For the first half-hour of this frenetic comedy, stage and screen actor Eddie Bracken can barely get a word in, and then it seems as if tired of Mickey Rooney's non-stop banter decided to fight fire with fire. From then on, he's nearly as obnoxious as Rooney is, both of them playing to go getters who get into illegal activity by siphoning gas from another station and selling it at an extreme discount. Of course it gets them into trouble, but a good majority of the film deals with the impact on their personal life and the variety of customers and of course their dealings with the owner of another station. Then there's the comedy, a mixed bag by today's standards.
The story involving the gas station larceny doesn't really begin until the second reel of the film, showing the two men in the military, their efforts to find honest work and finally their decision to do something shifty. The domestic part of the story isn't really interesting and the two starlets playing Bracken's wife and Rooney's girlfriend really don't have screen charisma. The presence of some good character actors does bring us up a notch but I want more than just 30 seconds of the adorable Ida Moore and others. Rooney and Bracken actually don't even seem to like each other, another big misstep. This seems like something that Columbia rather than MGM would do, but Columbia obviously had better comic contributors where most of MGM's comic talent worked in the A unit. This one is seriously only for the obsessive Rooney fan, here during one of the darkest points in his career.
The story involving the gas station larceny doesn't really begin until the second reel of the film, showing the two men in the military, their efforts to find honest work and finally their decision to do something shifty. The domestic part of the story isn't really interesting and the two starlets playing Bracken's wife and Rooney's girlfriend really don't have screen charisma. The presence of some good character actors does bring us up a notch but I want more than just 30 seconds of the adorable Ida Moore and others. Rooney and Bracken actually don't even seem to like each other, another big misstep. This seems like something that Columbia rather than MGM would do, but Columbia obviously had better comic contributors where most of MGM's comic talent worked in the A unit. This one is seriously only for the obsessive Rooney fan, here during one of the darkest points in his career.