When even a script by Joseph Fields and Philip G. Epstein and the presence of Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Billy Gilbert can't save a movie, a viewer knows they're in trouble.
Fred Stone may have been a delightful and welcome personality to audiences in the first third of the century, but he's nothing but annoyingly obnoxious in this one. The movie paints him as a charming eccentric who seems to be doing wrong but comes out right but, in actuality, he's a stupid busybody who gets a couple of innocent people killed through his dimwitted schemes. Every time the movie threatens to become interesting or funny, Stone's character mucks it up by doing something that no one with three functioning brain cells would do.
The Monopoly scene is a decent one, but that's mainly due to Williams's talents and Stone's not being an active presence in the scene.
I'm a sucker for unknown and little-seen B pictures, but this is like one of those acts that closed vaudeville shows: intended to clear out the theatre to make room for the next audience.
Fred Stone may have been a delightful and welcome personality to audiences in the first third of the century, but he's nothing but annoyingly obnoxious in this one. The movie paints him as a charming eccentric who seems to be doing wrong but comes out right but, in actuality, he's a stupid busybody who gets a couple of innocent people killed through his dimwitted schemes. Every time the movie threatens to become interesting or funny, Stone's character mucks it up by doing something that no one with three functioning brain cells would do.
The Monopoly scene is a decent one, but that's mainly due to Williams's talents and Stone's not being an active presence in the scene.
I'm a sucker for unknown and little-seen B pictures, but this is like one of those acts that closed vaudeville shows: intended to clear out the theatre to make room for the next audience.