Word: film
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Turin, an Italian Court of Assizes confirmed the annulment of the marriage of Film Director Roberto (Open City) Rossellini to Marcella de Marchis, mother of his eight-year-old son. Rossellini was thus free to marry Cinemactress Ingrid (Joan of Arc) Bergman, who was pressing hard for a divorce from her Hollywood surgeon-husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom...
...film places the action in a sort of opéra-bouffe Dogpatch in central Europe, in Napoleonic times. Kaye is not the knave of Gogol's play but a good-hearted rube. A half-starved outcast from a medicine show, he is mistaken by the crooked mayor (Gene Lockhart) and his henchmen-relatives for Napoleon's feared inspector general traveling incognito. Then, hardly grown into his splendid Techncolored uniform and the hungry affections of the mayor's wife (Elsa Lanchester), Kaye becomes a cat's-paw and fall guy for the scoundrelly medicine-show boss...
...sticks them with pitchforks. The plot maneuvers Jane Wyman, director of a consumers' research institute, into Dennis Morgan's top-secret navy sea tractor. Jane's reputation in her job depends on proving that she was actually underseas with Morgan, Morgan's on suppressing the film she shot in his craft. Most of the gags are pretty thin, e.g., a safecracker trying to open a sardine can and a lady who has lost her left shoe trying to cross a hotel lobby. But chiefly, the slapstick potboiler is saved by unpretentious acting and the leisurely direction...
...Concrete." Miss Padovani portrays calm acceptance and dogged belief almost perfectly and Kathleen Ryan, as Wanamaker's mistress, symbolizes the world in which right and wrong give way to strong and weak. Mr. Wanamaker lets himself be torn in two between the philosophies admirably; his final decision brings the film's conflicts out with clarity and force...
...managed to dilute the pure essence somewhat by inserting Edgar Bergen and his pair of painful mannequins in "You Can't Cheat an Honest Man." They even gave Charley McCarthy, who is rivalled as the screen's biggest pain only by Margaret O'Brien, equal billing and yards of film. But all this merely sharpens the edge of the master's humor. Surrounded by his perennial stooges, Fields shuffles and mumbles in the role of Larsen E. Whipsnade, bankrupt circus owner, following the fast buck and followed by the sheriff...