Other reviewers have explained the plot, so I'll simply tell you that I find this film funny and one of my top-rated movie comedies of all time (Blazing Saddles, Some Like it Hot, Olsen & Johnson's Hellzapoppin, Radio Parade of 1935, most of the film comedies starring Monty Python, Alastair Sim, Margaret Rutherford, Alec Guinness and almost all the classics by Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Mae West and Mel Brooks. During what seems in retrospect a scant decade following WWII, English language movies along with some stage plays, literature, network radio and early live television appealed to an American public better educated and verbally literate than generations before and after. In comedy of that fleeting era, there was frequently an absurdist streak and occasionally some commentary and deconstruction of the very medium in which it appeared. It's in the Bag is a good example of wit, absurdist comedy and deconstruction. An independent production built around the twin poles of a satiric Russian novel and acerbic comedian Fred Allen, it attracted co-stars willing to work for less than their usual salaries: Jack Benny, Binnie Barnes, Don Ameche, Robert Benchley, Rudy Vallee, Victor Moore, William Bendix, John Carradine, Sidney Toler and Jerry Colonna. The result is a series of scenes encountered by Fred Allen as he follows the trail of his missing chairs, one of which conceals a fortune. The script (written by Fred Allen, Morrie Ryskind, Lewis Foster, Jay Dratler & Alma Reville (Hitchcock's swife) is tight, clever, stuffed with incident and characters (most of them spoofing their on-screen personas). Directer Richard Wallace is efficient and compatible wirth the material and performers, and cinematographer Russell Metty was one of filmdom's finest and a favorite of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Don Siegel and Stweven Spielberg.
Review of It's in the Bag!
