Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:21 pm
I hate to complain, we get so few "classic" films on DVD, but this Carole Lombard collection is a huge disappontment. Only two of the six films in the set, Hands Across the Table with Fred MacMurray and Ralph Bellamy and The Princess Comes Across with MacMurray and a slew of great character actors, are good. The William Powell starrer, Man of the World, is unidstinguishable from scads of other talky early talkies, Love Before Breakfast, too farcical for its own good and We're Not Dressing and True Confession truly bizarre.
We're Not Dressing is about a spolied heiress shipwrecked on an uninhibited island with singing sailor Bing Crosby, drunken souse uncle Leon Errol, singing best friend Ethel Merman, gigolo Ray Milland and Burns & Allen as themselves. With that cast it should be fun. It isn't.
The grotesque True Confession has Lombard getting rich as a presumed murderess who gets off scot free thanks to the machinations of her lawyer-husband, again MacMurray. There are three - count 'em - three absolutely dreadful over-the-top performances by Edgar Kennedy as a dumb cop, Porter Hall as a nasty D.A. and worst of all, John Barrymore, a mere three years after he and Lombard sparkled in Twentieth Century, as a drunk who wiggles his ass and makes fart noises with a balloon.
We're Not Dressing is about a spolied heiress shipwrecked on an uninhibited island with singing sailor Bing Crosby, drunken souse uncle Leon Errol, singing best friend Ethel Merman, gigolo Ray Milland and Burns & Allen as themselves. With that cast it should be fun. It isn't.
The grotesque True Confession has Lombard getting rich as a presumed murderess who gets off scot free thanks to the machinations of her lawyer-husband, again MacMurray. There are three - count 'em - three absolutely dreadful over-the-top performances by Edgar Kennedy as a dumb cop, Porter Hall as a nasty D.A. and worst of all, John Barrymore, a mere three years after he and Lombard sparkled in Twentieth Century, as a drunk who wiggles his ass and makes fart noises with a balloon.