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Viewing Date: 10-14-2004
Posting Date: 3-13-2005
Directed by Edward Sedgwick
Featuring Joe E. Brown, Mary Carlisle, Clarence Kolb
An incompetent policeman loses his job when he lets a criminal escape, and he vows to catch the criminal to get his job back.
For many years I was most familiar with Joe E. Brown as a supporting player in any number of movies (like SOME LIKE IT HOT, COMEDY OF TERRORS and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM). He was always very enjoyable in these, but for some reason I never caught his starring vehicles. Having seen a couple of them now, I suspect that none of them ever really became comedy classics. Brown himself has good comic timing and a memorable face, and he did make the best of what he was given. However, his comic persona in these was strictly routine (the good-hearted bumbler), and rarely do they seem inspired. They were watchable, but hardly great.
The fantastic content in this one is slight; the last part of the movie has Brown matching wits with a criminal in a carnival spookhouse. This is also one of the better scenes in the movie, as a fight scene set among the usual funhouse accoutrements (stairs that turn into slides, slippery floors, etc.) does make for an interesting sequence. Other than that, the best scene of the movie is a sequence where Brown finds himself alone in a hotel room with his newly-married bride, and his nervousness results in his accidentally making a shambles of the room. Other than that, this movie is pretty slight and forgettable.
