UNEXPECTED UNCLE (1941)

No film genre is more unforgiving than Screwball Comedy.  Most examples of the form not even Screwball, merely uppity Rom-Coms, studded with a few classic Screwball elements: rich, dysfunctional family; mansion with majestic staircase and sassy servants; disdain for their own inherited wealth; furs treated like pets/pets treated like furs; et al.  And the most important one that later films were unable to use: The Great Depression as social/financial backdrop.  It gave weight & irony to the weightless principals.*  Compared to Noir or Westerns, to Courtroom Drama or Police Procedurals where thresholds for success might be low as 45%, or to the second toughest genre, Musicals, which might be saved with a couple of standout numbers, Screwball needs a batting average of 750.  And that’s just to get to first!  So credit this little number for getting the gist of things right.  And for hiring Charles Coburn (sixty before he got into films) to replay his Grandpa Cupid speciality and bring the couple together.*  Here, that’s Anne Shirley at her prettiest and James Craig at his tipsiest.  The rest is cringe city.  Premise: sales girl Shirley loses her job after telling off tush pincher James Craig, unaware America’s youngest industrial tycoon also owns the shop.  Coburn offers himself as Fairy Godfather and connives to get them back together . . . for keeps.  The film is hardly helped by changing mores that have turned Craig’s attempts at ‘making love’ (as the old phrase used to put it). into what now would be called out as sexual harassment.  Also ‘hilarious’ episodes of drunken driving and kidnaping for love.  Yikes!  While as a rom-com stylist, Craig no Cary Grant.  Even the vocal cadence all wrong for this sort of thing.  Director Peter Godfrey, under producer Tay Garnett, manages a wicked traveling shot around the sales floor, but elsewise too unvaried in pacing.  Plus the usual lack of simple explanations just to keep the ball rolling.  Co-writer Eric Hatch, the source of superior Screwballs like TOPPER and MY MAN GODFREY should have known better.  And the suggested happy ending, ‘millionaires!, you have nothing to fear but your own wealth’ doesn’t cut it in 1941.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK:  *Coburn got his Oscar® doing similar duty for Jean Arthur & Joel McCrea in THE MORE THE MERRIER/’44.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2008/05/more-merrier-1943.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  *You'd have thought The Great Depression would have made the idea that wealth drives these people crazy wouldn’t have played in those days, but the reverse ('money isn’t everything') was the unspoken moral.