La reine de Brooklyn

Short (only 50 minutes) but fun film has taxi company owners Tim McGuerin (William Bendix, always plays the blue collar palooka), and Joe Sawyer (Eddie Corbett) running out on their own party and finding all kinds of trouble. Along the way, they bump into Lucy Gibbs (Marjorie Woodworth, only 22 years old), and the real trouble begins. First of a trilogy, Brooklyn Orchid, 1942 was followed by "The McGuerins From Brooklyn" also 1942, and by "Taxi Mister" 1943, all under an hour, with the same writers, director, and leads. This was only Bendix's second gig. Plot moves right along - kind of feels like an extended episode of I Love Lucy, or Abbott & Costello. All's well that ends well, kind of....

This is a perfectly disposable entertainment, most notable for having William Bendix, some location shooting at a ritzy resort, and some OK gags, some of which are a little closer to risqué than usual for early 40s cinema. The better jokes invovlve a party about one-third into the movie.

Plot? A couple taxi drivers who hit it rich have girlfriends who want to move up in society. While playing hooky from the party, our heroes fish the "Brooklyn Orchard" out of the water, foiling her suicide attempt. Whereupon, she declares that since the boys fished her from certain death, they now own her life. The result is standard farce fare.

Why watch? The ladies are pretty and clothes they are wearing are better than the usual B frock. The drunken music critic who turns up in the second reel is funny.

Why not watch? The depiction of men as loutishly stupid and women as scheming plotters feels mean spirited outside of a Laurel & Hardy movie. And there is nothing here you can't find in many better movies (or, for that matter, in an episode of Friends).

Knockabout guys William Bendix and Joe Sawyer, a pair of millionaire taxi owners are just bored stiff at a party that Bendix's wife Grace Bradley is throwing for society. The water off Brooklyn Heights is as good as it is off Sheepshead Bay so they decide to go fishing. What they fish from the drink is suicide wannabe Marjorie Woodworth, the Brooklyn Orchid.

That's the contest she won a year before in Coney Island, but she's bored with her life now, it ain't no bed of roses for a beauty contest winner. But Woodworth is a student of Oriental philosophy and she believes like the Chinese, a life saved is a life owned.

Take Bendix's other and more famous Brooklyn character Chester A. Riley and give him a couple of million dollars and you've got Tim McGuerin. Unlike Riley, McGuerin married a stripper and Bradley does not like to be reminded from whence she came. This society bash she's giving is rather important to her.

Brooklyn Orchid was the first of three films the quartet of Bendix, Sawyer, Bradley and Woodworth made from these characters. They were done at Hal Roach Studio and Roach was lucky to grab Bendix right before he signed with Paramount and became one of their steadiest working character players. And also before he created Chester A. Riley for radio and then television.

Brooklyn Orchid is an easy to take B picture from the Roach Studio. One thing I didn't understand was not one reference to the Dodgers who had won the National League pennant the year before.

Brooklyn Orchid (1942)

** (out of 4)

Hal Roach comedy about two cab workers (William Bendix, Joe Sawyer) who save a suicidal woman (Marjorie Woodworth) only to have her follow them around thinking they owe her something. I've been watching quite a few of this Roach film, which typically run 50-minutes and they're all really lacking when it comes to their screenplays. There's no question these are cheaply produced B-movies but the lack of laughs make them pretty hard to get through even though they often feature an interesting cast. I've come to really enjoy Sawyer but he isn't given anything to do here. Woodworth has a few good moments but again, her character is poorly written. The only real highlight of the film is a snob piano player and his hand. This was followed by two sequels and is a remake of the Laurel and Hardy film Come Clean.

This surprisingly primitive 'streamliner' comedy from the Roach Studios -- with the collapse of the comedy short subject market in the mid-thirties, Hal Roach decided to go into feature production, first with films like the TOPPER series and later with second features that timed in at less than an hour -- contains all the standard cheap comedy motifs, including a Murphy Bed -- and runs through them in a rather mechanical fashion as made-it-from-scratch taxi fleet owners William Bendix and Joe Sawyer get tangled up with a girl who tries to kill herself and declares herself their responsibility. The dialogue direction limps and although there are some good gags in the opening scenes, including a music-hating music critic and Jack Norton playing his usual fine comic drunk, there isn't that much in the way of laughs to recommend this piece.