1931 Directed by John M. Stahl
A hopelessly silly young flibbertigibbet from Mississippi is faced with the choice of her poor, boorish New Jersey boyfriend or a dashing Opera star, a man of experience.
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A Preston Sturges play adapted by John M. Stahl. Sturges dialogue is sharp and the sex farce material very funny and Sidney Fox is great as the virgin southern heiress trying to get back at her boorish fiancée by staying the night with womanizer Paul Lukas who predictably goes from very dishonarable to I need to control my libido as he falls for her. It is very talky, but Stahl keeps it fluid and seductive.
A well written play by Preston Sturges which gets too stagy for this movie production. A lot of clever dialogue, but too often scenes would outstay it's welcome, so director John M. Stahl has to take most of the blame for making this less then it should have been. The acting is class. How can it not be when you got veterans like Lewis Stone and Paul Lukas in there. The most pleasant surprise was Sidney Fox as the sweet little girl that Lukas had Strictly Dishonorable intentions toward. She had a relatively short career which ended in 1934 and a even sadder life after that ending when she killed herself in 1942 at the age of 34. But her…
This is fun and entertaining, as I would have expected from anything based on a Preston Sturges hit play. Lewis Stone is a revelation as a comic, amiable drunk “judge”—an alternate universe Judge Hardy.
Preston Sturges's stage play has an opera singer as the lead character, yet John Stahl's film version doesn't add any musical scenes. Very sad.
On the other hand, little Sidney Fox and her even littler costume make this watchable.
This is very much a play, but it's a Preston Sturges play so it could be a lot worse! Seeing this is so illuminating for later Sturges work. It's just as shaggy as his own films, but in the context of theater it makes a lot more sense when comparing to the typical narrative structure. Lewis Stone and Paul Lukas - two standbys of the "gross how much younger is she?" kissing genre - are both very very good in the film, especially Stone who easily sidesteps even the pitfalls of playing drunk. I was very pleased with the ending, as I thought it might go one way but it ended correctly (even if the age gap isn't the best).
