Dulcy

This movie has a great cast of comedians, but even they can't bring much life to a dead script.

Why the script is so dead is the real mystery here. It is based on a Broadway success by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. But if you compare the two works, you see that this movie script was radically altered from the original play.

What we are left with is a lot of slapstick sight-gags, some of which are funny, some not, and a lot of really hairbrained events. No one comes of as even vaguely real.

So, in the end, a fine cast that could have done great things is left high and dry - unlike the characters, who often end up all wet.

Ann Sothern is terrific as "Dulcy". Ann Sothern is a delight to most men, and she's very funny in this movie. Shocking there is no official studio release. I'm happy to have this terrific film in my 3000 DVD/Blu-ray collection where I know it can never be censored.

Ann Sothern is a charming young woman without a brain in her head. Her brother, Dan Dailey, is in love with the daughter of Roland Young. Her boy friend, Ian Hunter, has invented a motor that he wishes to sell to Young. And Reginald Gardiner is a lunatic who drops in when he crashes his plane in the lake.

Nominally based on the Kaufman-Connelly play and the two earlier screen versions (Constance Talmadge in 1923, and Marion Davies in 1930), this version is far too complicated and predictable to suit my taste, even as it clearly shows the workings for the plot calmly advancing beneath its frantic exterior. It's one of the movies made when comedies were not permitted to be about anything real, so they were fast instead, hoping to slip one past the audience -- a Screwball Manqué if you will, in which every situation, every gag, is just what you expect it to be in the set-up. We go into a comedy knowing things will turn out well in the end, Jack shall have Jill, and man his mare. What we hope for are a few surprises on the route there.

This script provides none. Even so, I enjoy the movie a lot, and the reason is the way director S. Sylvan Simon directs his fine cast of comics (Gardiner always excepted), and throws in Billie Burke and Jonathan Hale along the way, and they raise smiles just by their performances. Which is the mark of professionals, able to make something out of nothing.

Later entry in the madcap comedy sweepstakes is paper thin but buoyed by the charming Ann Sothern. Wedged in between two Maisie pictures she gets to be a bit more addled than that resourceful gal ever was. She "fixs" things that work fine breaking them in the process and generally glides through the picture creating havoc in her wake while remaining completely unscathed.

As with most MGM movies of the era she is surrounded by an amazing cast of some of the best character actors/actresses working at the time. Billie Burke is delightfully dizzy almost matching Sothern's daffiness but the real standout besides Ann is Roland Young as the target of her unintentional "good deeds".

Inventive and illuminating it is not but thanks to the charming performances of the cast led by Ann this little known picture is worth checking out.

This film came at the end of the genre. The script is mirthless,and as a result the actors struggle manfully with their parts. Sotherns part is of a thoroughly obnoxious woman's whose antics border on the insane. She gabbles her part leading to the assumption that she wants to get to the end as soon as possible.