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Murmur of the heart, as Malle would say, it builds to a glorious slapstick roar. An "antiseptic upbringing" for the heiress (Bebe Daniels), seen swathed in furs with a thermometer dangling. Nothing like adventure to cure hypochondria, says the Texan uncle (Melbourne MacDowell) who arrives in a puff of cigar smoke and a hail of bullets, instead she takes off to the sanatorium she's inherited. "An invalid" is how she sees herself, "a loose leaf from Webster's Dictionary" is the description of the fella (Richard Arlen) who's just witnessed her sprinting like a medalist after her medicine valise falls off his jalopy. A bootlegger (William Powell) has taken over the institution, his henchmen pose as patients during the heroine's stay. "A swell mob this is! She can stuff these rats with pills, but not me!" Gregory La Cava happily complicating a "germ-proof life," his sure technique carrying the gags to a rollicking finish. (The asylum in Private Worlds is a delicate mental-emotional zone, here it's a place where "angina pectoris" sounds like imported hooch.) Undercover journos, bandaged hoodlums, Mallarmé's "peu profond ruisseau" crossed in a panic. "I'm drowning—and you critique my swimming!" The wallflower gets sloshed with the barrel-chested mug (Heinie Conklin), she pours gin on a teaspoon while he chugs bottle after bottle of cough syrup. Powell turns off the lights to reveal the baleful wolf behind the white suit, Daniels springs into action in the climactic free-for-all, yo-yoing from a rope outside a window and hurling barrels down the stairs at her pursuers. (Spilled chloroform triggers slow-motion ahead of Vigo, recalled some forty years later in Preminger's Skidoo.) "My heart will go where I go—and like it!" With George Irving, Charles Sellon, and Harry Cording. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |