Dulcy

... despite the presence of some wonderful actors. One is hard-pressed to understand why any of these contortions would ever be considered amusing. The production values are high, but the endless succession of predictable sight gags and cruel mishaps descend into near-gibberish. Ann Sothern looks lovely, but embarrassed. Even Roland Young, for me one of the most most dependably skilled comic actors ever, just plows ahead dutifully until the whole thing grinds to a halt.

Bill Ward (Dan Dailey) is in love and wants to marry a lovely lady. So, he invites her and her parents to his lakefront mansion for the weekend. During most of this time, Bill's sister, Dulcy (Ann Sothern) keeps doing things to hurt the girl's father...along with a variety of other people who happen to get in her way.

In the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made quite a few movies with kooky female leads. Usually they were played by Billie Burke or Gracie Allen or even Katharine Hepburn ("Bringing Up Baby") but "Dulcy" stars Ann Sothern...and whether or not you like the movie will depend a lot on if you like a leading lady THIS stupid, obnoxious AND selfish. Time and again, Dulcy hurts people because she is an idiot that just doesn't give a crap about them or her actions. One person's kooky is another person's vicious sociopath...and I found Dulcy to fall in that latter category and so I found the film tedious and horribly unfunny.

Ann Sothern is a charming young woman without a brain in her head. Her brother, Dan Dailey, is in love with the daughter of Roland Young. Her boy friend, Ian Hunter, has invented a motor that he wishes to sell to Young. And Reginald Gardiner is a lunatic who drops in when he crashes his plane in the lake.

Nominally based on the Kaufman-Connelly play and the two earlier screen versions (Constance Talmadge in 1923, and Marion Davies in 1930), this version is far too complicated and predictable to suit my taste, even as it clearly shows the workings for the plot calmly advancing beneath its frantic exterior. It's one of the movies made when comedies were not permitted to be about anything real, so they were fast instead, hoping to slip one past the audience -- a Screwball Manqué if you will, in which every situation, every gag, is just what you expect it to be in the set-up. We go into a comedy knowing things will turn out well in the end, Jack shall have Jill, and man his mare. What we hope for are a few surprises on the route there.

This script provides none. Even so, I enjoy the movie a lot, and the reason is the way director S. Sylvan Simon directs his fine cast of comics (Gardiner always excepted), and throws in Billie Burke and Jonathan Hale along the way, and they raise smiles just by their performances. Which is the mark of professionals, able to make something out of nothing.

like the zany madcap film Merrily We Live, "Dulcy" is a week in the life of a trusting, upperclass family with too much money and not enough hobbies. When they meet up with strangers, they blindly invite them into their lives and into their house. Although mostly scrubbed clean for the production code, their ARE some ethnic jokes and slurs which were prevalent at the time. Billie Burke (best known as Glenda the Good Witch) was also in Merrily We Live, which also had a clever, fast-moving script. Beautiful outdoor photography of Lake Arrowhead, California, back in its hayday. The best part of this film is Reginald Gardiner, who plays one of the "Schuyler van Dykes" (really).... two years later Gardiner will play the hilarious Beverly Carlton in "The Man Who Came to Dinner". Viewers will also recognize Dad Forbes (Roland Young) from Topper and Philadelphia Story. The film goes in all directions and moves right along... fun flick as long as you don't look too closely at the plot.

Ann Sothern is terrific as "Dulcy". Ann Sothern is a delight to most men, and she's very funny in this movie. Shocking there is no official studio release. I'm happy to have this terrific film in my 3000 DVD/Blu-ray collection where I know it can never be censored.