Along with musicals, farces must be the toughest genre to transfer from stage to screen. Even if you add in ‘screwball’ comedies, successful farces make rare cinematic fare. Here, a pitch-perfect cast (Margaret Sullavan, Herbert Marshall, Frank Morgan, Reginald Owen) and a zipped up Preston Sturges adaptation of a Ferenc Molnar play do battle against the odds and very nearly pull it off. Helmer William Wyler gives it as much swank as Universal Studios could muster and paces beautifully (he & Sturges plant a hilarious film parody in here), but they still can’t quite stop some of the dialogue & situations from feeling forced. Yet there’s so much emotion and charm in the playing, that this Budapest set nonsense about an orphan who heads out into the world as an usherette and finds every man she meets auditioning as lover, patron, father-figure or husband is almost worthy of Ernst Lubitsch. (Sturges would use rejigger some of Molnar's tropes in his masterful THE PALM BEACH STORY, but to a rather different effect.)
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