MAN ABOUT TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 21, 17 November 1939, Page 34

MAN ABOUT TOWN

(Paramount) Most agreeable surprise-packet fished out of the cinema’s bran-tub in the past few months is Paramount’s Man About Town. A lavish, witty and occasionally tuneful musical-comedy, it provides 80 minutes of as cheerful entertainment as any picturegoer these days has a right to expect. Man About Town reveals itself as a promising gloom-dispeller in the first few minutes, with the appearance of the irresistible Eddie (" Rochester") Anderson, and thereafter he, and Jack Benny, and one or two others see to it that the promise is kept. Paramount can take no credit for the "discovery" of Rochester, since we have it on the best authority that he is already a "sensation" ofthe American radio networks, but they can at least take credit for putting him on the screen in a way that should dispel the prevalent opinion among non-American audiences that negro comedians in general should be subjected to a compulsory blackout. For Rochester is a coloured gentleman whose brand of humour is as infectious as it is easily understood. He acts as valet to Jack Benny in the story, and while any master could hardly be served worse, it is safe to say that the audience could hardly be served better in the matter of laughs. Good as many of the other parts of the picture are, they resolve themselves in fact into mere periods of waiting for the reappearance of this ingenious buffoon. Even the

garrulous, always competent Jack Benny and the equally competent Edward Arnold and Binnie Barnes move in the shadow of Rochester. Even the presence, in flesh and blood, of the pretty-pretty Petty Girls from the pages of Esquire fail to excite us much. Most astounding of all, the appearance of Dorothy Lamour without her customary sarong passes almost unnoticed. Best wisecrack: The description of E. E. Clive as "the only man who always looks as if he is sucking a lemon, and isn’t."