Movie #918 "Boy Meets Girl" should have been a film I was delighted to watch, but that wasn't the case. I normally would enjoy a teaming up of Pat O'Brien and James Cagney in a farce on Hollywood writers, but I found it tedious and boring. After 15 minutes, I was working on Facebook and not paying much attention. And I was still able to follow the plot. This one is a "don't waste time on it" film ---- skip it and go to something that is classical and worthwhile. There are so many more screwball comedies out there that you WILL like. Enough said.
Boy Meets Girl (1938) - Comedy - 27 August 1938 (USA) I give this 3 stars out of 5. |
Gotta' credit Warner Bros. with a lot of guts for taking its top gangster star, James Cagney, and stiffly heroic Pat O'Brien and teaming them as a pair of screen writing con artists in a zany farce. But thanks to the wordplay of Sam and Bella Spewack, who adapted "Boy Meets Girl" from their Broadway hit, it works beautifully. And often hilariously. The set-up is simple. Challenged to come up with a script for sputtering cowboy star Dick Foran, Cagney and O'Brien are at wits' (or more like halfwits') end until commissary waitress Marie Wilson collapses while serving lunch. Seems she's about to have a baby (sans husband, a surprise given the strength of the Hays Office in 1938 although her slim figure suggests at least some degree of censorship.) The plucky screenwriters build a storyline around the baby who's born shortly thereafter and goes on to become an 8-month old superstar, eclipsing the increasingly furious Foran. There's also Ralph Bellamy as a pretentious mini-mogul, Bruce Lester as a British extra who's not what he seems, Ronald Reagan in a brief bit as a radio announcer, pre-Blondie Penny Singleton seen even more briefly as a manicurist, a squad of angry rock-throwing Indians and a relay team of slide trombonists to add to the comic confusion. All-in-all, a very entertaining movie -- and when Cagney illustrates a story point with an impromptu tap dance, you get a preview of the "Yankee Doodle" dandy he'll play five years later.
No comments:
Post a Comment