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The conjugal road, Leo McCarey's second honeymoon before Minnelli's newlyweds (The Long, Long Trailer). The opening scene showcases the minute gradations of irritation and fondness of the middle-aged couple, timid clerk (Charles Ruggles) and brassy wife (Mary Boland) heading west, "automobile gypsies" on their twentieth anniversary. Their domestic push-pull is invaded by another sort of vaudeville, the deadpan-ditzy duo (George Burns, Gracie Allen) with Rang Tang Tang the Great Dane in the passenger's seat. "The, uh, old rectangle," thus shared motel rooms and no space for intimacy, plus a valise with an embezzled fortune courtesy of a crooked coworker. "Maybe I'd better murder them and get it over with?" You gotta wash the dog if you want some time alone, seeing the Grand Canyon means literally hanging on a limb over the void. Signs are not to be trusted, declares the dingbat, she summons roadside tramps for directions and gets to experience a highway robbery. "I know what a map is. It's what you take afternoons when you're tired." The Long Arm of the Law belongs to the Nuggetville sheriff (W.C. Fields) who chugs down hooch flasks and demonstrates the surreal mystery of billiards, "about as busy as a pickpocket at a nudist colony." (Alison Skipworth as "the Duchess" is his better half.) Hell is other people, sixty-two minutes of sweet inspiration on the theme. Balletic misunderstandings at the boarding house, nothing like a letter in the luggage to turn the flustered husband into a law-breaking Lothario, it all ends happily with a tumble on the Pre-Code bed. "But tell me, how did they come to call you Honest John?" A greatly mined comedy, by everyone from Tashlin (Hollywood or Bust) to Ray (Kanchenjungha). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |