Comprando Barulho

Cagney was always trying to break away from his tough guy image, and is obviously relishing this FAST paced screwball comedy (think THE FRONT PAGE/HIS GIRL Friday) about two zany screenwriters. He mugs, he shouts, he dances, he wise-cracks, acts fey-you name it, he does a million bits of business here. Not until ONE,TWO,THREE 25 years later will you see Cagney in this mode again. FRONT PAGE vet Pat O'Brian easily keeps up the pace, but he's playing the "straight" funny man here. Ralph Bellamy is a riot as the idiot producer (college-man) as is Dick Foran, who sends up his own cowboy image (who knew Foran was this good?). At times the pace gets away from the actors and certain scenes are TOO frenetic, and laughs are lost, but generally this is such an off-beat surprise, that despite an ugly, washed out print that makes the film feel even older and less stellar, there is enough entertainment here for those who can plug into the farcical tone of a film that pulls the pants of Hollywood down.

Not in plot. In style where it counts. The dialogue comes really thick and fast. Pat O'Brien plays smooth Hildy Johnson again, only this time he's called J. Carlyle Benson, screenwriter. He runs rings around Ralph Bellamy who is bemusedly befuddled once more, as he was about to be shortly in "His Girl Friday", the remake of "The Front Page". "Boy Meets Girl" can hold its head up high in the company of either of those films. There are crazy laughs and movie industry in-jokes aplenty.

There's a swipe at Canadians! There's a swipe at Mark Hellinger!! There's a swipe at Marcel Proust!!! "Lui-même!" as pretentious droppers of French phrases like Ralph Bellamy would say.

Pat O'Brien does a pratfall! In the part of conniving Walter Burns, you've got Jimmy Cagney who naturally has no trouble keeping up with Pat. Jimmy's real-life buddy Frank McHugh plays their nemesis, Rossetti, the agent.

There are good, well-written parts here even for minor characters like those played by Marie Wilson and Bruce Lester.

Because the movie is littered with gags of all kinds, I just assume that the "errors" I see are only more in-jokes. Two characters discuss Errol Flynn and agree that he really is English. Wrong! We know he's actually Australian. But it's just another joke, in disguise. Doubly ironic is the fact that the English character in the scene is played by a South African. There's a joke about exactly this sort of thing in a different scene! Art imitates life imitating art imitating life. Or something. A cowboy movie gets produced during the course of the film. It's called "Golden Nuggets" on the poster, then "Golden Nugget" a minute later in the movie trailer. A mistake? Or just another swipe, this time at more typical slipshod Hollywood productions?

A film by and about screenwriters making fun of themselves, and everyone else while they're at it. A really funny, fast-moving story and a tangled plot. An ironic title. This is no simple "boy meets girl" movie.

James Cagney had been in a dispute with Warner Brothers since 1936. In 1938 the situation was resolved, and Cagney returned to his home studio - to do THIS? It seemed like they were punishing him for the entire episode, but his autobiography mentions only that he was glad to team with his two pals O'Brien and Bellamy. He does admit that he never deliberately watched his own movies though, and only saw this one on TV after he retired.

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien are two Hollywood writers tasked by their studio with coming up with a script for the studio's top Western star, with Dick Foran basically doing a parody of himself in just about every role as a cowboy that he ever had. A waitress from the studio commissary brings up the writers' lunch and passes out. It turns out she is pregnant, and Cagney and O'Brien get the idea of making a baby central to Foran's next Western. In fact they make the waitress' baby a star. Everyone acts like this waitress invented the concept of infancy, because it never seems to occur to them that if something happened and this baby was unavailable that they could just go out and recruit another one. Marie Wilson plays the infant star's mother, and a little of her dumb and naive act goes a long way, in fact it goes too far and she is just annoying in short order. This was supposed to be a parody of Hollywood, but it was unfunny at best and tedious at its worst.

The first half is almost indescribably bad. It has everybody behaving hyperactively, talking so fast you can hardly understand them, and doing things that make no sense. It is exhibit A in everything that can go wrong in a comedy during the early years of the production code. This approach might have worked for the Marx Brothers, but it was - at the same time - chaotic and boring in this situation.

And then it's like a different director took over at the halfway point, everything calms down, and there's actually room for meaningful dialog, especially between Cagney and O'Brien. It's not particularly compelling, but if the entire film had been like the second half it would have been a respectable 6/10.

Impressively ludicrous and hyperactive Hollywood self-spoof, Cagney and O'Brien play a pair of screenwriters sponging from a studio too free with its money. Double-talk turns to triple-talk as they do battle with various opposing forces (a hapless cowboy star, a college-educated producer, an effete English extra and even Ronald Reagan) to control a baby-star whose career they created while it was still in the womb; they are only defeated by the Eternal Power of Love as Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Finds Girl Again. Cagney, a genius who always struggled to play anyone who remotely resembled a normal human being, and O'Brien speak so fast that even native speakers of English struggle to follow. They would have given the Marx Brothers a run for their manic money.

Yet the greatest lines (and facial expressions) are reserved for Ralph Bellamy, on top form as the dopey producer (presumably a caricature of some well-known figure). Only Bellamy could spin comic gold from a line like "Good Gad, you've been drinking my milk." "It's 1938" says O'Brien. "I know that," replies Bellamy, "but not everyone's an intellectual."

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien made their second of two films adapted from Broadway plays, the first being Ceiling Zero. Boy Meets Girl, written by the husband and wife team of Samuel and Bella Spewack ran for 664 performances and was directed on Broadway by the great George Abbott.

It would have been nice had Warner Brothers secured the services of Mr. Abbott to direct this film version. But even without his touch Boy Meets Girl nicely adapts from the stage to the screen. The parts of Benson and Law, based loosely on the writing team of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, fit Cagney and O'Brien very well indeed.

I've always been of the opinion though it is the strong performances of the supporting cast that make this film. Dick Foran showed what a really good sport he was in satirizing himself essentially. At the time Boy Meets Girl was made, Foran was Warner Brothers B picture singing cowboy star. A whole lot of other players would never have done what Foran did. Too bad they didn't give him a song to sing in this though.

But the performance I really like is that of Ralph Bellamy, the harassed studio executive who is being driven to his wit's end by the antics of Cagney and O'Brien. Forget The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, or even Sunrise at Campobello, this to me is Ralph Bellamy's career role. What makes it work is that Bellamy does play it so seriously against Cagney and O'Brien.

Frank McHugh, Marie Wilson, and Bruce Lester are involved in this also. And very prominently featured is the 40th President of the United States in one of the first roles that brought him some attention as a radio announcer. Since that's what Ronald Reagan was before coming to Hollywood, no strain here on any acting ability. Still he has some good moments as Cagney hatches a plot that does disrupt his broadcast.

Do you ever think Ralph Bellamy finally did cure all the problems that 'Young England' was facing?