Mademoiselle ma femme

You have to be a die-hard RED SKELTON fan to approve of his slapstick performance in I DOOD IT, but some of his routines just fall flat. He and ELEANOR POWELL have to deal with a less than spectacular script in which he's mistaken for a wealthy man when he's actually a pants presser. The gags that follow are weak, for the most part, but occasionally some bright bits of humor do crop up along the way.

For comic timing, nothing beats the scene where Powell takes the sleep medicine by mistake and Skelton is unable to wake her up to either put her in a chair or on a bed. Her limber body provides a lot of chuckles as he struggles to get her off the floor. The timing by both is impeccable and it's one of the film's best routines.

Too bad her dance numbers aren't staged as well as that sequence which runs a little too long. They're serviceable, but that's about all.

Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra play some nice tunes, best of which is "Star Eyes" sung by Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell. An "audition" scene featuring Hazel Scott at the piano and Lena Horne as vocalist on "Jericho" is a lively routine that gives the film a much needed musical highlight.

But for both Skelton and Powell, this is one of their lesser efforts. Sam Levene, Thurston Hall, John Hodiak and Richard Ainley offer good support.

I hope they paid Powell triple. That rope dance she does is maybe the most demanding gauntlet of timing I've seen in years of viewing. I'm not surprised the rehearsal for it "knocked herself out cold", (IMDB). Then too, she's got the movie's comedic highpoint where Skelton has to bend her upside down and sideways while she's knocked out with sleeping pills. And catch that climactic top-like spin in front of the mock battleship that had me dizzy for a week. To me, the movie's really her showcase. On the other hand, Red's routines pick up slapstick momentum toward the end, but the first part has him do little more than wear a goofy grin. As a Skelton fan, I don't think it's the comedian's best showcase.

On the whole, the 100-minutes amounts to a rather unwieldy package, with a few over-stretched routines and an awkward Nazi subplot. But then this is 1943 and everybody's got to do their part. Note, for example, how class differences—a pants presser vs. a Broadway star—are overcome, while Blacks are presented in a non- demeaning way. It's like we've all got to pull together to defeat the Axis. And catch that last sequence where Red battles the Nazi Hodiak. Judging from the screen environs, I'll bet it was filmed in MGM's prop room with the lifts, props and catwalks all doing their part.

Overall-- as another reviewer points out—it's more a movie of parts than a whole. But some of those parts are fairly memorable. Most of all, however, hats off to the fearless Elinor Powell.

No one seems to point out that his film is a remake of an earlier film Buster Keaton made for MGM titled "Spite Marriage", with many of the visual gags pulled directly from that earlier film with almost no changes. So as well as Red Skelton did in this, an earlier genius had done it first. Many of the best sight gags were lifted note-for-note from Keaton. The two films differ greatly in their sub-plots, but the core premise is the same. If you liked this movie, you should seek out the earlier film; a lot of it is genuinely funny. Although not Keaton at his peak (he was hampered by the MGM-imposed studio system), any Keaton is worth seeing.

This is a film in which the parts are definitely greater than the sum. I understand it was a remake of a Buster Keaton silent feature,so the slapstick is pretty funny. Also entertaining are Miss Powell's dance numbers (even if two of them were lifted from previous films) and the musical numbers by Hazel Scott and Lena Horne. Red Skelton is his usual bumbling, confused,but lovable self. But the film as a whole is just goofy. Besides the whole "mistaken identity" plot,there is a subplot about Nazi saboteurs,which is just stupid and some really bad spoof of "Gone With the Wind" as the play that Powell's character is starring in. I guess that during wartime, anything light hearted was quickly put together and rushed into theaters as a diversion. This film looks it.

I have this notion that the thirties was a great pressure cooker for movies, during which time all sorts of experiments were tried. Out of that period came the genres we know today, plus the great invention of Noir, uniquely American.

So I've been watching lots of 30s movies, not because they are good or particularly enjoyable. But because you can see the genotype of today's movies, which is to say I can see the origins of how we all dream and mostly imagine.

Now here is an anomaly, a 30s movie made in the 40s. I can only imagine that it was to feed the war-starved theaters. It is a remake and "borrows" musical numbers from a couple films that really were made in the 30s.

It is a spliced picture, three movies combined, something that was common in the 30's.

One movie is a stage show. Simple and straightforward. Lots of variety here.

A second movie is a comedic fold: a movie where all the players are involved in some way in a play (different than the earlier mentioned performances and more like "Gone with the Wind"). Lots of physical humor here. Red Skelton's technique was to perform a comedic motion (like rolling his eyes after getting bonked) in an exaggerated fashion and then abruptly stop before it finished and look at the audience with a big grin. It was humor about humor, a not very sophisticated but an effective fold that would grow into what we have today (and call irony).

The third movie has a wartime saboteur. Because the "fold," the notion of the play within the play, is explicit here, the explosion is to blow up the theater (and somehow simultaneously threaten the nation by mechanisms unexplained).

Its a mess, these three parts not integrated in any way.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.