After Office Hours

Clark Gable is fun as a (maybe not so) tough-guy reporter. Stuart Erwin is wasted -- fine but he deserved more -- as his subordinate. Billie Burke is as always fun. But Constance Bennett strolls away with this.

Probably 99.9% of all living beings today have never heard of Ms. Bennett. Granted, about 90% have probably never heard of Clark Gable, either, But there is something odd about Bennett's fall from grace.

She was a huge star and her performances hold up beautifully. Yet, she seems to be viewed as a blip on the radar screen of American movie history, which she really was not.

I wonder, as an example, why "Topper" is almost never shown. I saw it once and thought it a very chic and appealing screwball comedy. Heaven knows, it spawned sequels (sot of sequels) and a TV series based on it was quite popular. Are there some sort of copyright problems? This movie, in any case, has a nice, twisting plot. It's amusing, it's stylish, it has a bit of suspense. It isn't great by any means, though it surely would have been more fun before the Code -- only a year or two before it was released.

(The title is racy but seems to have little bearing on the movie itself, just as an aside.)