Boy Meets Girl

Boy Meets Girl (1938)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely poor and unfunny spoof of Hollywood has two screenwriters (James Cagney/Pat O'Brien) coming up with a scheme to make their next film a hit. There's a lot of fast talking and some slapstick but I can't help but feel this should have been a film with The Marx Brothers instead. Cagney and O'Brien make a great team in dramas but their comedy act here just doesn't work and it comes off quite forced. The laughs are pushed so hard that it becomes rather annoying very quickly. Ralph Bellamy co-stars in this semi-redo of The Front Page. To date, this is the worst Cagney film I've seen.

Cagney was always trying to break away from his tough guy image, and is obviously relishing this FAST paced screwball comedy (think THE FRONT PAGE/HIS GIRL Friday) about two zany screenwriters. He mugs, he shouts, he dances, he wise-cracks, acts fey-you name it, he does a million bits of business here. Not until ONE,TWO,THREE 25 years later will you see Cagney in this mode again. FRONT PAGE vet Pat O'Brian easily keeps up the pace, but he's playing the "straight" funny man here. Ralph Bellamy is a riot as the idiot producer (college-man) as is Dick Foran, who sends up his own cowboy image (who knew Foran was this good?). At times the pace gets away from the actors and certain scenes are TOO frenetic, and laughs are lost, but generally this is such an off-beat surprise, that despite an ugly, washed out print that makes the film feel even older and less stellar, there is enough entertainment here for those who can plug into the farcical tone of a film that pulls the pants of Hollywood down.

I didn't find this to be a hilarious comedy, but it's entertaining and has some good performances. Cagney of course is excellent, and Marie Wilson is particularly charming as the naive mother of Happy, Hollywood's newborn sensation. The dialogue is extremely fast (for a challenge, try keeping up with it with your closed-captioning on.) The plot is perhaps a bit silly by today's standards, but good performances make this a worthwhile film. Look out for "in-jokes" about the movie industry, a future American president in a small role, and a lot of trumpets (or are they trombones?) Personally this film never made me laugh out loud, but it made me smile a lot.

That is the philosophy of J. Carlyle Benson (Pat O'Brien), fast talking screen writing hack at Monumental Pictures, a Hollywood dream creating factory run by C. Elliott Friday (Ralph Bellamy). Benson constantly insists that is the simple formula for every film script he and his partner Robert Law (James Cagney) do at Monumental. It must work because they are more than tolerated by the pretentious, "intellectual" Friday, who spends most of his time trying to salvage a movie set in Britain (at one point making the grandiloquent comment, "I'm trying to save "Young England"!"). Friday's intellectual triteness is easily shown - he so misunderstands just what a "trumpet" is, that he ends up making his sentinels blow some preposterous looking trombone while wearing beefeater costumes.

Pat O'Brien and James Cagney formed one of the most legendary friendships in Hollywood history, lasting from the 1930s until the 1980s. It was the backbone of what was called the "Irish Mafia" (O'Brien, Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Frank McHugh, Lynn Overman). They co-starred in many films, most notably ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, TORRID ZONE, THE FIGHTING 69TH, and this, their only real comedy together (the other films have comic moments, but are basically dramatic). BOY MEETS GIRL was a farce about Hollywood film making by Samuel and Bella Spivak, that was a Broadway hit. It translate well to the screen, as it follows the antics of O'Brien and Cagney as frustrated writers turned into meaningless hacks. In fact, despite the financial benefits for surrendering their talents, it takes a toll on the men. Cagney feels disgusted at the loss of his real writing talent (he almost got the Pulitzer Prize). O'Brien finds his marriage suffering due to his feelings, and his wife eventually walks out on him.

So they take their revenge on several targets, most notably Mr. Friday, but also the Dick Foran, a popular cowboy star at the lot, and his obnoxious agent Frank McHugh (one of the few McHugh - Cagney films where McHugh is not a close friend of Cagney's). Then they meet an employee of the studio (Marie Wilson), who has a baby but no living husband. Wilson's baby is quite adorable, so Benson and Law create a series of films involving the baby in the old west, and so force Foran into a co-starring position that he resents. Lest you think this is extreme, the 1930s saw many film series in which children or babies dominate. Shirley Temple is the best known example, but Jane Withers was the central figure in several movies, as was young Jackie Cooper, and even the Dionne Quintuplets. Further, there was a silent film called "Three Godfathers" that John Ford directed (he would later remake it with John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., and Pedro Armendariz), in which the western heroes give their all for a baby that is left with them.

The speed of the farce is matched by the delivery of lines by both it's Irish-American stars. O'Brien had learned to deliver lines snappily early on, and his speed is infectious on Cagney. But they can slow down for effect, especially as they give capsule descriptions of their gooey plots (at one moment, Cagney reveals the obvious point - when badman Foran is about to hide his loot from a robbery, he looks down at the place he chose, and "What do you think he finds? A Baabee!" dramatizes Jimmy). He also tries to make up dialog to explain the missing father of the baby, by suggesting that he may not have died on the Morro Castle (burned in 1934).

If the situation seems somewhat more dated today because screen writing is recognize (when well done) as the equivalent of a good novel, short story, essay, or play, the movie's gusto and humor still work quite well. So while not a film meriting a "10" it still gets a "9".

James Cagney had been in a dispute with Warner Brothers since 1936. In 1938 the situation was resolved, and Cagney returned to his home studio - to do THIS? It seemed like they were punishing him for the entire episode, but his autobiography mentions only that he was glad to team with his two pals O'Brien and Bellamy. He does admit that he never deliberately watched his own movies though, and only saw this one on TV after he retired.

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien are two Hollywood writers tasked by their studio with coming up with a script for the studio's top Western star, with Dick Foran basically doing a parody of himself in just about every role as a cowboy that he ever had. A waitress from the studio commissary brings up the writers' lunch and passes out. It turns out she is pregnant, and Cagney and O'Brien get the idea of making a baby central to Foran's next Western. In fact they make the waitress' baby a star. Everyone acts like this waitress invented the concept of infancy, because it never seems to occur to them that if something happened and this baby was unavailable that they could just go out and recruit another one. Marie Wilson plays the infant star's mother, and a little of her dumb and naive act goes a long way, in fact it goes too far and she is just annoying in short order. This was supposed to be a parody of Hollywood, but it was unfunny at best and tedious at its worst.

The first half is almost indescribably bad. It has everybody behaving hyperactively, talking so fast you can hardly understand them, and doing things that make no sense. It is exhibit A in everything that can go wrong in a comedy during the early years of the production code. This approach might have worked for the Marx Brothers, but it was - at the same time - chaotic and boring in this situation.

And then it's like a different director took over at the halfway point, everything calms down, and there's actually room for meaningful dialog, especially between Cagney and O'Brien. It's not particularly compelling, but if the entire film had been like the second half it would have been a respectable 6/10.