To my delight I found that this was the first 'screwball comedy' I'd seen -- including the famous 'Bringing Up Baby' -- that I could actually enjoy without reservation; in a genre that gets its kicks out of zany mayhem at the characters' expense, this one rang sweet all the way through. Except, of course, for the unfortunate murder victim, but it's hard to waste any tears over *him*...
There are two reasons above all to watch this film -- no, make that three! Carole Lombard, as Helen, the would-be author who spends her life in a maze of fictions that seem like a good idea at the time; John Barrymore, as the unscrupulous old cadger with a knowing eye and a trademark elephantine skip; plus the script itself. The scene where the heroine attempts to prevent the repossession of her typewriter via a teetering fabrication of improbabilities that finally convinces the firm's representative that her husband is a delusional homicidal lunatic -- whereupon his arrival and a series of innocent misunderstandings terrify the poor man out of his skin -- is a masterpiece of its kind that had the audience choking in mounting incredulous laughter. The plot summary of the film I had been given (compulsive liar confesses to a murder she never committed) sounded incredibly forced: but in fact it works far better than that description had given me to expect.
Helen isn't a sad pathological case. She's just a highly practical girl with a lively imagination which she proceeds to apply to the couple's financial problems in an unorthodox manner... until circumstances and her unwitting husband conspire to make a guilty plea seem the only reasonable way out. In a prefiguring of the musical 'Chicago', this turns out to be the best career move either of them could have made. But this now provides impeccable inverted logic to lay them open to blackmail from the one person with all the reason in the world to know that she couldn't possibly have committed the crime...
In the part of the con-man and self-styled criminologist who cheerfully admits to being quite insane, John Barrymore's scene-stealing performance is awarded its own little theme-tune, a vaudeville flourish that accompanies his exits from the bar where he holds forth; with his lurching swagger and twirling cane, he seems on the verge of a soft-shoe dance. He is perfect as the picture of civilised lunacy, alternately terrorising and infuriating with his ghoulish pronouncements and fondness for philosophical balloons. But when he tries his hand at blackmail, he discovers he has met his match and accepts defeat with apparent grace: 'Goodbye, my house', he proclaims plaintively in the famous Barrymore tones, as he retreats back to his undersized dinghy from the beach house he had hoped to own. It is a gloriously over-the-top performance along the lines of 'Twentieth Century', all pop-eyed obsession and childlike glee; and in his own way, it transpires, he is as great a fantasist as Helen herself, allowing the plot to let him off scot-free at the end.
But it is Carole Lombard who holds the whole film together, richly deserving her title as 'Queen of Comedy' as she conveys Helen's boundless enthusiasm for rushing in time and again where angels fear to tread, and the process by which every fabrication seems to arise inevitably from the last. Helen is quite impossible to live with, and yet Carole makes her endearing enough to explain any degree of forbearance. The character may be funny, but she is also fully human in unhappiness or panic, and we laugh with her rather than at her. In the end, everything is sorted out and everyone gets what they deserve... but Helen, when last seen, appears to be cooking up a new scheme already!
The film was released simultaneously with the more satirical 'Nothing Sacred' -- which I also enjoyed -- and they make an entertaining pair; but for my money this has the sweeter nature and the more outright laughs of the two.
There are two reasons above all to watch this film -- no, make that three! Carole Lombard, as Helen, the would-be author who spends her life in a maze of fictions that seem like a good idea at the time; John Barrymore, as the unscrupulous old cadger with a knowing eye and a trademark elephantine skip; plus the script itself. The scene where the heroine attempts to prevent the repossession of her typewriter via a teetering fabrication of improbabilities that finally convinces the firm's representative that her husband is a delusional homicidal lunatic -- whereupon his arrival and a series of innocent misunderstandings terrify the poor man out of his skin -- is a masterpiece of its kind that had the audience choking in mounting incredulous laughter. The plot summary of the film I had been given (compulsive liar confesses to a murder she never committed) sounded incredibly forced: but in fact it works far better than that description had given me to expect.
Helen isn't a sad pathological case. She's just a highly practical girl with a lively imagination which she proceeds to apply to the couple's financial problems in an unorthodox manner... until circumstances and her unwitting husband conspire to make a guilty plea seem the only reasonable way out. In a prefiguring of the musical 'Chicago', this turns out to be the best career move either of them could have made. But this now provides impeccable inverted logic to lay them open to blackmail from the one person with all the reason in the world to know that she couldn't possibly have committed the crime...
In the part of the con-man and self-styled criminologist who cheerfully admits to being quite insane, John Barrymore's scene-stealing performance is awarded its own little theme-tune, a vaudeville flourish that accompanies his exits from the bar where he holds forth; with his lurching swagger and twirling cane, he seems on the verge of a soft-shoe dance. He is perfect as the picture of civilised lunacy, alternately terrorising and infuriating with his ghoulish pronouncements and fondness for philosophical balloons. But when he tries his hand at blackmail, he discovers he has met his match and accepts defeat with apparent grace: 'Goodbye, my house', he proclaims plaintively in the famous Barrymore tones, as he retreats back to his undersized dinghy from the beach house he had hoped to own. It is a gloriously over-the-top performance along the lines of 'Twentieth Century', all pop-eyed obsession and childlike glee; and in his own way, it transpires, he is as great a fantasist as Helen herself, allowing the plot to let him off scot-free at the end.
But it is Carole Lombard who holds the whole film together, richly deserving her title as 'Queen of Comedy' as she conveys Helen's boundless enthusiasm for rushing in time and again where angels fear to tread, and the process by which every fabrication seems to arise inevitably from the last. Helen is quite impossible to live with, and yet Carole makes her endearing enough to explain any degree of forbearance. The character may be funny, but she is also fully human in unhappiness or panic, and we laugh with her rather than at her. In the end, everything is sorted out and everyone gets what they deserve... but Helen, when last seen, appears to be cooking up a new scheme already!
The film was released simultaneously with the more satirical 'Nothing Sacred' -- which I also enjoyed -- and they make an entertaining pair; but for my money this has the sweeter nature and the more outright laughs of the two.