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A Manhattan nightclub is quite the alien world to the botany professor from upstate (James Stewart), the chorines onstage seem to always be gyrating his way. He comes for the playboy cousin (James Ellison) but stays for the spirited chanteuse (Ginger Rogers), and dazedly compares meeting her to getting run over as a boy. "I just realized... I'm trying to make an impression." Next thing you know they're married, notifying the family back home is just a detail that slipped the groom's mind. His father (Charles Coburn) runs household and university with the same iron hand, his mother (Beulah Bondi) has taken to faking heart pangs and unknowingly splits a surreptitious cigarette with the new daughter-in-law. "If my husband wouldn't let me smoke, I'd find me a way to get a husband that would." "Depends upon which you enjoy the most." A particularly bright George Stevens composition, a screwball treatment of themes explored dramatically in A Place in the Sun and Giant. Posing as a student, the heroine purrs in the professor's ear as he peers into a microscope and, confronted by the fiancée (Frances Mercer), escalates from wisecrack to slap and beyond. (Hubby and Dad walk in mid-tussle, the rival about to get body-slammed.) Gratifying clowns fill the margins: Franklin Pangborn tapping a pencil in his mouth, Grady Sutton wolf-whistling to his heart's content, Willie Best as the world's most empathetic porter. For his part, Stewart showcases a mad-scientist gleam while concocting a cocktail out of classroom chemicals. "Shades and merciful saints preserve us, today you are a man!" Kanin (My Favorite Wife) and Dassin (The Affairs of Martha) take note. With Jack Carson, Phyllis Kennedy, Alec Craig, and Hattie McDaniel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |