Danger - Love at Work

Back in the 1930s, a common sort of film was the wacky family comedy. They were very popular and usually seemed to star Billie Burke or Mary Boland as the family matriarch. Such pictures as "My Man Godfrey", "You Can't Take it With You" and "Merrily We Live" are among the more famous films of the genre.

In "Danger--Love at Work", a hunt club wishes to expand but cannot until they buy some property owned by the goofball Pemberton family. While the Pembertons are not against selling the land, they are collectively like a toddler who has a severe case of ADHD as well as an addiction to meth! In other words, they are so busy off doing their own strange hobbies and talking in circles that they never seem to sit still long enough to complete the business deal. After many months trying in vain, the latest representative of the hunt club has quit and they just appointed Henry (Jack Haley) to take over the case and complete the deal. Not surprisingly, he's at wits end trying to corral these idiots into one place and to be quiet long enough to do much of anything!

To me, the screwball rich family was an overused cliche of the era. It wasn't that the films weren't enjoyable, but there is a certain sameness to them that makes them easy to avoid after you've seen a few. Plus, there is a part of most of us who would love to slap the snot out of these rich dilitantes...and that makes seeing a steady supply of the films tough going. In other words, seeing a few is fun...seeing them all is exhausting and repetitive....so choose a few of the best and ignore the rest.

So is "Danger--Love at Work" among the best of these films? No...though it is enjoyable and I cannot rate it poorly just because there's the glut of similar films. My only real complaint is that this family is more annoying than most in the genre and I found myself wanting to collectively slap them all! The film really tries too hard to make them strange...perhaps too much so....and that's why it only receives a 6 (though I was close to giving it a 7).

Crazy families was one type of film in the '30s, along with madcap heiresses. And sometimes there is a crazy family and a madcap heiress.

"Danger - Love at Work" is from 1937 and stars Ann Sothern, Jack Haley, John Carradine, Edward Everett Horton, Mary Boland, and Roger Catlett.

Haley plays Henry, an attorney who is charged with getting the eight members of the Pemberton finally to sign papers so that a hunt club can buy their farm property. He is actually taking over the job from another attorney whose nerves are shot and can't handle it any longer.

Henry has his work cut out for him, but he has help - the beautiful Pemberton daughter (Sothern). She is a half step or so above the others - she's engaged but doesn't like her fiance (Horton).

She is, however, engaged to him because he is forceful. He's as whacky as the rest of them, interrogating Henry and sure he's out to cheat them.

One of her relatives (Maurice Cass) has given up on society and lives like a neandrathal. Two aunts have a rifle in a setup on the front stairs to shoot criminals. Another relative (Carradine) paints everything in site. The child in the family is a ten-year-old high school graduate and makes Henry miserable. There are more.

This is a B film directed by Otto Preminger. Ann Sothern is delightful, as is Jack Haley. They're not Tracy and Hepburn, Loy and Powell, Lombard and Powell, but they're fun. The rest of the family is a little annoying after a while.

Not a classic, but Sothern is always watchable.

Thirties comedy tends to zanier-than-thou smugness, even in official classics like It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby. So it's a pleasant surprise to find Preminger already applying his lawyerly objectivity to a boilerplate screwball script, giving the zanies and the normals their due but not endorsing either. When Jack Haley asks Ann Sothern to elope and she protests, "If I don't have a wedding my family will never speak to me again" he shoots back, "That settles it!" and whisks her off - in effect a shotgun wedding between the two camps. A delightful tidbit that deserves reconsideration for the canon. (And the title song will have your toes tapping for days.)

Very gratifying to see that this very well-made film has gotten such excellent reviews on this site. Preminger himself, when interviewed, rarely tried to make a case for his films that were considered minor or unimportant, nor did he encourage looking back. Consequently, if foolishly, critics have tended to dismiss such films, and especially the few he made before "Laura." What a delight, then, to find that "Danger, Love at Work" is an especially effervescent and sophisticated screwball comedy. And it is a very legitimate example, based on the essential "crazy family" format. It completely ignores the social consciousness aspect of the classic screwball ("You Can't Take It With You" and "My Man Godfrey" are otherwise close relatives), and benefits perhaps from this narrow focus on plot and character. And what characters! Mary Boland, who can sometimes annoy, fits in here very nicely as Ann Sothern's mother; diminutive Etienne Girardot -- a fascinating and lively little actor (his nervous performance here, as in "Twentieth Century" is priceless) as her father (and has a charming counterpart -- equally diminutive -- in "Uncle Goliath," a "back-to-nature" type); brother John Carradine (as a "post-Surrealist" painter); Walter Catlett as a philatelist uncle -- all delightful. Miss Sothern herself is every bit as charming as Carole Lombard (and has a rather less annoying role than Lombard's) in "Godfrey," and, besides, has a lovely vocal duet with Jack Haley on the title song. She really can sing! And here we have Haley two years before "The Wizard of Oz" -- nicely done, though no Cary Grant of course. Edward Everett Horton is, as always, superb, though his straight-man adversarial role here doesn't point up his own best strengths. Even Benny Bartlett as an 11-year-old Princeton graduate, scores nicely. As is typical of Preminger, there is not a single bad performance ("My Man Godfrey," on the other hand, has its Gail Patrick - - ghastly). (In bit parts, we even have Franklin Pangborn and Elisha Cook, Jr.) So here we have, in this man's opinion, a screwball comedy truly worthy of entering The Canon (if such there be).

I turned this on by chance one day on the Turner Classic Movies channel and enjoyed it immensely. Hilarious plot, good acting, fun theme song. I have seen Ann Sothern in a few movies and in her television series from the fifties, only recently discovering her "Maisie" series of films which I also enjoy. At first I didn't put two and two together about Jack Haley being the Tin Man in "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), but was interested to find this out since I had also recently seen him on TCM in a lightweight but yet fun film called "Vacation In Reno" (1946). It's been said that "Danger: Love At Work" borrowed from "You Can't Take It With You" (1938). "Danger" is from 1937, so it's difficult to say which film did the borrowing! Another hilarious movie to look for in this same screwball-family genre is "Merrily We Live" (1938) starring one of my favorites, Bonita Granville.