Young and Willing

I found this on Youtube in multiple clips and downloaded it and put it together in one file. I'm very glad I did. It's one of the brightest, funniest, and original comedies I've seen in a long time. The cast is filled with young up and coming future stars and they shine wonderfully. The first half is well setup and the laughs in the second half come fast and often. The old hands give the movie a solid foundation for the newcomers to play on. I would love to find a good print because this film deserves to be seen as good as new. Track it down and forgive the print quality and enjoy the show.

The movie went along well enough when they weren't acting out parts that were supposed to illustrate they were still neophytes with very little talent. There were many elements of a screwball comedy but as much as I was interested in seeing the cast at this stage in their careers, this movie was so amateurishly written almost any of us could think of ways to improve it substantially. And Florence MacMichael's voice gave me a headache.

There was a bottle of medicine that figured in the plot that was supposed to be helpful for an expectant mother. It seemed to be a mystery substance known only to fictional doctors.

I'd suggest that a 1943 audience would be annoyed, even angered, that the guys weren't all in the military and the gals were totally uninterested in anything but acting. This movie would have gone over a lot better before Pearl Harbor.

I prefer Robert Benchley's writing to his movie roles but I always find him enjoyable and he worked well with Mabel Paige as the two responsible adults with all these immature young people.

If you are a very tolerant and easy-going person who laughs readily, you might enjoy this movie as a light-hearted romp. If you want to know what these people were like then, you might want to see this movie. Everybody else would be happier avoiding it.

This comedy from Paramount Pictures/United Artists and director Edward H. Griffith has six aspiring stage performers, Norman (William Holden), George (Eddie Bracken), Tony (James Brown), Kate (Susan Hayward), Dottie (Martha O'Driscoll), and Marge (Barbara Britton), all sharing an apartment to save on expenses. They have to keep their co-habitation a secret though, so as to not upset the morals of the day and risk immediate eviction. Their situation is upended by the arrival of cousin Muriel (Florence MacMichael) who wants to spill the beans on their arrangement, and playwright Arthur Kenny (Robert Benchley), a major Broadway figure who resided in the same apartment building in his younger years, and who has returned to recharge his creative batteries.

I found this more irritating than amusing. MacMichael uses an incredibly annoying cutesy baby voice that grates on the nerves. Neither the screenwriters nor the director succeeded in opening up the action much from its stage origins, and as such the majority of the film transpires in a single room. Future big-time movie stars Holden and Hayward are fine in their roles, but neither really displays much in the way of screen magnetism. Bracken gets to do most of the silliest shtick, naturally. This reminded me of a prototype version of Friends.

Paramount made this film in 1941, but the movie-going public didn't see Young And Willing until 1943 when the film was sold to United Artists to help them fulfill booking commitments. That it was held up for two years is always a bad sign.

It's not a horribly bad film, but not all that good. It concerns six people who are aspiring thespians who share an apartment. Bills such as they are are paid by Martha O'Driscoll who has a rich dad. The others living there are William Holden, Eddie Bracken, Susan Hayward, James Brown and Barbara Britton. It was agreed no romance, but Brown and Britton have already broken that rule, they are secretly married.

The young folks do struggle and when O'Driscoll's father learns she's been living coed he threatens to take her back to their small Illinois home town where family values prevail. The six of them pull all kinds of schemes to both keep O'Driscoll around and get a big break from playwright Robert Benchley.

One thing that truly drove me up the wall as much as it did to the characters on screen was Florence MacMichael's baby talking voice. She's a high minded young woman who finks on the arrangement to O'Driscoll's dad. That woman was hard to take from the moment she opened her mouth until the rest of the film was over. She made me glad when it was over.

This had to be the ultimate of what Bill Holden called his 'Smiling Jim' roles before Sunset Boulevard which he ached to get out of. But at least Young And Willing being the last film the public saw Holden in before he joined the Army Air Corps kept him in the public eye. The public wouldn't see him again until 1946 in Blaze At Noon.

Beware of Florence MacMichael.

I love this movie but I fear that it is now, possibly, lost forever. If there is a print of this movie, I hope that it can be restored and put back out. I last saw it on Night Owl Theater, on TV, in the 1960's. You can see that I have remembered it for a very long time. I know that "Out of the Frying Pan" is still periodically revived, but I really want to see the 1943 movie. I understand that this movie is unavailable. I was unaware that William Holden and Susan Hayward were in it. I do recall Eddie Bracken. It would be great if this movie could be put on the list for restoration. There are few other movies that would be more suitable for restoration