Danger - Love at Work

Otto Preminger was alternating directing for the stage and the movies at this point and this beautifully cast comedy is played like a variation on YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU. Like the New York Legislature or a Marx Brothers movie, everyone talks very fast and very loud and no one listens to anyone else. As a result, Jack Haley, who is not playing his usual milksop, is very frustrated in his efforts to buy a farm and be wooed by a surprisingly sweet and predatory Ann Southern.

A look at the cast list will show a fine assortment of supporting comics and people who didn't get enough chance to play comedy, like John Carradine.

I don't think this movie did very well at the box office, since Preminger didn't direct another movie for five years and rarely tackled a comedy except to finish up a couple of them for a dying Ernst Lubitsch. Perhaps this movie simply exhausted him. In any case, it is a fine, obscure screwball comedy.

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.

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.

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.

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.)