A LADY TAKES A CHANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 272, 8 September 1944, Page 31

A LADY TAKES A CHANCE

(RKO Radio)

SOME very familiar ingredients are also employed in this dish of comedy. It is, in essence, just a rehash of the Cowboy-and-the-Lady theme.

But thanks to a good deal of skill in the preparation, unusual methods of cooking, and the stirring-in of a generous portion of spice by the chef (Director William Seiter), A Lady Takes a Chance is not merely palatable: it has a distinctive flavour which should appeal to epicures. Jean Arthur, who is as good in her own style of comedy as Rosalind Russell is in hers, is seen as a New York girl with a string of possessive but unexciting male admirers. To escape them she sets out on a bus tour of the Great Middle West. Anything more unmitigatedly awful than this type of "holiday" it would be hard to imagine: by the time it is about one-third over Miss Arthur has had almost more scenery than she can stomach. But life begins to be interesting again when, at one brief stopping-place she goes to a rodeo and gets in the way of a cowboy (John Wayne) who has just been bucked off a bronco. He falls fairly hard, but she falls much harder, In fact she falls for ‘him so hard that, by the time she has got her wind back with the aid of a hair-raising beverage mildly entitled "Cactus Juice," she is not particularly upset to discover that the bus tour has continued without her. Thereafter the girl from the East sets out to prove that a man from the West can be made to love something more than his horse. It is difficult, for the cowboy does love his horse very much, almost as much as he loves his freedom. But even in the face of his statement that "women are like socks: ya gotta change ’em often"; even in the face of a warning from his old friend (Charles Winninger) that she is "barking up the wrong cowboy" — notwithstanding these serious impediments to matrimony, and many others, Miss Arthur persists. And Matrimony, after several narrow squeaks. when a substitute seems likely, eventually wins the day. The title of the film is slightly a misnomer; no "lady" would do some of the things, or take some of the chances, that Miss Arthur does. But she is a delightful actress always, and never better than when she is being unladylike.