Publicity woman Stella Adler comes up with a campaign to sell soup: choose a "Mr. Manhattan" and have him fall in love with "Miss Brooklyn", all thanks to the power of soup. Unfortunately for her job, the sparks fly between intended patsy John Payne and her instead of her intended target.
I thought that Miss Adler was a fine hard-nosed publicity woman who knows it's all a sham, but there's something mechanical about the way that John Payne and she fall in and out of love that seemed to be "All, right, in this scene you like her, but she doesn't like you, or some combination of four intersections of "She/he loves me/ she/he loves me not." Perhaps it's the confident way that soda jerk John Payne steps up to a microphone in front of hundreds of people, or tells a whopper to get Miss Adler out of being lynched as a baby thief. Maybe Luis Alberni is channeling Chico Marx too strongly, then gives back the money. Unless you're doing Marx Brothers comedy, where the comics are utterly insincere and say whatever comes into their head, there needs to be a core of truth in the characters. In the end, I didn't care about the workings out of the plot, which ended with Boy Getting Girl, seemingly, because we've run out of pies to throw at each other, so let's end it here.
Perhaps it was simply a mismatch between Miss Adler, a life time in the Yiddish and Broadway theaters, and Mr. Payne, in his fourth movie and a decade younger than she. She could do her job competently, collect her paycheck, then return to the stage and teaching. Mr. Payne had no choice. He had to learn his acting without the advantage of being born to it.
