It All Came True (1940)

"It All Came True" is about as dopey as anything Hollywood churned out in the early 1940s. But Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan sail blithely through it as if the story makes sense. Bogart is a hood the cops want to put away for the next hundred years. As a hide-out, he picks a New York boarding house, run by two little old ladies, one the mother of Ann Sheridan who quit her chorus girl job to keep her status as a "good girl" (wink wink.) Things turn serious -- or seriously silly -- when the bank threatens to foreclose on the old dears and Bogart saves the day by turning their boarding house into a lavish night club with a gay nineties theme, a staff of about 100 singing waiters, two chorus lines (one young and lovely, the other geriatric) and hundreds of patrons crammed into what earlier appeared to be a very small dining room. Between Bogart's sly send-up of the ruthless gangster he more often played and Sheridan's brash bonhomie, it's easy to overlook the gaping holes in the plot. Zazu Pitts as a ditzy old maid and Felix Bressart as an inept magician add to the antics but Jeffrey Lynn as Sheridan's childhood chum (and would-be lover) seems to have wandered in from another movie.

It All Came True finds Humphrey Bogart as a gangster on the lam from killing a police stoolie and using a gun that was registered to club piano player Jeffrey Lynn to do the deed. With the stoolie probably telling the cops about his regular hideouts, Bogart has Jeffrey Lynn under a blackmail threat about the weapon hide him in a boarding house that is run jointly by Lynn's mother Jessie Burley and Una O'Connor who is the mother of Ann Sheridan.Sheridan and Lynn were childhood sweethearts, she's a chorus girl, he's an aspiring composer and the Moms hoped that they'll be joint grandmothers some day. Bogart is hiding under an assumed name at the boardinghouse, but Sheridan recognizes him.Perhaps the fact that he's away from the police spotlight, fooling them even temporarily makes Bogart fall under the charms of the place which is a theatrical boardinghouse. O'Connor and Burley wax nostalgic about the Gay Nineties and Bogart kind of does also. Bear in mind that this was probably when he was a kid in the film.It All Came True is the kind of film that would have been better suited to James Cagney. In fact he did several fine nostalgic type films in his career like Frisco Kid, Johnny Come Lately, Strawberry Blonde, and The Time Of Your Life. I'm betting this was a property that Warner Brothers developed for Cagney, but for some reason or other Cagney couldn't do it.Sheridan's feet are firmly in the 20th century however, she delivers a few zingers that were quite up to date for the audience. Until Rita Hayworth was established, Ann was Hollywood's number one redhead and she had a bit more wit in her scripts than Rita got at Columbia. Maybe with Cagney in the lead and someone like Frank Capra directing and someone like Damon Runyon doing the screenplay, It All Came True could have been a real classic. It's an amusing comedy as it is with Ann Sheridan at her career height and Humphrey Bogart on the crest of becoming a legend.

Noticeably very well-filmed, edited, and acted comedy-drama-romance-gangster picture. Menacing gangster Bogart, sexy wise-girl Ann Sheridan, her family and quirky peripheral characters make this situation comedy more than the sum of it's parts. Very funny, touching, unpredictable, and a cultural time-capsule. 10 thumbs up! I'd rather not spoil the movie but IMDb requires more lines...one interesting scene is the initial intimacy (the intensity is as close as we get to romance/sex) between the love interests: it's musical in nature and their only way to bond. It's not performed as yet another tiring duet but a rehearsal with mistakes. That's another example of what makes this movie refreshing and quite different from movies of then and now.

This film had a cast of Hollywood's greatest actors of all time. Humphrey Bogart was an actor who could do comedy, romance("Sabrina" with William Holden) drama,("The Caine Mutiny,1954) Bogart was under contract and he had to make pictures which were sometimes a B movie, like this one was. Hollywood did not pay actors hugh salaries like the actors today, and every picture they made was a step up the ladder of success in hard times after WWII. Ann Sheridan(Sarah Jane Ryan) was often paired with Bogart and it was a great 1940 film in those days and they both made this film an all time classic. Zasu Pitts(Miss Flint) and John Litel gave great supporting roles. Bogart was a gangster in this picture who had a change of heart in the end and DID HIS THING! Any film that Humphrey Bogart appeared in is a CLASSIC forever and ever!