion and completely enjoyable from start to finish.

What a cute little movie!

[CatherineYronwode · 8/10 · 9 September 2010]

I ran across this in a load of cheap public-domain movies of the Monogram/Chesterfield/PRC type and, boy was i surprised! What a snappy little comedy-drama this one is! The script by John W. Krafft is a humdinger, and if the actors had all been A-list types (think Carole Lombard and Jimmy Stewart or Jean Arthur and Henry Fonda) and the settings has been filmed at Warner's instead of on Poverty Row, we would be hailing "Lady Luck" as a classic along the order of a Preston Sturges piece. It really is that zingy.

Cultural and racial stereotypes are lovingly exploited for inoffensive comedic effect: Patrica Farr plays Mamie Murphy, a spunky Irish American manicurist who has to fight off the wolves in the fancy hotel barbershop where she works. (Also, as a completely irrelevant aside, her voice timbre and accent remind me a lot of Judy Garland. Strange but true.) Duncan Reynaldo (pre Cisco Kid) plays Tony Morelli, a slick Italian mobster and nightclub boss. He's saddled with a jealous Latin spitfire of a girlfriend named Rita (Iris Adrian). Mamie is picked to win the Irish Sweepstakes -- but then another Mamie Murphy shows up, a warm-hearted Irish washerwoman, no less, played by the underrated Lulu McConnell. The two women team up to pose as aunt and niece, and agree to split the profits from the race.

Young Mamie's frustrated true love is an all-American boy reporter, played by William Bakewell, but she dumps him for a British "financial sculptor" (i.e. a chiseler) played by Jameson Thomas, but although he poses as a wealthy suitor, he is so broke he has to borrow money from his equally British valet, the delightful Robert Corey, just to take Mamie out to Morelli's night club. Then murder -- or at least a bit of gun play -- enters the scene when meek, bespectacled Mr. Hemingway (Arthur Hoyt) is informed that Conroy has been seen at Morelli's in the company of his bullish blonde wife Cora Hemmingway, played with mesmerizing lesbian overtones by the alternately brooding and baby-talking Vivian Oakland.

Along the way we get dancing chorus girls, a French maid, the wonderfully laconic checkers-playing Irish detective James O'Reilly (Lew Kelly at his very best), a babyish Irish hood (Claud Allister) who gets his first manicure and wishes his mother were still alive to see his clean fingernails, a smiling black shoeshine guy who does a towel-dance on Morelli's shoes, an incomprehensibly accented Latino head barber (Pedro Regas), a freaked out and eye-rolling black elevator operator (Ray Turner), and the hilarious team of Charles Lane and Joe Barton as Feinberg and Goldberg, a pair of fast-talking Jewish celebrity agents ("You wanna be notorious? Call Feinberg, Goldberg, Rosenberg, and O'Rooney." ... "What? You think business comes to a stop just because a guy's been killed? Sign here.") Oh yeah, a guy does get killed. But that's not the point -- this is just a sweet little depression-era confection that is more lovable that you'd expect from a plot synopsis. It's not A-list stuff, but it's well worth the few bucks you'll spend to buy it on DVD. Oh, and by the way, speaking of DVDs, except for a few pops and cuts, the print i got from Alpha Video was an extremely crisp, clean, and evenly exposed copy with excellent sound quality that showed off Charles Lamont's directing and the nice set decorations, and caught every bit of the snappy patter. "Lady Luck" is my sleeper selection of the month. Try it -- i think you'll like this one!