Joan Bennett plays Kay Kerrigan, who is goaded into shooting a man she blames for her sister's suicide. She then drives her car into the San Francisco bay while eluding the police. She is presumed dead, but actually begins a globe-trotting life on the lamb. The police hire freelance detective and playboy Sam Wye (Fredric March) to track her down. Along with oafish police detective Blodgett (Ralph Bellamy) and later his wisecracking secretary Jean Livingstone (Ann Sothern), Wye tracks her from the Territory of Hawaii to Japan, Shanghai, Saigon (then in Indochina, now in Vietnam), Singapore, Colombo (then in Ceylon, now in Sri Lanka) and Bombay. Sam and Kay fall in love, and Blodgett falls for Livingstone. They are forced to return to San Francisco by super detective George Faulkiner, where Wye proves that Kerrigan was not guilty of the murder that she believed she had committed.

Two Robert Osborne comments about this movie: most of the acting is done in front of projected scenes from the exotic locales that were visited.  The director, Tay Garnett, had taken extensive footage of a vacation cruise around the world a year or two before, and had talked the studio into letting him use the footage in this movie. Second, as part of the plot of this movie Joan Bennett dyes her blonde hair brunette in order to conceal her identity.  She had always played blondes up until this point and ever after played a brunette.



Familiar face: the San Fransisco police commissioner is played by Thomas Mitchell, who was Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life.

This is a madcap comedy starring Pat O'Brien and Jimmy Cagney.  They play the screenwriting team of Benson and Law, who believe there is only one story needed for the movies: Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Gets Girl.  They are on the hook to write a boffo script for a fading cowboy star when they chance upon a sweet girl from the studio commissary who is in a family way.  They extemporize a script where the cowboy finds a baby, and when the baby (named Happy) is born he becomes a publicity sensation.  Benson and Law finagle power-of-attorney to manage Happy and the cowboy is put out at playing second fiddle.  There are many frenetic swings of fortune.  This movie is a boat load of fun.  Kind of a Front Page lite.

James Cagney seemed intent to prove that he could machine-gun his dialogue as fast as Pat O'Brien so I had to turn on closed-captioning several times.  The naive mother was played by Marie Wilson whom I just saw as Carole Lombard's maid in Fools for Scandal.  Ralph Bellamy is the movie producer trying to ride herd on his actors and screenwriters.  He is also an intellectual snob and a health nut.  He makes a big point of ordering "raw" milk and in one scene complains that Cagney has broken his Vita-Glass window.  This was a brand name for glass that was UV permeable and supposedly promoted better health, but apparently had been largely debunked by 1938.  At one point an actor pretending to be Happy's long lost father claims that he "did not go down on the Morro Castle".  This was a cruise ship that caught fire in 1934 killing 137 people.  The timing does not actually work out.  I think much of the script was intended as jokes that are not today self-evident.

Familiar faces: Penny Singleton (Blondie) has a quick scene as a manicurist, and Ronald Reagan plays a radio announcer for a movie opening.

Boy Meets Girl trailer on TCM

Fools for Scandal with Carole Lombard and Fernand Gravet.  This is a screwball comedy with Lombard playing an incognito American actress visiting Paris and London.  Gravet plays a destitute Parisian chef who courts her.  When Gravet ends up spending the night after a masquerade party in Lombard's London home (ostensibly to serve as her personal cook) all of London society is alight with the scandal.

This was Lombard's only 1938 movie and she died in a plane crash in early 1942, so this was close to the end of her career.  I enjoyed her a lot.  Fernand Gravet played Johann Strauss II in The Great Waltz.  The songs in this movie are by Rodgers and Hart, but this isn't really a musical.  There is one "spoken word" duet called "Food for Scandal" which must have been a contender for the title of this film.

Allen Jenkins and Fernand Gravet

Familiar faces: Allen Jenkins as Gravet's sidekick; Ralph Bellamy as Lombard's wannabe fiancé.

Fools for Scandal Trailer on TCM

At a boarding school for girls, scholarship student Natalie (Anne Shirley) is forced to snitch on popular girl Linda (Nan Grey) for staying out all night.  Linda's wealthy parents are summoned to the school and buy her out of expulsion with a promise to build a new library.  Linda's father meets and befriends Natalie, so he tries some shenanigans with identical corsages to build a friendship between the two girls.  His scheme backfires when Linda accuses Natalie of corsage theft.

Familiar faces: Natalie's beau is played by Noah Beery, Jr. (Rocky from "The Rockford Files"); Marjorie Main plays one of the teachers; and Ralph Bellamy is engaged to another teacher.

Carefree with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.  This is the eighth of ten Astaire-Rogers films and the only one from 1938.  Astaire plays a psychiatrist who attempts to psychoanalyze Rogers to find out why she keeps canceling her wedding to Astaire's best friend, Ralph Bellamy.  Instead she falls in love with Fred, and then he falls in love with her.  I thought Ginger Rogers was hilarious in this film.  She performed a lot of mild physical comedy while she was alternately drugged and hypnotized by Fred Astaire.  There is one scene where she has been commanded to lose her inhibitions.  Loose on the street, she sees a glass truck carrying a large pane of glass and determines to smash it. She paces the truck as it creeps along in traffic, finding and rejecting various objects (her purse, her shoes, a fire hydrant) to throw.  All the while she is winking and waving at the truck driver.  In the end the talks a policeman out of his billy club.

There is also a dream sequence song-and-dance number called "I Used to Be Color Blind" that was supposed to be in Technicolor, but apparently it didn't look so good in the color test so they left it black and white.

There is a small role by Hattie McDaniel playing a character named Hattie, and there is also an appearance by Franklin Pangborn, my favorite archetypal hotel clerk (although he plays a skeet club manager in this one).

Ginger spies the billy club