One of those films that I've been meaning to watch for years since
it interested me as both a film student and wannabe journalist
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When
I saw that it was now streaming, I decided that I could use the
subtitles to keep up. However, it's surprising how many errors and gaps
appear in the text on Prime.
That this romantic
comedy is set in a newspaper is so clearly out of date, but so too are
the references to American socialism and also a joke about Hitler that
are interesting in how they give a glimpse of attitudes that quickly
shifted within a few years as the US joined WWII and moved into
McCarthyism.
For a film student there is a
strange sensation while watching it of how the performances from Cary
Grant and Rosalind Russell make sense of those seen in other movies.
Tony
Curtis famously modelled his character of Junior in Some Like It Hot
(1959) on Grant and it's difficult to see the original without thinking
of the imitation.
Similarly, Russell's
performance is mentioned on Wikipedia as inspiring the character of Lois
Lane in Superman, although she appeared in 1938 and the film was
released in 1940, but for me it kept bringing to mind Jennifer Jason
Leigh's role in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) -- which is one of my
favourite films.
The script is remarkable for
showing how a good story will travel through swapping the gender of a
character and into various remakes over the years, including Switching
Channels (1988).
A lot of the humour is still funny and there's so much of it that, if you get your ear in, the jokes flow in a way that moves easily from smirking to producing a laugh.
