So much average

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

I have never seen Norma Shearer look more beautiful than she does in this picture - and that's saying a lot. Nor is she as mannered as in some of her better-known pictures, like *The Women*. Melvyn Douglas, one of my favorite actors, also looks great here. Unfortunately, there isn't anything to the script. They and the rest of the cast, some of them very fine actors, are left with nothing to work with. There is no pacing here either. We just go from one scene to the next with no sense of forward motion. Compare it to *The Women*, for example, which builds to the great final scene where all the women come together and destroy Joan Crawford's character. Or better yet, compare it to another film directed by Robert Z. Leonard just two years before, *Pride and Prejudice*, which is one of the most perfectly paced movies I have ever seen. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that this 95 minute movie was based on a one-act play, and had to be padded. Perhaps the play on which is it based, Noel Coward's one-acter of the same name, just isn't very good. The best of Coward is fun when done well by any cast, but I've encountered some Coward plays, like *Conversation Piece*, that only seem to work when he's in them. He was a very good actor in his own way, and could make uninteresting dialogue sound very clever just by the way he delivered it. Coward premiered this play with himself and Gertrude Lawrence, one of his great partners, in the leads in both London and New York. Their way of working with dialogue together may well have had a lot to do with the play's initial success, more than the play itself.I wasn't bored. Shearer was so beautiful, I spent much of the time just looking at her face. The lead characters have no real depth, so it took no great acting to portray them. Nor are they particularly interesting or attractive. They are leaches who live off the nouveau riche, whom they disdain, so they really aren't particularly likable. You can imagine some of the dialogue appealing to New York theater goers in the 1930s when it was still fashionable to make fun of people simply because they came from Des Moines or Buffalo or Ashtabula or ..... I can't imagine this movie having a lot of success outside a few big cities, though. It's sophistication is pretty thin.

This is a pleasant little comedy but a minor work coming as it does from Noel Coward. Perhaps his name on the script was part of Norma's decision to participate in this instead of the other films offered that she rejected to do this one. It certainly has an estimable cast: Melvyn Douglas an expert as this sort of fluffy comedy, Gail Patrick and Lee Bowman both able performers and a handful, Connie Gilchrist, Marjorie Main, Norma Varden, Alan Mowbray, Florence Bates etc., of the best character actors MGM had under contract. The main problem with this and perhaps part of the reason it tanked on initial release is that even all dressed up in fancy 40's fashions this is a relic of the sort of drawing room confections that were popular a decade earlier and had fallen out of favor by the war years. Unfortunately without Irving Thalberg's strong guiding hand to pick the right properties for her Norma's script sense failed her. She had done well with her previous film "Escape" but would blunder again with her follow up to this her last film "Her Cardboard Lover". Still taken as is without all the back story an enjoyable trifle but unmemorable.

Why this film is so maligned I will never figure out. The script is witty. Leonard's direction sparkles and the acting by the charismatic Norma Shearer and Melvyn Douglas is a delight. Certainly it is MGM glossy fluff but it is so entertaining. Something about a penniless princess and the playboy she falls in love with. However it does not matter with these two stars at their peak. Norma is beautiful in her second to last film. I wonder if this film really flopped since box-office numbers are not available. Now Norma's last film "Her Cardboard Lover" is terrible but this charmer does not deserve such a hideous reputation. The forgotten Gail Patrick is also a delight as Norma's competition for Douglas.

For all the new scholarship about this neglected actress, people still need to see her in action. Yes-- let's accept the fact that, by 1942, Norma Shearer was past caring about a career in the movies, and let's take this romp for what it is: fun, vibrant, and a showcase for Norma. Her penultimate film brings out her exquisite comic timing, and her bursts of Polish round out the very amusing character of Vicky. Realize that Norma is winking at the camera and her public all through this film, asking only that we accept it on its terms: a fun exercise to help finish out her career (though there is evidence that she, in retrospect, didn't care much for it).