GOOD GIRLS GO TO PARIS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 11, 8 September 1939, Page 33

GOOD GIRLS GO TO PARIS

(Columbia) Last week I described Columbia’s "Clouds Over Europe" as a4 Secret Service story with a difference; this week "Good Girls Go To Paris,’ from the same studio, can be rated as a Cinderella story with a difference. Indigestion, not a fairy godmother, is what takes Joan Blondell, the heroine, from rags to riches. Only, to be romantic, the flutters in her diaphragm are labelled as twinges of an accommodating conscience which becomes active or remains quiescent according, very largely, to the promptings of self-interest. The heroine is a waitress at an American university: to go to Paris is the sum of her ambition. Having observed, from experience and the Yellow Press, that there are more ways than one of earning a boat fare, she decides that even the blackmailing of rich fathers of susceptible students is a method not to be ignored; and is only dissuaded from it by the assurance of a nice young professor that sometimes good girls go to Paris, too. Thus the opening scenes of a comedy which, while crazy, is also clever, and which contains enough examples of the great American wise-crack to shatter the composure of the most stolid audience. That the film succeeds, at this late stage of the crazy comedy cycle, in being almost consistently uproarious, is proof

of the originality of its direction and script-writing. It is perhaps even more a tribute to the acting of Joan Blondell and Melvyn Douglas, who know that good comedy is very largely a matter of good team-work and proper timing, and who play right into one another’s hands. Miss Blondell’s portrait, in particular, is a distinct contribution to the art of gold-digging. Her " conscience" having taken her into the very bosom of a rich family, she eases it somewhat by straightening out the tangled affairs of all the household, and by marrying the right man. But it is to be noted that virtue receives more than its own reward. The honeymoon-how did you guess?-is spent in Paris. Best supporting player: Walter Connolly who, as the Swedish patriarch of the idly rich family, splutters his way merrily through another series of apoplectic rages.