Only accept flowers, fruit and candy from gentlemen. That's the advice that English professor Melvyn Douglas gives waitress Joan Blondell after she's been ordered out of town by wealthy Clarence Kolb by claiming to be engaged to his son. "Good girls go to Paris", Melvyn insists, knowing that underneath her seeming gold digging exterior is a flutter which tells her heart what is right and wrong. On her way to New York, she meets Alan Curtis, the grandson of wealthy Walter Connelly, and sister of Douglas's fiancée, Joan Perry.
Blondell ends up in Curtis's wacky family mansion where the "My Man Godfrey" style family is involved in a whole bunch of absurd and wacky antics. Perry is obviously in love with another man, while Isabel Jeans as Curtis and Perry's rather dizzy mother, is playing the exact same character that Alice Brady played in "My Man Godfrey". Everything explodes when Douglas arrives, keeping Blondell's identity secret, but definitely out to teach her a lesson, especially when he learns that Perry has reluctantly made Blondell a bridesmaid!
By 1939, the comedy of the wacky screwball family was getting rather tired, but this entry is still delightful in spite of the fact that the audience was feeling, "Here we go again!" Connelly, as the irascible grandfather, gets a good majority of the laughs ("You might as well stay, you seem to be running this family", he tells the newly arrived Blondell), while Jeans makes Billie Burke seem like a genius. These films must have entertained the movie going public during the depression because they made the wealthy look like fools and the working class seem much smarter. As Douglas opens up to what Blondell really is all about and the foolish family he's about to become stuck with, it is obvious that real romance will develop between the two of them.
I just found it very hard to accept Douglas as a British character, his speech strictly American in spite of his sophistication. I did like his references to Aesop's fables, something more modern audiences should check out. Blondell was always likable whether playing a gold digger or a heroine, and her lengthy career (lasting up until right before she passed away) is worthy of making her more well known. Like the equally remembered Sylvia Sidney, audiences forget about her leading lady career and remember her more as a character performer. This has a truly witty script, and as directed by screwball veteran Alexander Hall, is very worthy of re-discovery.
Blondell ends up in Curtis's wacky family mansion where the "My Man Godfrey" style family is involved in a whole bunch of absurd and wacky antics. Perry is obviously in love with another man, while Isabel Jeans as Curtis and Perry's rather dizzy mother, is playing the exact same character that Alice Brady played in "My Man Godfrey". Everything explodes when Douglas arrives, keeping Blondell's identity secret, but definitely out to teach her a lesson, especially when he learns that Perry has reluctantly made Blondell a bridesmaid!
By 1939, the comedy of the wacky screwball family was getting rather tired, but this entry is still delightful in spite of the fact that the audience was feeling, "Here we go again!" Connelly, as the irascible grandfather, gets a good majority of the laughs ("You might as well stay, you seem to be running this family", he tells the newly arrived Blondell), while Jeans makes Billie Burke seem like a genius. These films must have entertained the movie going public during the depression because they made the wealthy look like fools and the working class seem much smarter. As Douglas opens up to what Blondell really is all about and the foolish family he's about to become stuck with, it is obvious that real romance will develop between the two of them.
I just found it very hard to accept Douglas as a British character, his speech strictly American in spite of his sophistication. I did like his references to Aesop's fables, something more modern audiences should check out. Blondell was always likable whether playing a gold digger or a heroine, and her lengthy career (lasting up until right before she passed away) is worthy of making her more well known. Like the equally remembered Sylvia Sidney, audiences forget about her leading lady career and remember her more as a character performer. This has a truly witty script, and as directed by screwball veteran Alexander Hall, is very worthy of re-discovery.