LOVE CRAZY
(M.G M.)
T was with considerable foreboding that I went to see Love Crazy. For one thing, I thought the PowellLoy combination had slid too
far into mediocrity with a succession of stereotyped crazy comedies ever to recover their pristine brightness; for another, the title was, to me, an uninviting as ice-cream to an Eskimo. These forebodings were, however, not realised. Though William Powell and Myrna Loy are still pretty close to the slippery slope, their downward progress has at least been temporarily arrested; and the title of their new picture is happily misleading. Since I was probably not alone in imagining that a name like Love Crazy must indicate a story of the Panting-with-Passion type, let me say at once that it belongs more to the Bats-in-the-Belfry school. William Powell is no Ophelia; he does not go crazy in an agony of unrequited love.
He merely pretends to go crazy because it seems the only way to postpone a divorce action which; because of a misunderstanding, his wife insists on initiating, and he pretends so successfully that he gets himself certified as properly insane and locked up in an asylum, It is, perhaps, not in the best of taste to make fun of madness, but it is always being done, and I have seldom seen it done better than in Love Crazy. Powell’s pretence of playful lunacy and his predicament when it is taken seriously, certainly produce some ridiculously comic situations, the chief of which is his masquerade as a maiden lady of rather forbidding mien, reminiscent of Charlie’s Big-Hearted Aunt (Askey version).
This masquerade, however, comes near the end of the picture when Powell, really hard pressed by adversity, has just about succeeded in winning back his wife’s sympathy (when he does succeed, of course, the picture is over). It is preceded by many other laughable absurdities, including an encounter with a runaway lift, which isn’t far off Chaplin standard. Sometimes, the comedy misses the target, but more often it gets there, and while I still feel some slight regret that stars of the sophisticated calibre of Myrna Loy and William Powell should have to descend to slapstick to earn a crust from M.G/M. I have no objection to paying my bob to* help the cause, as long as they can do it as brightly as here, oe
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 122, 24 October 1941, Page 17
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392LOVE CRAZY New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 122, 24 October 1941, Page 17
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