THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 153, 29 May 1942, Page 22

THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN

(Columbia)

ON the same evening as I saw Ladies in’ Rétirement ‘I-saw Three Girls About Town, which also happens to

De all about corpses — and, curiously enough, is very funny about them, too. If the one film is good melodrama, the other is just as good farce. One of those crazy pieces which drag in one absurdity after another but manage to retain spontaneity. The plot reminded me a bit of that even funnier film A Slight. Case of Murder which dealt with the difficulty of disposing of several inconvenient cadavers. They were dumped by gangsters on innocent doorways, but kept on turning up in awkward circumstances, In Three Girls About Town there is only one body but it is equally troublesome. It belongs to the man who is to act as Government mediator at a conference of employers and employees in an industrial dispute (America’s defence programme is being held up), and it turns up first in a hotel room occupied by three sisters, quaintly named Faith, Hope, and Charity, too of whom act as "hostesses" at the hotel. To avoid a scandal, these virtuous (well, almost) young women rightly decide that the "corpse" won’t object if it is found somewhere else; but their journey with it from their room to the alley outside the hotel takes most of the picture and is fraught with complications, arising from the interference of the police force, several "gentlemen" of the press (the

quotation marks are unfortunately necessary), the hotel staff, the hotel guests, representatives of Labour and Capital, three Irish charwomen, and the sodden remnants of a Magicians’ Convention which has just been meeting at the hotel. Not to mention a Convention of Morticians (American for undertakers) which is just starting. The producer has put almost too many outrageous absurdities into the film for safety, but he gets away with it, thanks to slick acting by Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes, Janet Blair (the Three Virtues), Robert Benchley, John Howard, Eric Blore, and others of this comic ilk, and thanks particularly to an abundance of wisecracks in the dialogue. It is perhaps not a show to be remembered a year from now, but certainly one to be enjoyed when you see it, provided you are in the mood and don’t object to jokes on a grave subject (the wisecracks are better than that pun). _ Good shot: The president of the morticians singing "If a body meet a body + -’ as he dresses for the Convention.