Four's a Crowd (1938)

Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and Rosalind Russell in a screwball comedy? These are the kinds of cast ensembles which unleash the inner fan boy in me. Errol Flynn rarely got the chance in his career to perform comedy and here he proves he was cable of doing Cary Grant-esque comedy on the same level as well, Cary Grant. Sadly Four's a Crowd's lack of box office success prevented Warner Bros from putting him in more comedies. Although The Women is seen as the film which launched Rosalind Russell as a fast talking comedic actress, Four's a Crowd is the first film in which she plays such a character and her first turn as the working career woman (or "newspaper man" as she refers to herself here) which became synonymous with with shades of Hildy Johnson coming through. She takes full advantage of the role, stealing the show with her impeccable timing which reportedly made Olivia de Havilland envious. De Havilland though is tasked with playing a dim witted character which she performs without coming off as annoying as such characters can easily be.Four's a Crowd owes a certain debt to Libeled Lady featuring some similar plot trends and themes with its slam on the upper classes, the socialite lifestyle and the desperate lengths newspapers will go to in order to get a story. Even the opening title sequence is taken from Libeled Lady in which the cast do the same arm in arm walk but is full of moments of inspired zaniness to distinguish itself. The model train sequence which lasts for 16 minutes had to have come from creative minds; plus what's funnier in an innocent, cute kind of way than grown men playing with model trains. However there is one moment in Fours a Crowd which is one of the most bizarre gags I've ever seen in a film in which after escaping from a pack of guard dogs to the other side of a gate, he grabs one of the dog's legs and bites it. I still don't know how to react to it, weather I should laugh or be horrified or both! The plot gets very confusing very fast but in a good way culminating in a finale in which Errol gets the wrong girl at the end! Although the manner in which this happens is screwball antics at its finest.

What Louis B. Mayer could do Jack Warner could do better at his studio. Two years before in 1936 MGM came out with one of the best screwball comedies of the decade in Libeled Lady, so essentially using the same formula of four stars with different pairings throughout the film, Warner produced Four's A Crowd and his four stars here are Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, Rosalind Russell, and Patric Knowles. Jack even got Walter Connolly to play the same kind of millionaire father in his film and the setting is once again a newspaper.It's new publisher is the rich and proper Patric Knowles and he's got Rosalind Russell on his staff as a reporter in what was a harbinger of her role in His Girl Friday. In comes an old friend to Knowles office played by Errol Flynn who has the reputation of being the best publicity agent in the world. Flynn's on a crusade to land Walter Connolly as a client, one of the richest men in the world who shuns publicity. Hey, every millionaire isn't Donald Trump. As it happens Knowles is going out with Connolly's granddaughter Olivia DeHavilland. If you are familiar with Libeled Lady you can take it from there.Just because Four's A Crowd is an imitation doesn't mean it's not a good imitation. The four stars are all in their salad years and give a good account of themselves. Errol Flynn showed a gift for light comedy that was not too often used by Warner Brothers as his public preferred him with sword in hand. Of all the eight films he did with Olivia DeHavilland this is the only one they did modern dress and it's probably unfortunately the least known. And at time when all Jack Warner wanted from DeHavilland was to look pretty and be supportive of the hero, she got her innings here giving such folks as Myrna Loy and Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert her version of the screwball heiress which saturated films of the Thirties.I also have no doubt that Columbia got Rosalind Russell to play Hildy Johnson in His Girl Friday on the strength of her performance in Four's A Crowd. Doing Craig's Wife at Columbia also on a loan out from MGM, Roz made her bones in dramatic parts, in this one she first reveals her gift for comedy. The following year Louis B. Mayer cast her in the third lead in The Women and Rosalind Russell was a certified movie star.Walter Connolly's millionaire role is virtually identical to the one from Libeled Lady. In that film his hobby is fishing, here it's electric trains and he's got a train set spread that any kid would envy. The single most hilarious scene in Libeled Lady is William Powell trying to fish for the first time. Here it's Errol Flynn feigning an interest in electric trains and having Connolly's dogs set upon him.One really ought to view Libeled Lady and Four's A Crowd back to back and see which you think is the funnier. We'll have different schools of thought emerging.

OK! This is not the great hidden screwball masterpiece. The screwy cleverness is pretty obvious, but it's still funny. The story is adequate enough to keep the laughs coming with the right cast. I won't bother too much with the details because you'll get the idea pretty quickly. This is the right cast however and they keep the laughs coming.For me the highlights are the scenes with Errol Flynn and Rosalind Russell. Russell has always been great as a comedienne and she delivers here as well, but Flynn is a revelation. Like Frank Morgan and Walter Pidgeon before him, he is the guy who not only can, but will, sell refrigerators to the Eskimos. When he turns the charm on Russell it's like being with that cousin who got you into network marketing.The final act gets the ensemble (de Havilland,Flynn, Knowles and Russell) colliding together like bumper cars with Justice of the Peace, Hugh Herbert misdirecting traffic. He may have delivered the ultimate screwball line ever with "Children, please don't fight! There'll be time for that after you're married." Realistically, it's obvious why the suits would not let Flynn take this direction, he was the king of swashbucklers and this would have weakened the brand. However, this movie shows what he could have been. As a screwball lead he had charm, athleticism, comic timing, sexy looks and a great voice, but so did Grant, Barrymore and Cooper and others and they were kind enough to leave the pirate market to him. A loss but I'll console myself with another hundred views of Captain Blood.

In this film, Errol Flynn plays a publicity man and ex-newspaper editor, Patric Knowles plays the owner of a newspaper, Rosalind Russell a star reporter and Olivia DeHavilland plays...well,...an idiot. While I could try to explain the plot as well as how all these characters come together in the film, I'd rather not--as the film is a super-frenetic mess. I am a huge fan of Errol Flynn as well as Olivia DeHavilland, so it came as quite a surprise that I enjoyed this film as little as I did. The biggest problem was that despite all the star power and the direction of the great Michael Curtiz, the overall effort is pretty awful and is only saved by a few moments here and there (provided mostly by Flynn and Walter Connelly). The stars and script try too hard--making the film very shrill and pushy. This is because the film is too high-paced and the script too busy--often resulting in all the main actors talking loudly over each other (not a fun experience at all). Now SOME films with these qualities work (such as MY GIRL Friday or BRINGING UP BABY), but this one does not because the script is poor plus Miss DeHavilland is cast in one of her worst roles ever. While Miss DeHavilland was wonderful in roles in such notable films as CAPTAIN BLOOD and GONE WITH THE WIND, here she plays against type. Instead of the usual sweet character, here she plays a ditsy dame and it just never works and seems, like the rest of the film, very forced. Katherine Hepburn could pull this off, DeHavilland could not.The bottom line is that the stars of this film made much better films and you should see them instead. In particular, Flynn, Knowles and DeHavilland all appeared in one of the greatest films of the era, THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD. So it's obvious with better direction (sorry, Curtiz just doesn't have it here, though he was usually a wonderful director--particularly in romances and adventure films) and writing this SHOULD have been a lot better considering the money Warner Brothers spent to bring all these stars together.