She Wrote the Book

Joan Davis is a buttoned down professor at an Indiana college. She's on her way to a conference to read her paper on abstruse mathematics, when dean's wife Gloria Stuart explains she wrote a tell-all novel called ALWAYS LULU. She wants the royalties for the college, which is just about broke, but for publicity publisher Thurston Hall and publicity man Jack Oakie want her in New York. They claim she has to sign papers. Miss Stuart asks Miss Davis to pretend to be her. Miss Davis reluctantly agrees, meets nice Texas engineer Kirby Grant and dates him up.... then comes down with total amnesia. Oakie, thinking her the real Lulu, tries to educate her in the ways of the vamp by reading to her from the book.

It's an amusing albeit unlikely comedy set-up. The problem for fans of Miss Davis is that it gives her far too chances for her outsized clowning. Except for a few moments when Jack Oakie is reading the book to her, she seems far too much the mild math professor. The movies always had problems with the level of her clowning: too much in one movie, too little in another, like here, where usually the script rarely gives her a chance to show her comic chops.

It was also the last film for three decades for Miss Stuart. Two more examples of how Hollywood often failed to know what to do with the talent it had.