Word: slapstickers
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...brittle warmth of Miss Hepburn's acting. For the firs half of the picture the tricks are new, the surprises come fast and furiously, the acting adds tempo and supplies authenticity. Then the script writers seem to run out of ideas, and begin to fall back on old, familiar slapstick. You keep remembering how well; everything had started out and looking for a twist, a turn, a climax that doesn't come. When the lights turn up you go out laughing, but a little sorry that the most promising comedy in a long time had to flatten into just...
...Slapstick and farce have here taken a back seat to subtle wit and biting satire. Critics who are fond of maintaining that the movie-going public will refuse to take in the sort of comedy that appeals to Broadway audiences are going to find the horse-laugh on themselves here, for the Kaufmann-Hart funnybone-tickler has been lifted almost bodily from the stage and set down in celluloid; and it's just as funny...
...parts of Writer-Director Sturges' fourth picture are better than its whole; it is a confusing mixture of satire, slapstick, drama, melodrama, comedy. Even so, it has many novel, hilarious moments...
Some of Sturges' slapstick sequences (a Keystone cops' auto chase; no less than four people shoved into the swimming pool) are a waste of film and satire. But many another is classic cinema-especially the scene of a Negro pastor cautioning his flock against showing their superiority over the convicts who are coming to share the parishioners' Sunday night Mickey Mouse movie...
...puns, drawn-out dialogue, and a well-nigh non-existent plot combine to make "Harvard, Here I Come" as a rather tedious ordeal. Except for the local interest in Hollywood's presentation of what bodes ill to become its favorite subject, Harvard, the show is merely another low metabolism slapstick comedy...