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What good are contests, muses the plutocrat, "all they prove is that you're making too much money in the first place." For the couple (Dick Powell, Ellen Drew) waiting for the winner to be announced, however, contests are a ticket out of tenement rooftops, for Preston Sturges they're closer to a game of emotional Russian roulette. Exhaustion has begun to creep into Powell's perennial go-getter, his manager's (Harry Hayden) monologue on embracing mediocrity is starting to sound reasonable. Co-workers prank him with a phony telegram: Maxford House Coffee has just picked his slogan and awarded him $25,000. The hoax snowballs—the dissonant jingle ("If you can't sleep at night, it isn't the coffee, it's the bunk") suddenly becomes gold-plated, and, elated with this "commercial insurance," the company president (Ernest Truex) promptly promotes the clerk upstairs to the advertising department. Prize money fills the streets with gifts, capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh away. "I'm not a failure, I'm a success," people tell themselves, and Sturges is there with his severe long takes, peeling back the comedy. A most barbed account of the American Dream as something between a shopping-spree bacchanalia and an uprising of tossed fruit, seemingly as cozy as The Gift of the Magi when in reality more stinging than Revolutionary Road. Vidor's dehumanizing office passes by on its way to The Apartment, a black cat crosses the squashed dreamer's path. Is it good or bad luck? "Well, depends on what happens afterwards." William Demarest has the punchline-miracle, cf. 12 Angry Men. With Raymond Walburn, Alexander Carr, Franklin Pangborn, Rod Cameron, Georgia Caine, Adrian Morris, Harry Rosenthal, Robert Warwick, and Jimmy Conlin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |