Sitting Pretty

Were this a cake it would be a hash cake. It's tasty, silly, a little weird and it just makes you smile like an idiot. It's not a great film but it is one of the best early thirties light comedies and is guaranteed to make you feel good.

Producer-Director H J Brown really knew how to create a good mood and he makes a surprisingly enjoyable picture from a pretty clichéd story. One sign of a well made film is when you get annoyed with the characters, you only get angry with them if you believe they're real. The two male leads aren't people you'd particularly want to know. Jack Haley (yes, The Tim Man!) is annoyingly limp, pathetic and lacks any self esteem whatsoever. You feel at times like shouting at him: for goodness sake man, grow a pair! His best mate, played by Jack Oakie is a lazy, selfish slob but you know there's something good inside him somewhere.

Like Jack Haley, Ginger Rogers is a bit of a non-entity as well. There's none of that sassy, brassy go-getting personality she had in a lot of her 30s movies but she has certainly progressed as an actress since her early films such as her bizarre role in YOUNG MAN OF MANHATTAN with her catchphrase: 'Cigarette me Big Boy.' Here she's just sweet and just about gets by on her cuteness. They're all quite shallow characters but real people are sometimes like this.

Returning to my hash cake analogy, as you watch the last ten minutes you wonder what on earth is going on. Totally bemused, you're not sure if you're still watching the same film. It was as though Mr Zukor wandered onto the set and reminded Mr Brown that this was a pre-code movie and said: 'Let's show some flesh!' Inexplicably but pleasantly surprising, the finale is a sort of Busby Berkeley inspired soft-porn dance routine to the song, 'Did You Ever See A Dream Walking?' To answer that question I'd say, maybe when I was a fourteen year old boy I had dreams like this. Be prepared to take a cold shower after this!