Simply A Masterpiece

A Major Disappointment

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Overshadowed by a certain redhead during the 1950's as the queen of TV sitcoms, Joan Davis could create laughs out of the silliest of situations. Her movie career had her as sidekick to leading ladies such as Alice Faye, Loretta Young and Ginger Rogers in "A" pictures, and as a leading lady in second features, she rivaled Lucille Ball as queen of the B's. Ball, however, only did a handful of comedies and only a few emulated her sitcom character. With Joan, however, she played the same type of crackpot on the screen that she did on TV, only rivaled by Judy Canova as a big screen female comedian. In this film, she's the best friend of singer Irene Hervey, accidentally interrupting Hervey's big musical number through an accident along side her partner, Fuzzy Knight. As a result of the comic mishap, Hervey and her pianist husband (Dick Foran) are fired, and separate after a fight. Hervey, Davis and Knight get jobs in a war plant and decide to put on their own show. When the estranged hubby reappears, he must pretend to be Davis's husband to prevent Hervey from being fired as secretary to the HR manager. While the songs are mediocre and the formula war musical plot predictable, Davis makes this worth while. It's nothing different than any of the many other B patriotic musicals of the time, and of course, putting a show on in a factory means it turning into the Hollywood idealized version of what they thought a factory common room would look like. At least there's an outdoor shot of the plant for historical purposes, one of the rare times I recall such a shot being used.