Swing It, Sailor!

By any standard, this is a lousy movie. Even the usually awful-film-saving Wallace Ford is lost here. He and Ray Mayer have a kind of Abbott and Costello go at being sailors, with Ford in the Bud Abbott role of unsympathetic lead who takes advantage of his partner at every turn. The difference is that Lou Costello was a master comedian with a certain sympathetic underdog quality, whereas Ray Mayer is an absolute cipher on the screen. Who cares who takes advantage of this guy? The reason to force yourself to give it a viewing is the presence, in a leading role for a change, of an actress I consider to have been perhaps the most criminally wasted of the entire Hollywood talking era - Isabel Jewell. Ms. Jewell was almost like a female and younger version of Thomas Mitchell. Mitchell had tremendous acting range coming out of a face, voice and body that would normally have marked him as a constant bartender in films, but we know what he accomplished. Similarly, a much younger Isabel Jewell, with the face, body and voice of, at best, an undersized salesgirl in a B film exhibited tremendous range whenever she got the chance. Just think of a few of the roles she put her mark on: The shy little seamstress not understanding why she must go to the guillotine with Ronald Colman in A TALE OF TWO CITIES (she's not in the film more than five minutes and almost walks away with the end of it); the motor-mouthed and very funny secretary in COUNSELLOR-AT-LAW (holding her own throughout the film against what may be John Barrymore's finest film performance); the redeemed prostitute in LOST HORIZON; the quietly unsettling fortune teller, ever present cigarette dangling from her mouth, in THE LEOPARD MAN etc., yet no one ever seemed to know what to do with her to take full advantage of her talents and build her into a real character star (they certainly knew what to do with Thomas Mitchell!). Anyway, here she is a gold-digging sailor-catcher, maybe in it (according to her roommate) for her paramours' insurance policies, yet she becomes human and funny as the film progresses, most especially when she sticks her new dog right into Wallace Ford's face as he leans forward for a goodnight kiss, and then yelps a delightful laugh at his shock as she pulls back Fido and shuts the door on him. Misused, certainly, but I will watch any film she's in, which is the sure and certain only reason I got through this one at all.