The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941)

What an annoying movie. My quest to find an old an un-insane Bette David movie led me to this accidental find while browsing in the library. Sometimes there is a reason for not having heard of a movie.

Joan Winfield (Bette Davis) is an heiress about to elope with a band leader she has only known for a few weeks. Her oil rich father does not approve. When Joan and her fiance hire a pilot to fly them to Vegas for a quick wedding, hilarity ensues. Pilot Steve Collins (James Cagney) has just lost his plane to creditors. What to do? Call up Joan's dad of course and offer to fly her to her dad rather than to Vegas. Collins charges $10 per pound, just the right amount to pay his creditors. Joan's father thinks this sounds good because, "She won't weigh so much after an all night trip."

Joan doesn't much appreciate having her fiance tricked out of the plane and then being kidnapped. Her early attempt to jump out of the plane backfires, though, when Steve loses control of the plane trying to stop her and they crash land in the desert. There is a running gag in which Joan and Steve take turns falling on cacti throughout the movie. The cacti get their own dopey music, and Joan, while she still hates Steve, gets to lie across his lap while he picks prickers out of her butt. All while going through his picnic basket of fattening food... Steve is still hoping to get more money upon delivering her.

The dopey cacti music was just one sign that this was a dopey movie. Joan and Steve spend some time with an old hermit living in a ghost town, they cave in an old mine, there is a joke about marriage: "One of you's gettin' married, the other's going to jail. So you really got a lot in common," and eventually the characters don't couple up as originally planned. A slapstick comedy that caused more groaning and cringing than laughing. One star, and I don't really want to see this again. Still in search of entertaining early Bette Davis movies...

Love Crazy (1941)

William Powell and Myrna Loy.  What do you think I will rate this movie?

Susan and Steve Ireland are celebrating their fourth anniversary in a wonderfully witty Loy and Powell way.  Instead of exactly re-enacting their first date the way that they usually do on their anniversary, Steve suggests that they re-enact the date backwards.  Unfortunately, they are interrupted almost immediately by the arrival of Susan's mother, and hilarity ensues.  


Steve gets stuck in an elevator with an old flame who lives a floor down, Susan's mother trips on the ugly anniversary present she has bought them, Susan has to run her mother's urgent pick-up errand, and a cooped up Steve ditches his mother-in-law to catch up with the old flame. All of this leads to divorce proceedings and Steve's increasingly drastic attempts to keep Susan from divorcing him over a misunderstanding. Oh William Powell, are you ever bad in a comedy?
Four stars.  I would watch this again.  I'm looking into non-Thin Man Loy&Powell box sets...

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Four stars...I have lost track of how many times I've seen it.

This movie is the reason I love Cary Grant. The faces he makes, his comedic timing, the ways he flips over chairs and over himself... I watch every Cary Grant movie I can get my hands on hoping for more of this.

There is also just something wonderful about a dark comedy in which two sweet little spinster aunts poison lonely bachelors with elderberry wine and bury them in the basement just to be nice and helpful. The men are their "charity cases." Mortimer Brewster (Grant) arrives home with his new bride and steps right into the middle of his aunts' latest charity case. At first he thinks his nutty brother Teddy has killed the dead man he discovers in the window seat, but his aunts soon set him straight:

Mortimer: Men don't just get into window seats and die!
Abby: Of course not, dear. He died first.
Mortimer: But how?
Abby: The gentleman died because he drank some wine with poison in it. Now, I don't know why you're making such a big deal over this, Mortimer. Don't you worry about a thing!



Mortimer's brother Teddy believes that he is actually Teddy Roosevelt and spends part of the the movie digging locks in the basement for the Panama Canal... holes that really end up as graves for the lonely bachelors. By the time Mortimer's convict brother Jonathan appears in the house to hide the body of his own murder victim (although the aunts object, because a crook should not be buried next to their nice gentlemen) there is almost too much insanity to keep track of. Poor Mortimer has to try to cover for his aunts and Teddy, try to protect everyone and himself from Jonathan, and worry that he will go insane like the rest of his family. "Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops," says Mortimer. Such a fun movie.

I'm not a cab driver, I'm a coffee pot.

Bathing Beauty (1944)

I caught this on TCM this Sunday morning - why does TCM play all the good movies in the morning? Red Skelton is sneaking into a woman's college to pursue the love of his life so I'm sold.



Still watching it. It must be colorized because the colors are crazy. Maybe not, though. It is sort of a musical since Red Skelton plays a songwriter.

I was sold when a strange old man started drunkenly plotting his life in fruit on the bar. And what can I say to a movie where a chorus of college girls coaxes a spinster music professor into playing jive on her organ while they accompany her on drums and tamborines? Heaven, pure heaven.

I also had to rewind and fast-forward to examine the hairstyles, too. Each girl wears red lipstick and red fingernails and a perfect reverse flip with curled hair. Each hair-do is slightly different on each side and slightly different from every other girl's.

It is purely fascinating.

Okay I'm finished watching and I'm putting this on my "need to watch again" list because there was way too much to take in at once - the grand finale was a water ballet! There were people shoved into a closet together and a man with a guitar climbing through a window and lots of other Zany Comedy Moments. It was like RS was channeling Buster Keaton!

The colorizing is almost too much to handle - it must have been colorized in the sixties when matching orange ensembles seemed like a cool idea.

Need to watch again.
Three Stars.