Danger - Love at Work

If Jack Haley and Ann Sothern had been A list players Danger - Love At Work would have attained the classic status for screwball comedy. As it is it's a great undiscovered piece of film making.

Haley is a rich junior lawyer at a prestigious white shoe law firm who hasn't exactly lived up to his potential or at least the potential his money should have brought him. After others before him failed he gets the assignment from his firm to get a family named Pemberton to sign off on the sale of a piece of property next to a country club the firm represents.

Not so easy because as was said in Arsenic And Old Lace insanity doesn't run in this family, it gallops. These people will not be distracted from their particular brand of insanity. That includes daughter Ann Sothern who was marking out the territory that Katharine Hepburn claimed later in Bringing Up Baby.

A great group of familiar character players was brought together by 20th Century Fox for roles here, Frank Capra couldn't have done better. My favorite is Maurice Cass who usually plays mild and officious doctors and professors. Here he's decided that civilization itself has been a failure and has decided to live in a cave like a caveman. He's Ann Sothern's uncle. The rest are as bad.

I mention Capra because if Capra or Leo McCarey or Gregory LaCava had directed Danger - Love At Work it would be a classic as well. But in one of his early contract assignments it was Otto Preminger, not known for directing comedy who was the man in charge. It was a B picture and Preminger got some good performances out of his cast, but he wasn't any kind of name yet.

This one is a real undiscovered comic gem, don't miss it if broadcast.

I turned this on by chance one day on the Turner Classic Movies channel and enjoyed it immensely. Hilarious plot, good acting, fun theme song. I have seen Ann Sothern in a few movies and in her television series from the fifties, only recently discovering her "Maisie" series of films which I also enjoy. At first I didn't put two and two together about Jack Haley being the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), but was interested to find this out since I had also recently seen him on TCM in a lightweight but yet fun film called "Vacation In Reno" (1946). It's been said that "Danger: Love At Work" borrowed from "You Can't Take It With You" (1938). "Danger" is from 1937, so it's difficult to say which film did the borrowing! Another hilarious movie to look for in this same screwball-family genre is "Merrily We Live" (1938) starring one of my favorites, Bonita Granville.

Otto Preminger was alternating directing for the stage and the movies at this point and this beautifully cast comedy is played like a variation on YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. Like the New York Legislature or a Marx Brothers movie, everyone talks very fast and very loud and no one listens to anyone else. As a result, Jack Haley, who is not playing his usual milksop, is very frustrated in his efforts to buy a farm and be wooed by a surprisingly sweet and predatory Ann Southern.

A look at the cast list will show a fine assortment of supporting comics and people who didn't get enough chance to play comedy, like John Carradine.

I don't think this movie did very well at the box office, since Preminger didn't direct another movie for five years and rarely tackled a comedy except to finish up a couple of them for a dying Ernst Lubitsch. Perhaps this movie simply exhausted him. In any case, it is a fine, obscure screwball comedy.

"Tin Man" Jack Hayley headlines here with Ann Sothern with an oddball family that makes "You Can't Take it With You" look like a day in church.

Hayley is a lazy young lawyer sent by his firm to get signatures to sign off on a land deal, who wanders into a regular asylum of eccentrics.

The eccentrics include the always reliable John Carradine as a crazy painter (whose art I actually like), Mary Boland as a woman who is too busy talking to get her facts straight, two older ladies so afraid of burglars they set up death traps and one old codger who claims he's given up society and dresses like a cave man (though he reads Esquire on the sly).

The one disappointment is that Edward Everett Horton plays the villain rather than one of the family. He's a likeable villain, but I'd liked to have seen what sort of eccentric he'd have made.

Warning, this movie can get VERY annoying and Sothern takes a cue from Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfrey" and cries and screams a lot. And there are moments that today would shock people as child abuse that, back then, would have been called "comeuppance." It doesn't bother me but it might trigger some hypersensitive souls.

Very gratifying to see that this very well-made film has gotten such excellent reviews on this site. Preminger himself, when interviewed, rarely tried to make a case for his films that were considered minor or unimportant, nor did he encourage looking back. Consequently, if foolishly, critics have tended to dismiss such films, and especially the few he made before "Laura." What a delight, then, to find that "Danger, Love at Work" is an especially effervescent and sophisticated screwball comedy. And it is a very legitimate example, based on the essential "crazy family" format. It completely ignores the social consciousness aspect of the classic screwball ("You Can't Take It With You" and "My Man Godfrey" are otherwise close relatives), and benefits perhaps from this narrow focus on plot and character. And what characters! Mary Boland, who can sometimes annoy, fits in here very nicely as Ann Sothern's mother; diminutive Etienne Girardot -- a fascinating and lively little actor (his nervous performance here, as in "Twentieth Century" is priceless) as her father (and has a charming counterpart -- equally diminutive -- in "Uncle Goliath," a "back-to-nature" type); brother John Carradine (as a "post-Surrealist" painter); Walter Catlett as a philatelist uncle -- all delightful. Miss Sothern herself is every bit as charming as Carole Lombard (and has a rather less annoying role than Lombard's) in "Godfrey," and, besides, has a lovely vocal duet with Jack Haley on the title song. She really can sing! And here we have Haley two years before "The Wizard of Oz" -- nicely done, though no Cary Grant of course. Edward Everett Horton is, as always, superb, though his straight-man adversarial role here doesn't point up his own best strengths. Even Benny Bartlett as an 11-year-old Princeton graduate, scores nicely. As is typical of Preminger, there is not a single bad performance ("My Man Godfrey," on the other hand, has its Gail Patrick - - ghastly). (In bit parts, we even have Franklin Pangborn and Elisha Cook, Jr.) So here we have, in this man's opinion, a screwball comedy truly worthy of entering The Canon (if such there be).