Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Rio Hayward All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Robert J. Maxwell It's the depression and everyone is hard up except the very wealthy. (Plus ca change...) Ginger Rogers is a working girl forced to share an attic or loft with Norman Foster, an artist who refuses to take any money from the society matron (Laura Hope Crews) who pursues him. George Sidney is Mr. Eckbaum, the slightly frantic landlord who tries to keep everything going. He arranges it so that Rogers, who is a telephone salesgirl by day, and Foster, who has a job as a night watchman, never meet. Trying to keep the place "respectable," you know.Well, the two roomies who don't know each other take a long time to meet. In the meantime, leaving nasty notes for one another and playing painful pranks, each comes to loathe the other.But -- guess what! -- they meet accidentally outside their attic, assume false identities for different reasons, and fall for each other. This plot, I'm sure, goes back farther than "You've Got Mail" or "The Shop Around the Corner." I honestly don't know how far back in the mists of ancient history it goes. When did they invent rentals? It's a bit slow at first. George Sidney is funny, though, as the wisecracking Jewish landlord. His son Julius brings him a bowl of noodle soup for the famished Rogers but spills some on the carpet. "Ahh, next time I ask you for TWO bowls of zoop -- one for the lady and one for the carpet." If you don't think that's funny, I ought to warn you that that's about as good as it gets.Robert Benchley is in it too, as the amorous boss of Rogers at the Icy Air Refrigerator Company, but his particularly Ivy League brand of humor may be an acquired taste. Except for "Foreign Correspondent," come to think of it, where his non sequiturs were superb. Guinn (Big Boy) Williams also appears in the small role of a comic taxi driver.Foster isn't much of an actor but Ginger Rogers is delightfully piquant as a tough but vulnerable proletarian. She has a wonderful figure, which she gets to display, but her movements are stiff and no one could have predicted that within the next few years she would be a partner in the most famous dancing team in the world.Everything about the movie is smooth and logical and never rises above the level of "nice" -- slightly amusing, slightly warm, and with a happy ending.

HarlowMGM RAFTER ROMANCE is a delightful little comedy rescued from the legalities that kept it out of circulation for over 40 years by Turner Classic Movies (thanks folks!) starring a pre-stardom Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster. Looks to me like a ton of people may saw this little gem anyway because it has a number of bits that seem to have influenced later pictures such as a running gag about the climb up stairs in a New York apartment (used most famously in BAREFOOT IN THE PARK) and it's main theme - a couple are in love but hate their unseen roommates, completely unaware that it's each other, which was used in reverse (coworkers hate each other but fall in love with their unseen pen pals who happen to be that hated foe) in THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER and it's remake YOU'VE GOT MAIL.This movie has many charming moments and proved Ginger with one of her first showcases for her sparkling comedy talent although the lovely star is not always photographed flatteringly. Norman Foster has for decades been best known to movie buffs as Claudette Colbert's first husband rather than for his actual film work, thanks to TCM we can now see his fairly prolific career as a leading man in the pre-code era, often cast as a weak heel or (as here) a middle-class answer to Robert Montgomery. Both stars give terrific performances and there's lovely "falling in love" moments in a canoe at the company picnic that are quite romantic. (I agree with another reviewer that the trash laden picnic tables left by Ginger' coworkers is a rather startling glance at America in it's pre anti-litterbug days.)In the supporting cast, Laura Hope Crews stands out as artist Foster's aging benefactress who wants a more intimate relationship with her protégé. Legendary humorist Robert Benchley is also around as Ginger's boss at the "ice box" company with no so secret designs on his Ginger himself. As another viewer comments this is one of the first films with it's characters set in the world of telemarketing and it rings true some 70 years later with it's long-winded phone sales pitches, apparently hostile and blue responses (unheard on film but clearly received judging by the employees' faces) by the receiptents of these unsolicited calls, and one of the funniest bits in the film, albeit unintentional, has Benchley urging his employees to "put a smile in your voice", a phrase most definitely still in use today when training employees for work in this and similar phone-oriented fields.

