Triple Feature Movie Review

With the recent re-emergence of Burns and Allen in my life, I decided to order myself an early birthday present and get some B&A merchandise I've had my eye on for quite some time. One of these is a triple feature DVD of Burns & Allen films. (If I could find all of their early film shorts on DVD, I think I would literally shit myself.) Since I've decided to write more, I will occasionally do book, movie, or album reviews here to build my repertoire. I used to do a weekly feature on a music forum I frequented, but I haven't been on there for years and I would love to start doing reviews again.

The first film on this triple feature DVD is a movie called Here Comes Cookie from 1935. Gracie plays the ditsy daughter of a very rich man who decides that in order to protect his fortune from a gold-digger that is courting his other daughter, he must sign his money over to Gracie. Mr. Allen agrees to let Phyllis marry this suitor if, with falsely generated word that Mr. Allen has gone broke, he sticks by her side despite Daddy no longer being a possible meal ticket. Things begin innocently enough, with Gracie deciding to assist with the homelessness problem in New York by offering free room and board to unemployed actors (who apparently consisted of the majority of the city's homeless population at the time). Gracie instructs the butler to start cutting up their clothes in order to make them look like vagrants. Hearing about the new financial arrangement, her sister Phyllis's beau decides to pursue Gracie, sending a fortune teller to set up their meeting by telling her when, where, and how she will meet the man of her dreams. Meanwhile, her father finally enjoying his retirement in North Carolina on mere pennies a day, until Phyllis arrives to reveal Gracie's inanities and urge him to return home. When they arrive, Gracie has had the home reconstructed into a theater to put on a show with her new actor friends, at the insistence of her new fiancé, who has concocted the theatrical production as a means of embezzling the money without having to actually marry either daughter. The play is a riotous disaster, and this leads to the swift but pleasant ending. The suitor and his accomplice get locked in the box office, while Gracie gets offered a job as a movie producer. Cops get thieving suitor; Pops gets his piece of mind back by getting his wacko daughter out of his hair. Cue credits.

The movie is full of Vaudeville acts, ones that are unrecognized today but I'm sure would have been known by audiences at the time. (Many of them go uncredited as well.) George Burns is on hand to be befuddled by Gracie's antics as her father's legal advisor. Gracie is a delight through and through. She's thin and bright-eyed, and you can't keep your eyes off of her. She's quite agile as well, performing a cute little Latin-inspired song and dance number during the show within a show. Her voice is airy and lilting, and she appears as light as air on her feet. The movie contains a few pratfalls as well. It's is entertaining but very brief, and it feels more like a showcase for Gracie's talents than a movie with an actual plotline.

Film number two is a road trip comedy called Six of a Kind, also starring Charlie Ruggles, Mary Boland, and W.C. Fields. The Whinneys are about to set off on a cross-country trip to celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary. The wife decides to take out an ad in the paper offering to share the ride with another couple in an attempt to save money. George and Gracie answer the ad, much to the chagrin of the husband. They take off for California with Gracie's Great Dane in tow. Calamity ensues. The older couple's plans for a second honeymoon are further thwarted when, finding out George and Gracie aren't married, they don't even get to share a room together on their trip. In the meantime, a bank co-worker of Mr. Whinney's stays in hot pursuit of the foursome. It seems he decided to embezzle $50,000 from the bank and pin it on Whinney, thinking he could place the money in Whinney's suitcase and retrieve the money from them along the way. Finally catching up to them in Nevada, the embezzler gets caught by the local sheriff (Fields), who is tricked into thinking the embezzler is actually the embezzled. Detectives, who became aware of the Whinneys whereabouts when the couple ran out of cash and wired the bank for cash from the road, show up and the whole crazy scheme is revealed.

This film is another one with a speedy resolution, but the laughs along the way are worth it. Ruggles (who I instantly recognized) and Boland make a great little team, and the patter between George and Gracie is brilliant, as always. "You have an aunt that sees with her mouth?" "Yeah, she sees if her soup is cold." W.C. Fields doesn't show up until halfway through the movie, but he has a gut-busting scene involving a pool cue that he just can't seem to shoot straight. He also has a few funny zingers, including, "I'm as busy as a pickpocket at a nudist colony." This feature also has a nice special feature. It includes the original trailer!

The final movie in the set (Love in Bloom) features Dixie Lee (Mrs. Bing Crosby) and Joe Morrison in the lead roles. A young girl whose family are carnival people decides she's had enough and runs away. Starting over in the big city, she meets an aspiring songwriter. They both get a job working at a music store, where they fall in love and decide to get married. George plays Dixie's brother, who brings his wife Gracie along in search of little sis. Their alcoholic pop has landed himself in jail again, and they need sis to bail him out. Unfortunately, once he's out of jail, Dad's mission is to bring his beloved daughter back home. She refuses at first, but when her father inadvertently crashes the wrong wedding while stone-cold drunk, she decides to go with him to save herself from further embarrassment. As the carnival travels the world, our budding songwriter finally gets published. Dad decides to let his daughter have her freedom after all, after acquiring a new business partner from New York, which turns out to be our songwriter. He basically paid for his lover's "freedom", but hey, the young-in-love couple gets to be together in the end and that's all that matters.

During an early scene, Gracie sings a little number called "Here Comes Cookie" (seems misplaced, huh?) while George stuffs cotton in his ears. This is reminiscent of one of their later running gags on their radio show where George randomly breaks out in song with great protestation from everyone around him (except Gracie). Aside from this, Gracie and George are onscreen for less than 1/3 of the movie. Lee and Morrison are decent enough actors and both have pleasant singing voices. On its own, the movie is fairly good, but the billing is misleading as this is not a Burns-Allen vehicle. Enjoyable enough, though.

For all three films, I'd give four out of five stars. One succeeds where the others fail, and for me, the presence of Burns & Allen made it worth the price of the disc.