Three Girls About Town

The director (Leigh Jason) keeps up the madcap pacing, while the scriptwriter comes up with a clever premise (hiding a body during a morticians convention). Then too, add some very capable performers, Blondell, Barnes, the incomparable Robert Benchley, and an extremely winsome Janet Blair. It looks promising, yet, the results are mixed at best, at least in my little book. It seems to me, a key element of screwball or madcap is flustered frustration. The classics—Bringing Up Baby (1939); Murder, He Says (1945), for example—get laughs from comedic exasperation. Petty annoyances keep thwarting a Grant or a MacMurray as they try to accomplish their goals, whether catching a big cat or escaping a deranged family. We laugh at the way everything seems to work against them, in a light-hearted way, of course. But it's that sense of comedic frustration, mounting over time and petty adversity that carries the momentum.

Now, there's a rich source of frustration here with getting the body out of the hotel. One problem is that the focus switches back and forth too often among the players, so that the crucial sense of comedic exasperation is dissipated among Blondell, Howard, the cleaning ladies and the police chief. Note that the one scene that really works, the poker-playing skit, keeps the focus on Howard and his mounting frustration in trying to get away. In short, the movie suffers because there's no one person (a Grant or a MacMurray) to identify with as he or she encounters the series of petty plot adversities. Thus, a key element of comedic continuity is lost, as, for example, when the cleaning ladies booze it up, an amusing but unconnected event. Add to that, Howard's limitations as a comedic performer and the really unfortunate casting of an inapt Hugh O'Connell as the police chief. In fact, O'Connell's role turns out to be much bigger than expected and really requires the flustered antics of an expert performer, say, a Donald McBride or a James Burke, familiar cop faces from that era.

Anyway, the movie does have its compensations, especially the clever twist ending. I'm just sorry that so many promising elements produce such a generally mild result.

This film should have succeeded. The cast is exceptional, and Columbia Pictures had been on a winning streak at the time. But the script is dreadful and illustrates the truth that good screwball comedy is rare and requires more than good actors. In this movie, people are running around frantically (poor Eric Blore), screaming lines (poor Joan Blondell and Binny Barnes), and trying on-so-hard to be wild and wacky. And it doesn't come off. The plot is tedious and unconvincing. And if you can find more than three laughs in the film, you deserve an award for credulity or inattention. In short, this is a dud. And the era of screwball comedy was just about over. Three Girls About Town is unavailable on DVD or VHS. (I bought a bad copy on e-Bay, probably taken off of television.) Few film buffs or comedy fans should cry for its reappearance.

What's so fascinating about films from the 1930s, particularly those from the early 30s is that they let us taste a world so different to our own. They had a certain primitive charm, an innocent simplicity which had vanished by the 1940s. To quote Jon Anderson's song 'The Friends of Mr Cairo,' "Citizen Kane came fast and quickly, Conquering ol' New York City, Poking fun at superstition, Media became television" OK, films from the 40s were generally better made but the magic had gone.

This is what this film demonstrates. It stars the ultimate sex symbol, the ultimate sassy broad of the 1930s, Joan Blondell but here she's just one of the countless clones of the 40s. She's nothing special anymore, she doesn't look any different to everyone else, in the 40s she can no longer be that girl who gave'us' a smile through The Depression. This film itself is so spectacularly un-special that you're likely to forget you were watching it if you go out of the room for five minutes to make a cup of tea.

It's a typical family fun picture with generic 1940s Hollywood humour. It's not a bad film, it's actually reasonably amusing - although the story of an inconvenient corpse was done a million times better in Fawlty Towers (the Mr Leeman episode).

Odd that although the 40s are hardly modern times, seeing the stars from a decade earlier makes you nostalgic for a time you clearly never even knew (and in reality would certainly never want to experience). If you're not inexplicably obsessed with the 30s however, you might enjoy this because it's an above average example of its genre.

Hope (Joan Blondell), Faith (Binnie Barnes) and Charity (Janet Blair) are three oddly named sisters. The first two work at a hotel and the third has arrived for a visit. This hotel specializes in hosting conventions and exactly what their job entails is a big vague (perhaps it was implied that they were 'good time girls'). One group of conventioners are morticians and another is a meeting of a labor and management with a federal mediator. However, the mediator never arrives...and Tommy Hopkins (John Howard) is a reporter waiting and waiting and waiting. However, suddenly and without warning, a body appears...it's the mediator! Well, since he is a reporter, Tommy is planning on exploiting this to the max...but then the body disappears...and keeps appearing and disappearing...much like in the film "Weekend at Bernies".

This film's biggest problem is that it tries way too hard. It's supposed to be a screwball comedy but continually bashes you over the head as if to say "now you MUST laugh". The ending is even worse, as the actors seem to have no idea what to do and start mugging badly at the camera...as if they are begging for more laughs. As a result, the film really grates on you when it should have been funny and Eric Blore (a very funny guy) is sadly wasted here as well.

This film is an undiscovered classic comedy. Robert Benchly is the desk clerk of a hotel where a wild magician's convention is breaking up at the same time a somber mortician's convention is starting. Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes play two hostesses at the hotel who are in hot water with the local moral guardians. To complicate matters even more, their little sister arrives after escaping from a "proper" private school. All she does is wear lingerie and make passes at older men.

Joan's boyfriend John Howard is at the hotel covering the negotiations for a labor strike. When the mediator turns up dead, the girls try to spirit the body out of the hotel to avoid bad publicity. This breathless comedy is just fantastic, as the body is continually being moved, either intentionally or unintentionally. The ending of this film is definitely a surprise, but it fits the film perfectly.

In one of the best scenes, Howard and his dead "buddy" duck into a poker game just to avoid the police. He wins a hand while the police go by, but the other players won't let him out of the game. Howard does everything he can to lose, but still wins all the hands anyway!