Dulcy

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.

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.

Ann Sothern is terrific as "Dulcy". Ann Sothern is a delight to most men, and she's very funny in this movie. Shocking there is no official studio release. I'm happy to have this terrific film in my 3000 DVD/Blu-ray collection where I know it can never be censored.

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.

... despite the presence of some wonderful actors. One is hard-pressed to understand why any of these contortions would ever be considered amusing. The production values are high, but the endless succession of predictable sight gags and cruel mishaps descend into near-gibberish. Ann Sothern looks lovely, but embarrassed. Even Roland Young, for me one of the most most dependably skilled comic actors ever, just plows ahead dutifully until the whole thing grinds to a halt.