Ann Sothern is a charming young woman without a brain in her head. Her brother, Dan Dailey, is in love with the daughter of Roland Young. Her boy friend, Ian Hunter, has invented a motor that he wishes to sell to Young. And Reginald Gardiner is a lunatic who drops in when he crashes his plane in the lake.
Nominally based on the Kaufman-Connelly play and the two earlier screen versions (Constance Talmadge in 1923, and Marion Davies in 1930), this version is far too complicated and predictable to suit my taste, even as it clearly shows the workings for the plot calmly advancing beneath its frantic exterior. It's one of the movies made when comedies were not permitted to be about anything real, so they were fast instead, hoping to slip one past the audience -- a Screwball Manqué if you will, in which every situation, every gag, is just what you expect it to be in the set-up. We go into a comedy knowing things will turn out well in the end, Jack shall have Jill, and man his mare. What we hope for are a few surprises on the route there.
This script provides none. Even so, I enjoy the movie a lot, and the reason is the way director S. Sylvan Simon directs his fine cast of comics (Gardiner always excepted), and throws in Billie Burke and Jonathan Hale along the way, and they raise smiles just by their performances. Which is the mark of professionals, able to make something out of nothing.
Nominally based on the Kaufman-Connelly play and the two earlier screen versions (Constance Talmadge in 1923, and Marion Davies in 1930), this version is far too complicated and predictable to suit my taste, even as it clearly shows the workings for the plot calmly advancing beneath its frantic exterior. It's one of the movies made when comedies were not permitted to be about anything real, so they were fast instead, hoping to slip one past the audience -- a Screwball Manqué if you will, in which every situation, every gag, is just what you expect it to be in the set-up. We go into a comedy knowing things will turn out well in the end, Jack shall have Jill, and man his mare. What we hope for are a few surprises on the route there.
This script provides none. Even so, I enjoy the movie a lot, and the reason is the way director S. Sylvan Simon directs his fine cast of comics (Gardiner always excepted), and throws in Billie Burke and Jonathan Hale along the way, and they raise smiles just by their performances. Which is the mark of professionals, able to make something out of nothing.