An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick, in fact, I was planning to watch ‘Pépé le Moko’ on Netflix but it was apparently removed maybe a week before, so I decided to watch instead this movie also released in 1937. Well, I must admit that I was actually really positively surprised by the first act. Indeed, the intro was not bad but, above all, as soon as Wally Cook got to Warsaw, this movie became actually quite hilarious. It’s too bad that it didn’t last for long though. Indeed, from the moment Carole Lombart got introduced, it became so much less interesting. I know, Lombart was apparently a major screw-ball comedy legend and, in fact, I’m not blaming her. Before she came around, I just loved the interaction between Cook and the inhabitants of this fictional little city though but it was obviously not what this movie was about and I’m afraid I just didn’t care much about this flimsy concept. Basically, the idea was that everybody was supposed to think that this woman was terminally ill but I thought it was rather odd and/or annoying that nobody would notice or mention that she actually looked fine. Sure, you could argue that screwball comedies always had some far-fetched even borderline idiotic storylines, that it is inherent to the genre, but, as far as I was concerned, it was just too paper thin in this case. The fact that Wally Cook and Hazel Flagg both started to act hysterically from the moment they met each other, again something which was supposed to be hilarious, was also hardly entertaining. It’s too bad because the first 15 mins were actually really fun. Anyway, to conclude, even though I’m not really a fan of the genre, I have to admit that it was still a decent vintage screwball comedy and it is worth a look.