I'd never even *heard* of Toto before this retrospective at the Cleveland Cinematheque. But he's OK. I know it sounds like I'm damning with faint praise here but I'm not. This isn't one of my favorites - TOTO DIABOLIKUS, THE POOR AND THE NOBLE or HANDS OFF ME! might appeal to me more personally, but that could just be taste.
Toto's bent for word play comes up a number of times in the film and even across the language barrier you get a good feel for this. There's a nice musical number with a broom while he's singing a song which includes the phrase "When you're a lad of 20 you need to find a wife."
There are two driving forces in the film. One is Toto's determination to find the mysterious person who's stealing the oil he leaves at the altar of John the Baptist that he maintains. The other is to attempt to hold his family together after he promises his daughter's hand in marriage to one person without realizing she is in love with another. How these two come together you'll have to see the film to discover.
If you think descriptions like "waste management" instead of "janitor" and "domestic engineer" instead of "housewife" are relatively recent, back in 1940 Toto is saying "I'm no cobbler, I'm a shoe technician!" His character also echoes Chauncy Gardener's as performed by Peter Sellers in BEING THERE - he's introduced as a professor and given due deference but when he points out how a local cobbler is about to defraud someone in the family, they are even more impressed.
If you're in the mood for some light comedy, you really can't go wrong with this. Toto made about 100 films and there are 15 in this series - mostly the cream, I'd bet.
