I'm not convinced that comedy was Warner Brothers' forte at this period; or maybe it's fast-paced humorous gangster movies starring Bette Davis that aren't quite my thing. At any rate, this film reminded me rather of "Satan Met a Lady", the last Warner comedy I'd seen (remembered today chiefly for the fact that it was their second version of "The Maltese Falcon", one of the few films where the remake was better than the original... but that, alas, was not to be until the third version!)
To be fair, "Jimmy the Gent" is cleverer and funnier on the whole than "Satan Met a Lady"; but Bette Davis is equally uninspiring in it (one wonders how much effort she put into these supporting roles), and it isn't really my sort of film. Cheerful, generic stuff with a fair proportion of laughs and cringes (the mounting catalogue of implausible disasters at the beginning had me in hysterics), but I didn't find the hero as lovable as the film thinks he is, or the quickfire dialogue as funny as the scriptwriters presumably hoped.
It was reasonably enjoyable, but not really worth the entrance fee as a rarity.
To be fair, "Jimmy the Gent" is cleverer and funnier on the whole than "Satan Met a Lady"; but Bette Davis is equally uninspiring in it (one wonders how much effort she put into these supporting roles), and it isn't really my sort of film. Cheerful, generic stuff with a fair proportion of laughs and cringes (the mounting catalogue of implausible disasters at the beginning had me in hysterics), but I didn't find the hero as lovable as the film thinks he is, or the quickfire dialogue as funny as the scriptwriters presumably hoped.
It was reasonably enjoyable, but not really worth the entrance fee as a rarity.