Betty Hutton runs a bookstore with no customers and has written a novel which no one will publish. She's enamored of her brother-in-law, Patric Knowles, and very annoyed by know-it-all sports reporter McDonald Carey. She also is prone to go into trances in which she imagines herself doing something great or noble.
It's based on a play by Elmer Rice, but I can't tell if it's a bad play or director Mitchell Leisen was trying to sabotage Miss Hutton's career. Her character is unfocused enough as it is, but she plays it with bad make-up and a flat, nasal voice. It's a character which, in a well-run comedy, would receive a kick in the pants and get on with things. Instead, thanks to a screenplay by Arthur Sheekman, no such thing happens. It just wanders through several scenes in which she and Carey snap at each other, making sure we thoroughly dislike each, hoping they will get together so they can make each other thoroughly miserable.
Miss Hutton was 27 when she made this, pretty far from the young jitterbugger she had portrayed eight years earlier. Apparently the jitterbug had fallen out of favor, and Paramount was trying to make a new star persona for her. With vehicles like this, the public had no interest in cooperating.
It's based on a play by Elmer Rice, but I can't tell if it's a bad play or director Mitchell Leisen was trying to sabotage Miss Hutton's career. Her character is unfocused enough as it is, but she plays it with bad make-up and a flat, nasal voice. It's a character which, in a well-run comedy, would receive a kick in the pants and get on with things. Instead, thanks to a screenplay by Arthur Sheekman, no such thing happens. It just wanders through several scenes in which she and Carey snap at each other, making sure we thoroughly dislike each, hoping they will get together so they can make each other thoroughly miserable.
Miss Hutton was 27 when she made this, pretty far from the young jitterbugger she had portrayed eight years earlier. Apparently the jitterbug had fallen out of favor, and Paramount was trying to make a new star persona for her. With vehicles like this, the public had no interest in cooperating.