Three Girls About Town (1941)

Hope (Joan Blondell), Faith (Binnie Barnes) and Charity (Janet Blair) are three oddly named sisters. The first two work at a hotel and the third has arrived for a visit. This hotel specializes in hosting conventions and exactly what their job entails is a big vague (perhaps it was implied that they were 'good time girls'). One group of conventioners are morticians and another is a meeting of a labor and management with a federal mediator. However, the mediator never arrives...and Tommy Hopkins (John Howard) is a reporter waiting and waiting and waiting. However, suddenly and without warning, a body appears...it's the mediator! Well, since he is a reporter, Tommy is planning on exploiting this to the max...but then the body disappears...and keeps appearing and disappearing...much like in the film "Weekend at Bernies".This film's biggest problem is that it tries way too hard. It's supposed to be a screwball comedy but continually bashes you over the head as if to say "now you MUST laugh". The ending is even worse, as the actors seem to have no idea what to do and start mugging badly at the camera...as if they are begging for more laughs. As a result, the film really grates on you when it should have been funny and Eric Blore (a very funny guy) is sadly wasted here as well.

It's "Convention City" time for Joan Blondell again, and this time, her movie has managed to survive the ravages of time, "Convention City" apparently having offended so many people back in 1936 that Warner Brothers allegedly destroyed every print. Along with Blondell are Janet Blair and Binnie Barnes as the three tough-talking "Convention Girls" who discover a dead body in one of the rooms. He was ironically there for an undertaker convention, and the girls disguise themselves as charwomen in order to get rid of the corpse. "Just dump him any place. We know you've got good taste", Barnes tells Blondell's boyfriend John Howard. With all this going on, the farce just gets even zanier, leading the girls into a situation that they fear they might not be able to drag themselves out of.In a case of art imitating life, Blondell mentions singer Dick Powell being in the hotel, this ironically coming during the last years of their marriage. The film is loaded with famous character actors: Charles Lane and Bess Flowers as a mortician and his wife who discover the dead body in their hotel suite; Almira Sessions and Una O'Connor as the spirited charwomen who keep finding the corpse; Larry Parks, Bruce Bennett and Lloyd Bridges as reporters; Vera Lewis and Sarah Edwards as busybody members of a moral society, and Eric Blore as a drunken convention member who has an amusing encounter with Howard that brings on a rather "gay" reference."Will all those planes and bombs dropping, a dead body ain't safe anymore", one potential coffin customer tells Lane while shopping, giving a timely war feel to the film. Another highlight is a card game with the corpse as one of the players where the others don't even know the man is dead! The film just proceeds to get sillier and sillier as it goes along, and when the dead card player is complemented as being "a lucky stiff", it reaches the nadir of good natured bad humor. At a very short running time, this doesn't outstay its welcome, and even if similar plots were done in two reel shorts, the "A" list cast makes this worth being a feature.

The director (Leigh Jason) keeps up the madcap pacing, while the scriptwriter comes up with a clever premise (hiding a body during a morticians convention). Then too, add some very capable performers, Blondell, Barnes, the incomparable Robert Benchley, and an extremely winsome Janet Blair. It looks promising, yet, the results are mixed at best, at least in my little book. It seems to me, a key element of screwball or madcap is flustered frustration. The classics—Bringing Up Baby (1939); Murder, He Says (1945), for example—get laughs from comedic exasperation. Petty annoyances keep thwarting a Grant or a MacMurray as they try to accomplish their goals, whether catching a big cat or escaping a deranged family. We laugh at the way everything seems to work against them, in a light-hearted way, of course. But it's that sense of comedic frustration, mounting over time and petty adversity that carries the momentum.Now, there's a rich source of frustration here with getting the body out of the hotel. One problem is that the focus switches back and forth too often among the players, so that the crucial sense of comedic exasperation is dissipated among Blondell, Howard, the cleaning ladies and the police chief. Note that the one scene that really works, the poker-playing skit, keeps the focus on Howard and his mounting frustration in trying to get away. In short, the movie suffers because there's no one person (a Grant or a MacMurray) to identify with as he or she encounters the series of petty plot adversities. Thus, a key element of comedic continuity is lost, as, for example, when the cleaning ladies booze it up, an amusing but unconnected event. Add to that, Howard's limitations as a comedic performer and the really unfortunate casting of an inapt Hugh O'Connell as the police chief. In fact, O'Connell's role turns out to be much bigger than expected and really requires the flustered antics of an expert performer, say, a Donald McBride or a James Burke, familiar cop faces from that era.Anyway, the movie does have its compensations, especially the clever twist ending. I'm just sorry that so many promising elements produce such a generally mild result.

This film is an undiscovered classic comedy. Robert Benchly is the desk clerk of a hotel where a wild magician's convention is breaking up at the same time a somber mortician's convention is starting. Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes play two hostesses at the hotel who are in hot water with the local moral guardians. To complicate matters even more, their little sister arrives after escaping from a "proper" private school. All she does is wear lingerie and make passes at older men.Joan's boyfriend John Howard is at the hotel covering the negotiations for a labor strike. When the mediator turns up dead, the girls try to spirit the body out of the hotel to avoid bad publicity. This breathless comedy is just fantastic, as the body is continually being moved, either intentionally or unintentionally. The ending of this film is definitely a surprise, but it fits the film perfectly.In one of the best scenes, Howard and his dead "buddy" duck into a poker game just to avoid the police. He wins a hand while the police go by, but the other players won't let him out of the game. Howard does everything he can to lose, but still wins all the hands anyway!