Obliging Young Lady

From the opening of this minor screwball comedy from RKO, the silly tone is set for an enjoyable romp.

Joan Carroll plays a girl abandoned by her silly squabbling parents to the lawyer's secretary--Ruth Warrick, who is being chased by a crazy reporter--Edmond O'Brien. They all end up at Lake Mohawk in the off season.

The opening motif of repeating Heinie Manusch to the sounds of the clattering train wheels is very funny and starts the film off on a perfect note. Manusch was a famous baseball player. Warrick has a stuffy boy friend (Robert Smith) and the voracious lady reporter (Eve Arden) is after the story of the little girl.

At the lodge, Carroll and Warrick pose as sisters until O'Brien shows up and says he's the kid's father. The hotel staff gets intrigued especially when Smith shows up and says he "Mama's" boy friend.

Lots of fun and made funnier my a sterling supporting cast: George Cleveland, Ceorge Chandler, Almira Sessions and Fortunio Bonanova are the hotel staff. Charles Lane is the detective. Luis Alberni is the deranged composer. Franklin Pangborn heads the birding party. Marjorie Gateston and John Miljan are the parents. Pierre Watkin is the lawyer. Andrew Tombes is the train conductor. George Watts is the judge who wants chicken.

Warrick and O'Brien are attractive leads. Carroll isn't too sticky and is funny as she puts tacks on everyone's chairs.

and always remember: HEINIE MANUSCH!

Cute little antic comedy from very early in Edmond O'Brien's career. If you only know him from his later character work you'll be surprised how lean and attractive he is here. He also shows himself adept at the knockabout comedy the script calls for.

Joan Carroll, more well known as Agnes Smith in Meet Me in St. Louis and Patsy the troubled young girl in The Bells of St. Mary's, is winsome as the mischievous child who causes the plot to be set in motion. Ruth Warrick, famous from years as Phoebe Tyler in All My Children, is pretty and properly exasperated as the object of O'Brien's ardor.

Filmed at a breakneck pace and stocked with a bunch of reliable character actors, chief among them the great Eve Arden, this is a breezy minor comedy that is more enjoyable than you'd expect from a quickie feature obviously meant for the lower half of a double bill.

This weirdly inept attempt at screwball comedy is undone by the casting of its three leads. Edmond O'Brien -- best remembered today as the desperate poisoning victim in the 1950 cult classic "D.O.A." and the alcoholic senator in "Seven Days In May" (1964) -- and Ruth Warrick -- known primarily for playing Charles Foster Kane's first wife in "Citizen Kane" and a long run on a TV soap opera -- were never known as adept farceurs. And moppet actress Joan Carroll has the kind of physical and verbal precocity that makes the audience wonder if perhaps she might not be a midget (OK, "little person," if we have not yet appropriately repudiated the silliness of political correctness). And she's a little person with a distracting tendency to let her mouth hang open in closeup reaction shots, at that.

The script -- rewritten (over Frank Ryan) by Bert Granet, suggesting that a certain paucity of talent may have been what redirected him to demi-success as a TV producer in the '50s and '60s -- is littered with what are presumably meant to be running gags, but bespeak a lack of understanding that to merit that classification, the shtik must be funny, not merely repetitive. These "runners" include the bizarre notion of a train's sound mimicking the name of a famous baseball player of the period, Heinie Manusch, and every passenger on the train getting the name stuck in their head, treating us to tedious extended sequences of extras chanting the name over and over again in syncopation with the chugging of the locomotive. There is also Carroll's character, Bridget, who repeatedly demands, for no apparent reason, "What's wrong with the name Bridget?"

This farrago of badly-executed ideas is ultimately ill-served by the direction of B movie hack Richard Wallace, whose coverage is so inadequate that the cutter is repeatedly forced to go from masters to two-shots in which actors' positions and expressions change radically, making startling jump cuts out of what should be seamless transitions. Wallace even manages to undermine the usually-redoubtable Eve Arden, evidently sabotaging her trademark talent for wringing laughs from the lamest one-liners by underplaying. It almost looks like Wallace coaxed her to overact. It's painful to watch...not unlike the film as a whole.

This film had great potential, however, the screenplay left a lot to be desired. Young Miss Carroll is actually the better performer of all the folks who appear in it. Franklin Panghorn isn't that bad either. After these two forget it, which is a ashame. Eve Arden is wasted, such a talent deserved more than the tripe she was given in this one. Edmund O'Brian makes one ill just watching him handle his lines. I cannot bear to discuss the other parts. Joan Carroll had a lot of potential, but she like Ann Carter and Sharyn Moffet never were consistent child performers thanks to much of the inane scripts they were given. Carroll was the most talented of the three RKO child Starlets, but Moffet at least had a few pictures that were all her own. Obliging Young Lady shows Carroll was star material, this just wasn't a vehicle in which she was able to shine, still whatever redeeming value it has is carried by her.

Ruth Warrick does not exude charm. Edmund O'Brein is fun but a little strange in a comic role. The child is all right.

The plot if lots of fun, though, and some of the supporting players are delightful.

Franklin Pangborn gets one of the juiciest roles I've ever seen him in. He plays the leader of a bird watchers group.

I have to say, his role seems modeled somewhat on Charlie Ruggles's in "Bringing Up Baby." But the bird watchers' assault on the hideaway hotel is genuinely hilarious.

The whole movie has a sweet, friendly quality.