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.
