La dulce entremetida

Bill Ward (Dan Dailey) is in love and wants to marry a lovely lady. So, he invites her and her parents to his lakefront mansion for the weekend. During most of this time, Bill's sister, Dulcy (Ann Sothern) keeps doing things to hurt the girl's father...along with a variety of other people who happen to get in her way.

In the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made quite a few movies with kooky female leads. Usually they were played by Billie Burke or Gracie Allen or even Katharine Hepburn ("Bringing Up Baby") but "Dulcy" stars Ann Sothern...and whether or not you like the movie will depend a lot on if you like a leading lady THIS stupid, obnoxious AND selfish. Time and again, Dulcy hurts people because she is an idiot that just doesn't give a crap about them or her actions. One person's kooky is another person's vicious sociopath...and I found Dulcy to fall in that latter category and so I found the film tedious and horribly unfunny.

This is at least the third time that the stage play "Dulcy" by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly was made by MGM into a film. A silent featuring Constance Talmadge appeared in 1923. Version No. 2 appears under the title "Not So Dumb" in 1930 and features Marion Davies (directed by King Vidor). A CD version is available featuring Zazu Pitts in a 1935 radio broadcast and you can pull down off the internet a 1937 radio version with Gracie Allen. Dulcy must have been a real hit on the stage and I would expect that the Gracie Allen version was a hoot. I just did not think this was a slap on the leg comedy that aged well for viewers the 21st Century. The story's premise is that a scatterbrained young woman tries to turn a weekend social event into a business opportunity for her fiancé. Ann Sothern is a good actress but the material just does not seem quite as funny as it obviously must have decades ago. There are clever written gags and lots of physical comedy. The material has the actresses in the lead playing as if they were actually dumb - not just clever and using being dumb as a technique to get their way. Today we no longer find funny folks who are not that bright and who seem to glide through life oblivious to their situation. All ends well, despite Dulcy's efforts, and perhaps some of you will find this a pleasant diversion. Recommended for social scientists and anthropologists attempting to research what was funny to us when.

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.

This movie has a great cast of comedians, but even they can't bring much life to a dead script.

Why the script is so dead is the real mystery here. It is based on a Broadway success by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. But if you compare the two works, you see that this movie script was radically altered from the original play.

What we are left with is a lot of slapstick sight-gags, some of which are funny, some not, and a lot of really hairbrained events. No one comes of as even vaguely real.

So, in the end, a fine cast that could have done great things is left high and dry - unlike the characters, who often end up all wet.

Later entry in the madcap comedy sweepstakes is paper thin but buoyed by the charming Ann Sothern. Wedged in between two Maisie pictures she gets to be a bit more addled than that resourceful gal ever was. She "fixs" things that work fine breaking them in the process and generally glides through the picture creating havoc in her wake while remaining completely unscathed.

As with most MGM movies of the era she is surrounded by an amazing cast of some of the best character actors/actresses working at the time. Billie Burke is delightfully dizzy almost matching Sothern's daffiness but the real standout besides Ann is Roland Young as the target of her unintentional "good deeds".

Inventive and illuminating it is not but thanks to the charming performances of the cast led by Ann this little known picture is worth checking out.