A Girl, a Guy, and a Gob

One night, while he was at the opera, young ship tycoon Stephen Herrick (Edmond O'Brien) accidentally meets an unusually full young woman named Dot (Lucille Ball). The next day, while he is still dizzy from their dizzying meeting, she enters his office to serve as his secretary. Despite her audacity - or because of it - Stephen is inevitably attracted to the lively Dot, which is a big problem for Dotina's beauty, a sailor beast named Coffee Cup (George Murphy).

Harold Lloyd the fabled comedian of the silent screen produced this comedy for RKO. Lloyd recognizing comic talent has Lucille Ball in the lead and her guy and gob in that order are Edmond O'Brien and George Murphy.

The day before she's to start a new job as the secretary of a big shipping firm, Ball and her family which consists of parents George Cleveland and Kathleen Howard and nimble fingered Lloyd Corrigan as her brother decide to go to the opera. They get into a row with Edmond O'Brien and his fiance Marguerite Chapman when they sit at his box at the Met.

The next day Ball reports for work and discovers her new boss is O'Brien and that sets off a row. But soon he rather likes the blue color girl. The problem is she has a blue collar guy in sailor George Murphy on leave from Uncle Sam's Navy and deciding whether he wants another hitch.

The comedy belongs to Ball and Murphy. O'Brien who is a rich but shy business executive serves as a foil primarily. Lloyd puts in a few nice touches including a great car chase that could have come from one of his silent screen classics.

Franklin Pangborn has a couple of scenes as a nervous pet shop owner whom they all seem to run into and put upon. Henry Travers is also featured as O'Brien's uncle and quite the matchmaker.

Curiously enough with one of the protagonists a sailor and the film coming out in March of 1941 not a word about current unpleasantness in the world that the Navy would be getting into before the year was out.

Films like these were putting Lucille Ball on the road to being the queen of comedy.

If you're a Lucille Ball fan, you would definitely want to see this movie. As a Lucille Ball fan, I have seen many of her movies, but this one would probably stand as one of the tops. In this movie, Lucille Ball plays as an average girl rather than a self-absorbed lady like in her other films. This movie also features her more than her other works, being seen in most of the scenes. I thought that the movie was great throughout except for the ending. The ending could have been better. Overall, it's a good movie to watch, especially with Lucile Ball in it.

A couple of years ago one of our video rental stores went out of business. They sold off their stock. I knew that they had a good selection of movies from the 30's and 40's so I invested in about 20 of them. I just realized last week that I had overlooked viewing some of them. One of these was a 1941 flick called "A Girl, A Guy and a Gob" which I watched this evening. It starred Lucille Ball, George Murphy and Edmund O'Brien and was released in 1941.Much to my surprise it was very entertaining. The Producer was none other than Harold Lloyd of silent film fame. Evidently he produced 2 movies for RKO and they were both successful...don't know why the collaboration did not continue. "A Girl, A Guy and A Gob" has touches of silent film comedy and is also reminiscent in places of "You Can't Take It With You" since it deals with a similar "crazy" family. The principal stars look unbelievably young, especially O'Brien who later in his career became rather heavy. In this movie he looked somewhat like Franchot Tone. George Murphy also looks youthful and even does a bit of dancing although this is not a musical. Lucille Ball restrains herself in her comedy bits and mostly leaves the horseplay to Murphy (the Gob) and a fine cast of supporting players. So if you only like Lucy at her most outrageous you might be a little disappointed, but forget your disappointment because this is really a funny movie. The writing is good and the simple story line makes sense and the characters come through as believable. I attribute this to the involvement of Harold Lloyd who was really a comedy genius. I actually laughed out loud several times, something I don't often do for a Hollywood comedy. Try it, you might like it too.

Lucille Ball was much more restrained in this 1941 comedy with Edmond O'Brien and George Murphy.

O'Brien appears so young and dashing in this film. He plays an upper class businessman who meets and finds love with secretary Ball. Murphy plays her sailor boyfriend. To me, the biggest question in the film was who would Murphy wind up with?

The comedy here is tedious. O'Brien has a snobbish girlfriend with a high society mother to the bargain.

Ball comes from a real common family where the brother finds opera tickets that belong to O'Brien. By the next scene, Ball is going to apply for a job where O'Brien is the owner. How coincidental can we get?