Word: macmurray
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Never a Dull Moment (RKO Radio) tries to hatch another Egg and I, merely lays an egg. The picture marries off a fashionable Broadway songwriter (Irene Dunne) to a rodeo cowboy (Fred MacMurray) and plunges her into the soul-testing pratfalls of housekeeping on his ramshackle ranch...
...MacMurray's homestead is equipped with props out of the Coney Island fun house: loose floorboard, collapsing bed, backfiring stove and a small gale that hits at the worst possible time. Heroine Dunne must also cope with livestock and servant problems, gossipy neighbors, a spoilsport (William Demarest) who controls the water supply, and the delicate affections of her husband's two daughters by another marriage...
Borderline (Universal-International) is just one more in the long series of movies that try to make 1934's It Happened One Night happen all over again. Thrown together on an unorthodox journey in Mexico and forced to pose as husband & wife, Fred MacMurray and Claire Trevor bicker their way into true love. They mistake each other for dope-smuggling hijackers, but each is really an agent of the law who thinks that the other will have to be turned in when they reach the border...
...nuggety information. Samples: Bing Crosby "always rehearses with his pipe clenched between his teeth, even when singing"; Robert Cummings "reads lines from a semi-crouch, like a boxer"; Joan Crawford is a "microphone-clutcher," while Barbara Stanwyck is a "shoe-taker-offer." Don Ameche (with Loretta Young and Fred MacMurray, he is tied for the record with 21 appearances) drinks a pint of milk before each show "as a sedative." Paul Muni once played his violin right up to curtain time "to soothe his nerves...
...most familiar thing about this picture is its stars, who may have put in too many years as models of romantic discomfiture. The film's manufacturers readily admit this possibility by allowing a bobby-soxer to surrender a park bench to Miss Colbert and Mr. MacMurray with the remark: "Imagine an old couple like that looking for a place to smooch...