Joel McRea and Claudette Colbert are man and wife, but he's having a hard time finding money to build his airport and she's feeling useless, just another added expense. Things are so rough that they're being evicted from their New York apartment.
Though they still love each other, Colbert runs off to Palm Beach for a divorce. On the train she meets Rudy Vallee as John D. Hackensacker III. Any resemblance to John D. Rockefeller III is intended. They meet accidentally, while she is fleeing the drunken members of the Ale and Quail Gun Club who are shooting the lights out. While trying to climb into an upper berth in the sleeping car, she steps on his face and crushes his eyeglasses. "Oh, that's alright," he says, "Just pick out the little pieces of glass, will you?" He falls for Colbert and she allows his attraction to deepen in hopes that she can squeeze a bundle of money out of him for McRea's airport.
McRea hasn't been idle. He manages to find an airline ticket to Palm Beach and meets Colbert and Vallee there. Colbert introduces him as her brother, Captain McGlue, hiding his real identity because she still hopes to wheedle a hundred thou out of the good-natured and thoroughly smitten Vallee.
In Valee's Art Moderne mansion, his flighty sister, Mary Astor, attaches herself to McRea, believing him to be single.
The identities are finally untangled at the end. The married couple are reunited, their love renewed. Vallee is disappointed but is firm about investing in McRea's airport venture. Astor is a little disappointed too. But -- voila! Both McRea and Colbert have identical twins and the film ends with their marriages to Astor and Vallee. The twin that married Astor is getting the worst of the deal.
It's pretty funny -- wildly so at times. The Ale and Quail Gun Club are a hoot, with their shotguns and hunting hounds, roaming the corridors of the train, shooting out windows. The scene comes at a point at which the plot needs a little livening up because the script has already spent twenty minutes on a couple whose marriage is falling apart.
One of the better comedies of its time -- 1942. I've seen it twice, over the years, and enjoyed it more the first time round. Some of the characters seemed not so much inspired as silly. Toto, Mary Astor's boyfriend, for instance, has little to add once his shtick of inventing a new language is grasped. And there are few of Sturges unexpected felicities in the script. No galumphing proletarian says, "It's watcha call a paraphrase." However, everything rolls along at such a pace that there isn't much time for dwelling on fallen gags. It lifts the spirits, like a martini too quickly consumed.
Though they still love each other, Colbert runs off to Palm Beach for a divorce. On the train she meets Rudy Vallee as John D. Hackensacker III. Any resemblance to John D. Rockefeller III is intended. They meet accidentally, while she is fleeing the drunken members of the Ale and Quail Gun Club who are shooting the lights out. While trying to climb into an upper berth in the sleeping car, she steps on his face and crushes his eyeglasses. "Oh, that's alright," he says, "Just pick out the little pieces of glass, will you?" He falls for Colbert and she allows his attraction to deepen in hopes that she can squeeze a bundle of money out of him for McRea's airport.
McRea hasn't been idle. He manages to find an airline ticket to Palm Beach and meets Colbert and Vallee there. Colbert introduces him as her brother, Captain McGlue, hiding his real identity because she still hopes to wheedle a hundred thou out of the good-natured and thoroughly smitten Vallee.
In Valee's Art Moderne mansion, his flighty sister, Mary Astor, attaches herself to McRea, believing him to be single.
The identities are finally untangled at the end. The married couple are reunited, their love renewed. Vallee is disappointed but is firm about investing in McRea's airport venture. Astor is a little disappointed too. But -- voila! Both McRea and Colbert have identical twins and the film ends with their marriages to Astor and Vallee. The twin that married Astor is getting the worst of the deal.
It's pretty funny -- wildly so at times. The Ale and Quail Gun Club are a hoot, with their shotguns and hunting hounds, roaming the corridors of the train, shooting out windows. The scene comes at a point at which the plot needs a little livening up because the script has already spent twenty minutes on a couple whose marriage is falling apart.
One of the better comedies of its time -- 1942. I've seen it twice, over the years, and enjoyed it more the first time round. Some of the characters seemed not so much inspired as silly. Toto, Mary Astor's boyfriend, for instance, has little to add once his shtick of inventing a new language is grasped. And there are few of Sturges unexpected felicities in the script. No galumphing proletarian says, "It's watcha call a paraphrase." However, everything rolls along at such a pace that there isn't much time for dwelling on fallen gags. It lifts the spirits, like a martini too quickly consumed.