Pretty lame. Warner Bros.’ 1930s house style for comedy comes down too hard to help pull off this third-rate B’way Boulevard Farce. And it needs all the help it can get. The set up finds novelist Warren William, tops in Ladies’ Fiction, touring his latest with loyal secretary Joan Blondell. But a stop in Cleveland brings something extra, old flame Genevieve Tobin who thinks she’s the model for his new bestseller, now hopes to leave butter-and-egg husband Hugh Herbert and pick up where she & William left off back in their college days. Things dribble along in talky manner before picking up slightly near the end for a mock divorce staged in William’s hotel suite. He gives ‘testimony’ dressed in pajamas. A yawner, but with one striking moment, literally so as Blondell serves up two sincere (possibly real) slaps to William. (I get it! She really cares for her boss after all!) With director Michael Curtiz calling the shots, those resounding slaps sound like the real thing. Too bad nothing else in here does.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: William, an underappreciated Pre-Code star, made two of his best in ‘33: naughty & hilarious as the driven department store manager in EMPLOYEE’S ENTRANCE; and superbly Damon Runyonesque for Frank Capra in his early masterpiece LADY FOR A DAY. And 1934 was even better. But he soon fell into Bs before dying young (only 53) in 1948.
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