marcslope

It may be hard to explain Eddie Cantor's appeal to today's moviegoers. In the 1930s he demonstrated a combination of ethnic relatability, physical comedy, song-and-dance dexterity, and out-and-out silliness that contemporary audiences found enormously appealing. This lavish Sam Goldwyn production may be his best shot, a nonstop parade of nonsense, where Eddie's backed by a wonderful cast. The story, about a Brooklyn boy inheriting a fortune and traveling to Egypt to claim it, reeks of all-night screenwriter conferences to wring out every possible joke. But it's so lively and silly, and there's so much besides Eddie to appreciate. Ethel Merman not only gets a lot to sing but demonstrates considerable comic chops, and she's partnered with a funny Warren Hymer. Ann Sothern is pretty and poised, and you don't mind her being partnered with a pallid George Murphy so much. A very young Nicholas Brothers get to do a specialty. Eva Sully, who didn't make a lot of movies, is an Egyptian princess with a Brooklyn twang (another silly joke), sort of Gracie Allen-esque, and she's very funny. The finale, in early three-strip Technicolor, is as fun as it is tasteless. Get past all the non-PC stuff offensive by today's standards (Eddie even dons blackface for a minstrel sequence; the other cast members fortunately don't), and you'll probably have a marvelous time.

Drama, or maybe it's a comedy, I couldn't really tell, has Loretta Young as a down-on-her-luck urbanite with two crook pals, who stumbles on her wealthy absolute lookalike at a speakeasy, where the trio contrive to rob her. From there it's ludicrousness upon ludicrousness, with poor Loretta also being telepathic (she's able to intuit the safe combination out of the other, unconscious Loretta), escapes and coincidences that would never happen, and a finale that reveals why the two Lorettas look so alike... can you guess? Her leading man, Jack Mulhall, is dullsville, and our loyalties are confused; if poor Loretta is engineering a jewel robbery, how on her side can we be? The double exposures involving the two Lorettas are reasonably well faked, and it's over mercifully fast. What this has to do with any road to paradise, I'm stumped.

Ms. Durbin is at her considerable peak in this offbeat comedy, with music, of course, sprinkled in. It's a macabre premise for fun, beginning with a dying tycoon (Charles Laughton, playing about 20 years above his age and having a merry time). His son (the perpetually uninteresting Robert Cummings, though he's livelier than usual here), for reasons not worth going into here, must get hat check girl Deanna to impersonate his fiancee for the old man, though he's already engaged to Margaret Tallichet. Laughton's enchanted with her, as who wouldn't be, and when he starts recuperating, Cummings has to keep the ruse up. Lurking on the sidelines are harassed doctor Walter Catlett and nurse Clara Blandick, but the three leads have most of the screen time, and most of the fun. Henry Koster directs expertly, and for a Universal assembly line product, it's unusually well photographed. Universal remade it in 1964, as "I'd Rather Be Rich," with the son turned into a daughter, Sandra Dee, presenting Maurice Chevalier with Robert Goulet as the fiance, instead of Andy Williams. It's actually pretty good, too, though this one has it over it.