My Dear Miss Aldrich

This is a quality MGM production. Overall, the film is pleasing and entertaining. The script plays it safe by suggesting female equality but allowing the hero to win the woman's heart by the end of the movie.

Edna May Oliver is, as always, the bright spot in the movie. No one can toss off a carefully crafted bon mot like Miss Oliver. Walter Pidgeon plays what amounts to a talking "Ken Doll". Maureen O'Sullivan is stunningly beautiful. This film shows that she has a far greater range than playing "Jane" in the MGM Tarzan movies.

The weak point in the film is the script which is Generic MGM - any number of Actors and Actresses could have played these roles.

I'm speaking of Maureen O'Sullivan of course. She is indeed very charming and beautiful, beautiful and charming.

I won't go over the plot. Everybody has already done that. Besides, writing plot summations bores me to tears.

The script is smart and funny, funny and smart. The acting is fairly standard for the 1930's. Not too heavy, not too light. But very professional. It is a comedy after all. And a very good comedy at that. Lots of laughs, lots of funny lines and situations.

A movie to make you smile. A movie to make you laugh. And that was greatly needed in the 1030's. Lots of dark times during that decade. But they sure had some wonderful movies to make them smile.

"My Dear Miss Aldrich" begins with the death of a rich man. He has no will and his closest heir is Martha Aldrich. Suddenly, Aldrich is a very rich and important lady--the new owner of a newspaper! However, Aldrich (Maureen O'Sullivan) isn't content to just own the paper--she wants to be a reporter. But instead of just making herself a reporter, she politely asks the editor of the paper, Ken Morley (Walter Pidgeon, to hire her and treat her like any other employee. At the same time, Aldrich is starting to fall in love with Morley. What's going to happen to the pair as well as Aldrich's aspirations to become a reporter?

This film isn't especially deep and is very slight. But it's quite enjoyable and works a bit better because the wonderful Edna May Oliver is on hand as well. Worth seeing but far from a must-see.

The best thing about MY DEAR MISS ALDRICH is that it gives MAUREEN O'SULLIVAN a chance to prove that she was not only very pretty but a capable enough actress to ensure that in the future she would be rewarded with more leading lady roles worthy of her charming presence. Not so. MGM gave her this chance to shine briefly and then tossed her back into secondary parts in big films until she was cast as Jane in the hugely popular Tarzan series.

But the film itself appears to have been hastily put together on a modest budget with some good one-liners thrown to EDNA MAY OLIVER, who of course is a sheer delight as Miss Atherton, presumed at first to be the heiress who has inherited a big city newspaper. Of course the real owner is her niece, and when the real owner's identity becomes known to the hero, the story becomes a battle of the sexes with Maureen out to show him that his sexist attitude towards women needs some sort of reformation.

If the script and direction had been a little more sophisticated, this might have earned a better reputation as a screwball comedy in an era when the major studios were churning out things like FOUR'S A CROWD and LIBELED LADY. As it is, it's harmless fluff that gives the spectator a good look at Maureen O'Sullivan at her loveliest, billed over Walter Pigeon who takes full advantage of his role. They both play with assurance as romantic leads, but Pigeon's fans will be delighted to see that his flair for this kind of comedy even existed. He was cast in much more serious roles for the main part of his career.

Obviously produced as a programmer for the lower half of a double bill, this has its moments, thanks chiefly to Edna May Oliver's dominating way with stealing a scene. Her tart remarks are what helps make the film click at all.

Spelling note: I've tried to correct the spelling of Walter Pigeon's name, but it keeps on being switched back to Pigeon by the spell check apparently written into this review by either my computer or the IMDb site. There's a "d" before the "g", for anyone who's curious.

I can watch this movie a couple of times a year. It's astonishing in the MGM ham-handedness of the production. How we are to believe that Maureen O'Sullivan, with her trans-Altantic accent, or Edna May Oliver, with her stage-British, hail from Nebraska, is beyond me. MGM's idea of screwball comedy usually involved.... well, MGM didn't do screwball, unless you count casting Joan Crawford in SUSAN AND GOD.

Yet somehow, everything about this movie works. There's the Herman Mankiewicz script, of course, and the sure comedy direction of George Seitz and Miss Oliver is always absurd. Most of all, Walter Pidgeon is perfect as the lumber-minded Ken Morley.