This one has a slick, expensive look to it, but there's something tired about it, like you'd seen it all before. The humor is stale and highly predictable. The tunes within have to be the most forgettable in all of Cantor's films, indeed, maybe of all films of the decade of the 1930's.
Nobody in it has any character depth. Eddie starts out as an easily bullied little nebbish, but just as soon as we meet him, he gets a little mail-order instruction course in how to be assertive. It works, he's self-confident, and he's a regular guy with no interesting character traits any more.
To get in more gags and force the desired plot developments, coherence is sacrificed. For instance, Eddie has confidence enough to run the amusement park and stand up to the gangsters, but for no other reason than to make a slapstick sight gag, he meekly, quietly accepts the messy abuse from the potato peeler and beauty mud pitchman.
At another point, with the gangsters now posing as police, convince Eddie that they won't take in Ethel as a murder suspect if he'll let crooked slot machines be placed in the park, and Eddie agrees to it. That's a preposterous bit of sloppy writing. It makes no sense. How could Eddie still believe they're cops? Logic takes a beating, and the viewer gets the lumps. The average Joe E. Brown feature has more sophisticated plotting.
Review of Strike Me Pink