theowinthrop It is a happy moment when something that has been absent for awhile returns in good shape. On Wednesday, April 4, 2007 Turner Classic Movies (hosted by Robert Osborne) played (for the first time in sixty years) three of six films that had been out of circulations due to some complicated court settlements involving RKO studios and their producer Merriam Cooper. All the films are from well preserved negatives, so these films looked fresh as well.Whether they hold up as well as they did in the 1930s is another matter. I happen to like them, but they are not missing gems - it's not like finding one of those great "Holy Grails" like the complete GREED or the complete Welles' MAGNIFICENT AMBERSOMS". These were serviceable comedies and dramas of the age of our grandparents, and have the flaws of those films as well as the best merits of the Hollywood system near it's peak.RAFTER ROMANCE is typical of the positive and negative aspects of these films. An early Ginger Rogers movie, it reminds us that prior to turning out to be the perfect dancing partner to Fred Astaire Ginger was usually playing smart, tough working girls in comedies (sometimes being too agreeable - as in her role of "Anytime Annie" in 42ND STREET just before this film was made). Rogers has come to New York for a career, and is in Greenwich Village (the outsider's view of the raffish village back in the 1920s or 1930s - no Gay types seem visible). She is rooming in the "Eckbaum" Arms rooming house, run by George Sidney (Mr. Eckbaum) and his wife and son Julius. Sidney got permanently typecast as Jewish after appearing in a series of "Abie's Irish Rose" mixed ethnic silent comedies in the 1920s called "THE COHENS AND THE KELLYS".Sidney's not bad as far as caricatures of Jews go. He mangles language a little - tolerably so (we still understand him). He uses some Yiddish terms. He is money grubbing, but with the taxes on his rooming house it's understandable - he's constantly knocking the pay phone to retrieve coins, with indifferent success. However, he does show anger once - his idiot son starts drawing swastikas on the wall of the hallway, and Sidney lets him have it (a first perhaps in American films). He's also kindhearted. He has let Ginger and another roomer (Norman Foster) stay on far longer than most landlords without paying all their rent. But his wife convinces him he has to alter this.What the screenwriters did is actually a bit of plagiarism, which I am surprised nobody caught. In 1866 Maddison Morton wrote a farce called BOX & COX about two men, one who works at night and one who works at day, who both (unknown to each other) rent the same room in a boarding house (until they accidentally meet when one gets an unexpected holiday). This farce was made into a one act musical operetta retitled COX & BOX by F.A. Burnand and Arthur Seymour Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) which is how it survives today (like CAVALLARIA RUSTICANA and PAIGIACI, COX & BOX is usually on a double bill with Gilbert & Sullivan's TRIAL BY JURY: it is the only non-Gilbert & Sullivan work that Savoyards like to watch).Sidney moves Rogers to the attic loft that Foster lives in. From 8:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M. Rogers may use it as her own. From 8:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. Foster can use it. Needless to say neither is happy at the arrangement. They never have met, so they are soon sniping at each other. The reader can see where this will lead.Rogers finally gets a telemarketing job for a refrigerator firm owned by Robert Benchley. She does well, but she has to fight off Benchley's amorous interests. Foster is a night watchman, but he is also a struggling painter. He has attracted the attention of Laura Hope Crews, a wealthy woman who is also a dipsomaniac. He has repeatedly refused to have her make him her boy toy (much to Sidney's chagrin, as it would pay off the debt that Foster owes him). By chance Rogers and Foster meet in the streets of the city, and a romance begins - but at the same time they are unconsciously sniping and sabotaging each other as the rival, unseen roommate.Benchley was just starting his film career, and in his opening scene his fumbling with some papers to explain to the new girls how to do their sales pitch reminds us of his classic "THE TREASURER'S REPORT" which began his acting career. He was not quite as paunchy here as in later films, but certainly no Adonis. Ms Crews' alcoholic dowager is miles from "Aunt Pittypat" in GONE WITH THE WIND, but is a distant cousin of her drunken mentalist working with Clark Gable in IDIOT'S DELIGHT. She has a distinct distaste for boarding house landlords.Guinn "Big Boy" Williams has a role that probably was a little longer originally. He's a taxi driver who takes a brotherly interest in Ginger. They apparently meet when she is buying herself a hamburger at an all night stand. Later he helps her derail Benchley's attempts to make an evening's dinner - theater date into a boring flop. He also shows up at the conclusion of the film to assist in the genial mayhem.It's also nice to note (in a bit part) our old friend Bud Jamison - away from his foes The Three Stooges for awhile - as the winner of a fat man's contest at a picnic.

jchokey This is a cute romantic comedy from the 30's. An enterprising landlord arranges to rent the same top-floor apartment to a man who has a night job and a woman (played by a young Ginger Rogers) who has a day job. He lives/sleeps there during the day; she does during the night. The two protagonists don't actually know each other, except through the increasingly hostile notes that they leave to each other about the upkeep of the apartment. (It starts off with mild stuff like "Clean up the sink after you shave", and gets increasingly angry from thereon.) Eventually the two become bitter enemies, even though they have never met in person-- or so they think. As one might predict, it just so happens that the two meet and fall in love in the course of their lives outside the apartment-- and they don't realize that they are actually in love with their despised 'roommate' until the very end.Though hardly classic cinema, this is certainly a cute and entertaining comic romance. Also, it has a couple of curious bits of cultural history built into it. The first is that Ginger Roger's character is a telemarketer-- and this is, to my knowledge, the first representation of that very modern profession in the cinema. The second is that there's a very strange reference to Nazism in the film. At one point, the landlord's somewhat dim-witted son draws a swastika on one of the doors as he's heard it means 'good luck'. The landlord (who, like is son, is clearly meant to be Jewish) is of course, furious. The odd thing is that this little incident was obviously intended to be funny (though I think most contemporary viewers will find it jarring or troubling). I think that just shows that this movie was made at during the narrow period of time when Nazism's anti-semitism was known in the U.S., but could still serve as a foil for laughter; it had not yet been recognized as the truly terrible force that it really was. As such, that makes this movie a curious historical artifact as well.