Some months after Pearl Harbour was a little late to be putting out a New Deal-style crazy comedy, and it feels like it here.
Alexander Hall was a Broadway veteran whose Hollywood films never seemed to venture out of doors. He helmed a strenuously busy but claustrophobic showcase for La Crawford, after her scenery-masticating dramatic hit in "A Woman's Face"; but when Carole Lombard died, Joan was loaned out to Columbia for this change of pace, donating her fee to the Red Cross because it found Lombard's body.
She plays a "woman in possession", of the genus Barbara Stanwyck, who inherits the family trucking firm, mentors her susceptible kid sister on men and copes with the "Topper" couple, Young and Burke, as distrait presences around the sister's wedding. The score, over-reliant on "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby", nudges us to notice what's meant to be funny. Joan strides through the cut-ups: shoulders back, mouth grimly fixed, eyes flaring like a basilisk as ever. Reporter Douglas, the eternal support to strong women, threatens to reveal her company's dark side before warming to the object of his expose. Who'd have thought it?
Joan is in transit, image-wise, between her tragedy queens at MGM and her future, in reduced circumstances, at Warner- where her Oscar-winning but brief comeback in "Mildred Pierce" would finally establish her, middle aged, as an increasingly batty matriarch and dominatrix. It's a switch for which she seems to be preparing in her desk-set background and admonitory scenes with sister Parrish, who's an "innocent young girl" of Hollywood's most artificial sort, all head-dipping and handwaving, gooey-eyed and goggle-mouthed.
Joan's fatiguing jitterbug at the company hop ruefully acknowledges that her jazz-baby days are long gone, and also that even the biggest Hollywood stars have to clown for the war effort- like arch-rival Bette Davis croaking through "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" in "Thank Your Lucky Stars".
With no plot surprises threatening, the audience has to lean on farcical thesping, and there is too little slapstick after the wedding opening to gloss over the silly psychology within this set of conventions. None of the accomplished practitioners seem quite on key, as if war clouds had got to them. Burke had become too engrossed in her grande-dame daffiness, her voice lurching ever higher out of her control: the Glinda persona too must have suddenly seemed irritating and out of date for grown-up movies in wartime, for both she and Young were soon dropping into cameo parts. Douglas would head off to the theatre after rising from private to major in the Army. The picture flopped. The Thirties really were over.
Alexander Hall was a Broadway veteran whose Hollywood films never seemed to venture out of doors. He helmed a strenuously busy but claustrophobic showcase for La Crawford, after her scenery-masticating dramatic hit in "A Woman's Face"; but when Carole Lombard died, Joan was loaned out to Columbia for this change of pace, donating her fee to the Red Cross because it found Lombard's body.
She plays a "woman in possession", of the genus Barbara Stanwyck, who inherits the family trucking firm, mentors her susceptible kid sister on men and copes with the "Topper" couple, Young and Burke, as distrait presences around the sister's wedding. The score, over-reliant on "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby", nudges us to notice what's meant to be funny. Joan strides through the cut-ups: shoulders back, mouth grimly fixed, eyes flaring like a basilisk as ever. Reporter Douglas, the eternal support to strong women, threatens to reveal her company's dark side before warming to the object of his expose. Who'd have thought it?
Joan is in transit, image-wise, between her tragedy queens at MGM and her future, in reduced circumstances, at Warner- where her Oscar-winning but brief comeback in "Mildred Pierce" would finally establish her, middle aged, as an increasingly batty matriarch and dominatrix. It's a switch for which she seems to be preparing in her desk-set background and admonitory scenes with sister Parrish, who's an "innocent young girl" of Hollywood's most artificial sort, all head-dipping and handwaving, gooey-eyed and goggle-mouthed.
Joan's fatiguing jitterbug at the company hop ruefully acknowledges that her jazz-baby days are long gone, and also that even the biggest Hollywood stars have to clown for the war effort- like arch-rival Bette Davis croaking through "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" in "Thank Your Lucky Stars".
With no plot surprises threatening, the audience has to lean on farcical thesping, and there is too little slapstick after the wedding opening to gloss over the silly psychology within this set of conventions. None of the accomplished practitioners seem quite on key, as if war clouds had got to them. Burke had become too engrossed in her grande-dame daffiness, her voice lurching ever higher out of her control: the Glinda persona too must have suddenly seemed irritating and out of date for grown-up movies in wartime, for both she and Young were soon dropping into cameo parts. Douglas would head off to the theatre after rising from private to major in the Army. The picture flopped. The Thirties really were over.