Post by rmichaelpyle on Aug 2, 2009 5:43:31 GMT -6
Jean Arthur had already been in films for nearly a dozen years or more when she made "The Whole Town's Talking" in 1935 and had her career begin to take off as it should have long before. In 1936 she made "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "The Plainsman" and she was off and running until she retired. She was already 36 years old in 1936! Well, she also made "More than a Secretary" in 1936, which I watched last night. It has all the signals of a Harry Cohn budget job about it. Cheap, cheap, cheap! The story's fine. The cast is great. Everything about it is fine - except it looks as if it was edited down below the bone! The ending is so abrupt that if you happen to be eating you can't look down to take a bite of food or you'll miss it! It happens that fast! I'm not kidding... Anyway, it's the story of Arthur, a teacher at a secretarial school, who quits her job to take another with George Brent at a health magazine as his secretary. She's a fabulous secretary, of course, and she has a thing for Brent, but he's such a fuddy-duddy wierdo that he can't figure out the human thing for a quite some time, though that finally happens - after the machinations of another interloping secretary played wonderfully by Dorothea Kent. Also in the cast were Ruth Donnelly, Charles Halton, Lionel Stander (funny, funny, funny, and that accent of his!), Reginald Denny (wasted, wasted, wasted!), and several others, all of whose parts are trimmed below any characterization. I'm glad I got to see another Arthur picture I'd not seen before, and this one could have been very funny, but Columbia Pictures' Harry Cohn was the only thing I could see most of the picture with a large pair of budget cutting scissors in his hand. Really a shame.
