Brilliant and touching

A Brilliant Conflict

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Bebe Daniels stars here as a successful commercial artist who refuses to marry even though she is surrounded by men who pursue her. She likes her independence and her own salary of $60,000 per year (a fortune in 1933). The film opens with Daniels finishing off a sketch to deliver to her boss (Randolph Scott) while hosting a cocktail party of mostly men. She explains that while most women want marriage and a baby, she wants her "cocktail hour." She delivers her sketch and Scott proposes for the umpteenth time. She says no so he locks her in a bathroom so she'll miss her boat to Europe, where she is escaping all for a vacation. She escapes. Onboard she is deluged by all her male friends until the gong for sailing. Scott shows up again and proposes again.She meets a famous Russian pianist onboard (Muriel Kirkland) who turns out to be a fake and is from Kansas. Also onboard is Philippe (Barry Norton) who is in love with Daniels, and his mother (Jessie Ralph). She also meets the smooth William Lawton (Sidney Blackmer) with whom she falls in love. Things get very tricky onboard until they land in England and Blackmer pulls a surprise out of his hat.Daniels heads to Paris and visits the country estate of Philippe's where a tragedy occurs and Daniels is hauled away by the cops. Scott to the rescue? Daniels looks great, wears nice clothes, and even sings "Listen Heart of Mine." The rest of the cast is quite good, especially Blackmer and Kirkland. Others include Marjorie Gateson, John St. Polis, Forrester Harvey, Willie Fung, Phillips Smalley, and Dennis O'Keefe as a party guest.This was Daniels' follow-up film to 42nd STREET and one of five films she made in 1933. It's a pity Daniels wasn't more successful in talkies. She had a good singing voice and excelled at playing the independent women of the era that were more famously played by Ruth Chatterton, Kay Francis, and Norma Shearer.

MINOR SPOILER ALERT.Saw this at a Library of Congress screening in the Spring of 2003; it was a pleasing, if minor, Depression-era diversion. By this I mean it was (and is) a perfect way for any put-upon person to lose 73 minutes. "Cocktail Hour" has almost no edgy, precode vibes, a la Warner Bros. Instead there're attractive well-dressed people in chic apartments (better art direction then I expected from Columbia) doing moderately interesting, but non-taxing things, and a shipboard romance capped by Bebe Daniels warbling a cute song. Randolph Scott had just come from doing a batch of memorable Paramount B-Westerns. This was one of his only loan-outs during this period, and the chemistry between the two leads is just fine.Melodrama intrudes into "Cocktail Hour" once the cast reaches Paris, including a threatening character getting shoved through a window, but rather then jar this works to keep things lively. Budgetary constraints mean no exteriors, either in the early "Manhattan" sequences or in "Paris"—you have to use your imagination—but it's OK; whatever you do see is slick enough to get by. Being a second tier studio, Columbia couldn't or wouldn't bring a first-rate supporting cast together for every production, and as a result "Cocktail Hour" had to settle for, along with a lot of other people I didn't recognize, the obscure Muriel Kirkland as an amusing fake countess (Dennis O'Keefe was listed in the IMDb credits doing a bit, but I didn't notice him). All in all, good escapism.