Producer J. Walter Ruben. Copyright 26 May 1942 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M picture. New York opening at the Capitol: 16 July 1942. U.S. release: Not recorded. Australian release: 27 January 1944 (sic). 9 reels. 8,360 feet. 93 minutes.
SYNOPSIS: Terry Trindale, a young songwriter, loses $3,200 to Consuelo Croyden at baccarat at a fashionable gambling casino at Palm Beach while under the spell of her beauty. He is unable to pay his losses and Consuelo offers to employ him as her bodyguard to keep her from seeing Tony Barling, a suitor with philandering inclinations with whom she is in love. Tony calls at Consuelo's home, but she tells him she is in love with another man, for the sake of making him jealous. Despite all, Consuelo continues to pursue Tony, but Terry, living up to his obligations, forbids it.
NOTES: A re-make of The Passionate Plumber (1932), starring Buster Keaton. That movie itself was a re-make of a 1928 Marion Davies vehicle, The Cardboard Lover, based on Jacques Deval's 1927 stage play, Dans Sa Candeur Naive ("In Her Naive Candor").
Final film appearance of Norma Shearer, who then retired. According to director George Cukor, Norma Shearer herself selected the old Deval play for her farewell screen appearance, having previously turned down the title role of Mrs Miniver (which was then assigned to Greer Garson).
COMMENT: Norma Shearer was not greatly liked in either Great Britain or Australia - except of course by the carriage trade. Only four of her movies were re-issued in Australia during the great M-G-M classics revival of the late 1950s in which the studio ransacked the vaults:
Her Cardboard Lover did little business anywhere on first release, even in situations were Shearer was reasonably popular. Wartime audiences had little time for this sort of dated posturing.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, nothing dates so finally and inexorably as a sex comedy. Unfortunately this one was already well and truly rancid even before it was freshened up for 1942.
The players try hard, all the M-G-M gloss and production values are there. The trouble simply is that so far as the characters in the play and their predicaments are concerned, we the audience simply don't care. They have long since passed from any semblance of real life into artificial death.
NOTES: A re-make of The Passionate Plumber (1932), starring Buster Keaton. That movie itself was a re-make of a 1928 Marion Davies vehicle, The Cardboard Lover, based on Jacques Deval's 1927 stage play, Dans Sa Candeur Naive ("In Her Naive Candor").
Final film appearance of Norma Shearer, who then retired. According to director George Cukor, Norma Shearer herself selected the old Deval play for her farewell screen appearance, having previously turned down the title role of Mrs Miniver (which was then assigned to Greer Garson).
COMMENT: Norma Shearer was not greatly liked in either Great Britain or Australia - except of course by the carriage trade. Only four of her movies were re-issued in Australia during the great M-G-M classics revival of the late 1950s in which the studio ransacked the vaults:
Her Cardboard Lover did little business anywhere on first release, even in situations were Shearer was reasonably popular. Wartime audiences had little time for this sort of dated posturing.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, nothing dates so finally and inexorably as a sex comedy. Unfortunately this one was already well and truly rancid even before it was freshened up for 1942.
The players try hard, all the M-G-M gloss and production values are there. The trouble simply is that so far as the characters in the play and their predicaments are concerned, we the audience simply don't care. They have long since passed from any semblance of real life into artificial death.