Lucky Night (1939)
5/10
Bing Would Have Made It Gel
7 April 2010
Back in the Thirties every studio was making a film or three a year about an heiress and the guy she eventually would marry in the film. Probably the actresses most identified with playing heiresses were Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy. In Lucky Night Myrna Loy teamed for the one and only time with Robert Taylor where she is another madcap heiress that movies loved back in those Thirties.

Probably the genre was overdone by the time Lucky Night came out because there certainly isn't anything original about it. It probably could have been put over a lot better had they done this at Paramount with Loy lent out over there to appear with Bing Crosby. With a couple of songs this film might have worked better because the part that Taylor has here, the footloose and fancy free charmer was something Crosby could do in his sleep.

As it is Loy is bored with the stuffed shirts that she sees in her social set, none of them quite do it for her including the last one Joseph Allen. So she meets Robert Taylor sitting on a park bench and the two have a madcap evening and wind up the next day hung over and married. That doesn't please Loy's father Henry O'Neill a bit.

It's when they try to make a go of it as an ordinary 9 to 5 average American couple that the film just bogs down. And it never really gets back on track by the time it ends.

In the Citadel Film series book on The Films of Robert Taylor Lucky Night is described as the first of three dud films that Taylor made, the others being Lady Of The Tropics and Remember. It's not that Lucky Night was as bad as the other two, but it never does gel after the first third is over. It certainly created no demand to team Loy and Taylor again.
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