The preliminary skirmish between Hollywood studio bosses and a boat-rocking director, who's sick to death of manufacturing money-winners called Ants in Your Plants of 1939 and Hey, Hey, in the Hayloft, is an unimprovable specimen of Preston Sturges's single-take comedy style, a style kept in high key by abnormally energized actors climbing all over one another and dipping, one and all, into Sturges's grab bag of punchy, muscle-bound dialogue. When the rebellious director, in a tramp's costume supplied by the studio's wardrobe department, sets off on a steadfast pilgrimage to learn about Real Life, the movie takes some unforeseeable turns, somewhat paralleling the William Wellman silent, Beggars of Life, and it lands the vagrant hero eventually in prison camp, where he learns the lesson, at a recreational screening of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, that making people laugh is not, after all, an ignoble vocation. Sturges's own position in this spray-gun social comedy is much too shifty for this lesson to be interpreted as a personal testament of faith; and, as brave and inventive as the movie may be, Sturges's widely promoted candidacy for the rank of first-class satirist is not well served by a title that conjures up the towering specter of Jonathan Swift. Starring Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, William Demarest, Porter Hall, and Franklin Pangborn. (1941) — Duncan Shepherd
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