Word: demarest
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This oldtime, gosh-all-Friday comedy-drama is served up by people who obviously admire Writer-Director Preston Sturges and his cynical gift for playing both ends of a cliche against the audience's middle. Nothing is too stale or too simpleminded: a sheriff (William Demarest) trying to be heroic with one leg in a low-comedy plaster cast; a brat tormenting the neighborhood with trombone practice. But most of it is quite funny, and besides his feeling for slapstick and travesty, Director William Russell knows how to shade in some sharp authenticity. The most redolent blend of realism...
...crudely exploited in this film, and a capacity for comedy which is exploited just as crudely, but oftener and more successfully. Several of her missteps as a stage neophyte are good for laughs, and there are some funny scenes about moviemaking, in which she is stoutly abetted by William Demarest as a director, by Constance Collier as a high-nosed old ham actress, and by such old masters of journeyman slapstick as Chester Conklin and Snub Pollard. There is some faint hint of the toughness of the people who made the old movies, and a fair suggestion...
...Demarest Lloyd...
Even so, it is by no means without interest and a certain charm. Dr. Morton (Joel McCrea) is Sturges' least caricatured, most straightforwardly sympathetic hero to date. Some of the comedy, supplied chiefly and expertly by William Demarest (the picture is reduced largely to its comic episodes), is funny if you can enjoy laughter in contexts of physical misery. Some of the drama, supplied by McCrea, by Louis Jean Heidt as Horace Wells (who discovered the anesthetic possibilities of laughing gas) and by Harry Carey as Dr. Warren (who first used anesthesia for surgery), is firm, humane and moving...
...acting is restrained and competent. Ella Raines does an admirably sincere job as Eddie's girl. William Demarest is a typical, but not a stereotyped, top sergeant. And in the part of the "little man" turned hero, Eddie Bracken is in his element...