Danger - Love at Work

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.)

There's no doubt that this is a funny movie. It's madcap mayhem much of the time. It has a plot that ties it all together. And, it has a very good cast, all of whom do well in their parts. So, why do I give it only six stars? Well, for starters, it's very zany and funny at times – but not laughably funny most of the time. The ingredients for the screwball comedy are there in spades – the love triangle. But it isn't really a triangle because E.E. Horton's Howard Rogers "masterfully" became engaged to Ann Sothern's Toni Pemberton. She doesn't love the guy and there's no conflict between two suitors. And, there is very little comedy between the two leads – Sothern and Jack Haley's Henry MacMorrow.

What distinguishes the great screwball comedies is the interplay between the two leads. The exchanges of witty lines, the riotously funny give and take between the two, the hilarious mishaps and slapstick. There is none of that in this film. After a short encounter in their first meeting, the two leads become friends with a common pursuit. Now it's just a romance with them. The film does have many weird characters, and they have some lines that strain at humor. But mostly, they are engaged in individual eccentricities that are funny but that soon grow tiresome.

"Danger – Love at Work" has the feel of watching a variety show with one comedy skit – or attempted one – after another. The incidents and scenes are amusing, but that's it. A couple of other reviewers have noted that it would have been a better production with a top-line director of the day. That might have been so, but only with a major rewrite of the screenplay. It has to start with the screenplay, and this one doesn't have what it takes to make great comedy.

"Tin Man" Jack Hayley headlines here with Ann Sothern with an oddball family that makes "You Can't Take it With You" look like a day in church.

Hayley is a lazy young lawyer sent by his firm to get signatures to sign off on a land deal, who wanders into a regular asylum of eccentrics.

The eccentrics include the always reliable John Carradine as a crazy painter (whose art I actually like), Mary Boland as a woman who is too busy talking to get her facts straight, two older ladies so afraid of burglars they set up death traps and one old codger who claims he's given up society and dresses like a cave man (though he reads Esquire on the sly).

The one disappointment is that Edward Everett Horton plays the villain rather than one of the family. He's a likeable villain, but I'd liked to have seen what sort of eccentric he'd have made.

Warning, this movie can get VERY annoying and Sothern takes a cue from Carole Lombard in "My Man Godfrey" and cries and screams a lot. And there are moments that today would shock people as child abuse that, back then, would have been called "comeuppance." It doesn't bother me but it might trigger some hypersensitive souls.

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.

If Jack Haley and Ann Sothern had been A list players Danger - Love At Work would have attained the classic status for screwball comedy. As it is it's a great undiscovered piece of film making.

Haley is a rich junior lawyer at a prestigious white shoe law firm who hasn't exactly lived up to his potential or at least the potential his money should have brought him. After others before him failed he gets the assignment from his firm to get a family named Pemberton to sign off on the sale of a piece of property next to a country club the firm represents.

Not so easy because as was said in Arsenic And Old Lace insanity doesn't run in this family, it gallops. These people will not be distracted from their particular brand of insanity. That includes daughter Ann Sothern who was marking out the territory that Katharine Hepburn claimed later in Bringing Up Baby.

A great group of familiar character players was brought together by 20th Century Fox for roles here, Frank Capra couldn't have done better. My favorite is Maurice Cass who usually plays mild and officious doctors and professors. Here he's decided that civilization itself has been a failure and has decided to live in a cave like a caveman. He's Ann Sothern's uncle. The rest are as bad.

I mention Capra because if Capra or Leo McCarey or Gregory LaCava had directed Danger - Love At Work it would be a classic as well. But in one of his early contract assignments it was Otto Preminger, not known for directing comedy who was the man in charge. It was a B picture and Preminger got some good performances out of his cast, but he wasn't any kind of name yet.

This one is a real undiscovered comic gem, don't miss it if broadcast.