Considering this wasn't from a big studio, the cast, even in '35 were unknowns or has-beens and it was made with a budget that probably wouldn't cover the sandwich bill at MGM, this isn't too bad. It's definitely not 'good' either but if you enjoy mindless trash drenched in 1930s atmosphere you just might enjoy this.
Independent little pictures like this had no guarantee of being shown in cinemas so they had to make them as well as they could and then sell them as well as they could - such as by populating their advertising with pictures of very scantily clad girls! Being made just after the pre-code era means that it's far less risqué than it would have been were it made a year earlier. Nevertheless - for those of you who enjoy seeing sexy young ladies born over a hundred years ago bouncing around in skimpy outfits, you're in luck! Or are you? Nancy works in a Burlesque show but because she gets fired, we only get about one minute to see the goings on back stage with the young ladies wearing very little. For the rest of the film Nancy is trying to impress her strait laced mother by dressing...well, just like her mother.
Like a lot of early and mid thirties pictures, especially comedies, the plot is not what you'd call sophisticated: a dancer needs to convince her respectable mother she's respectable to so asks a stranger to pretend to be her husband and to complete the illusion, she 'hires' a baby from her neighbour. Yes, this film doesn't know of the existence of the concept of credibility. Somehow however you just accept this nonsense without criticism - although if you're not used to what was considered comedy in the 1930s, you might just think this a pile of puerile, poorly written garbage....which it is! Some of us however occasionally enjoy low brow rubbish - as long as it's not really bad! This just about gets over the line between watchable and unwatchable.
OK, Jeanette might be quite pretty, Ben Alexander is quite likeable but unquestionably without a shadow of a doubt, the real absolute star of this picture is Corky the dog. He honestly out-acts everyone else. He's great and I'm not joking, he really is the star of the show. He also deserves a more considerate and responsible owner than Ben Alexander's Dudley character. You'd have the RSPCA onto him these days. It's probably saying something when the best thing about a movie is a dog doing tricks but hey-ho, huff the Talbot!
