George Brent wants to spend quiet evenings at home with new wife Joan Bennett, but she's throwing a party. There's Ernest Truex and his new wife, Una Merkel, who knows about her husband's long friendship with Miss Bennett; and there's jumped-up singer Mischa Auer and his wife, Glenda Farrell, and he is a Lothario with designs on Miss Bennett. It reaches the point where Brent walks out.
It's based on a stage farce by Salisbury Field, and the third act concerns everyone winding up in the Brents' apartment for the usual farcical reasons, with Truex and Auer in their skivvies, for the usual farcical reasons, while Miss Bennett tries to cover it all up, for the usual farcical reasons.
It can and should work with these players; Miss Bennett was perfectly capable of acting as daffy as anyone, and the other two ladies were excellent at being skilled and sexy. In fact, it probably does work -- on a stage with three rooms arranged like a railroad apartment, with lots of slammed doors covering entrances and exits, performed with clockwork precision in about ten minutes. It does not work in 22 minutes, and editing cuts that break up the continuity and destroy the zany clockwork precision that is the hallmark of this sort of stage farce.
Producer Edward Small was reviving old farces for release through United Artists in this period, so for the others in the series UP IN MABEL'S ROOM, GETTING GERTIE'S GARTER, and BREWSTER'S MILLIONS. They were zippy and funny, and the last is a classic. Not this one.
