Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Twilightfa Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

blanche-2 Marjorie Main and James Whitmore are Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone in this delightful 1950 comedy that was probably a second feature. I wish some main features were as good.Let me get this out of the way first. George Carlin, before he became what he was most known for - political comedy, black comedy, etc. - was just a regular comic. He once referred to Marjorie Main as "that saucy little Italian tart." I can't hear her name or see her without remembering that.Onto our story. Mrs. O'Malley lives in a Podunk town and wins $50,000 on a radio show. She has to take a train to New York in order to pick up her prize. Meanwhile, a womanizing, money-hungry attorney, Malone, is after a paroled embezzler who owes him $10,000. The man, Kepplar, was in prison for a robbery, but the money was never found. Malone is sure Kepplar has the money on him.Kepplar jumps parole by boarding the same train on which Mrs. O'Malley is traveling. Malone jumps on as well, in hot pursuit. He's not alone in searching for Kepplar. It's a merry band: his ex-wife (Ann Dvorak) and a police inspector Tim Marino (Fred Clark).Kepplar is murdered, and the murderer is trying to set Malone up to take the fall. With the help of Mrs. O'Malley in the berth next to his, the two of them start moving Kepplar around, all along trying to catch the killer.Whitmore and Main are fabulous together, and Whitmore's comic timing is excellent. The dialogue is snappy and funny, and the slapstick is great. Fred Clark's serious and frustrated demeanor makes his scenes even funnier.Phyllis Kirk is Malone's pretty secretary. Ann Dvorak, as Kepplar's ex-wife, is marvelous in a light role. This is a late-ish part for her she was most prolific in the '30s and '40s. It's a shame she didn't stay in films, but she would retire the next year.This should have been followed up with more films featuring O'Malley and Malone. A shame it didn't.If you spot this on TCM, don't miss it.

edwagreen Sheer farce with Marjorie Main and her usual wise-cracks teaming up with small time lawyer, but big-time gambler James Whitmore to solve a double murder on a train, when Whitmore's former client, an embezzler, and his girlfriend wind up deceased.Main and Whitmore definitely do have some chemistry, but the film falls apart with it becoming dead bodies on the train and a defiant Fred Clark arresting them both for the murders.Main is an old western fixture having won a contest and going to N.Y. when she meets up with the Whitmore character.Ann Dvorak is good as the embezzler's ex-wife and Dorothy Malone appears as his southern girlfriend.

moonspinner55 Marjorie Main and James Whitmore are a delightfully offbeat team in this often riotous farce about a radio-contest winner who travels by train from Montana to New York as part of her prize, getting involved in a murder while riding the rails and attempting to solve it with help from a rumpled lawyer. Some of Main's exasperated one-liners are a hoot, and Whitmore's quick-witted panache provides the perfect counterbalance to Marjorie's brashness. They both shine, even though the plot itself isn't much and it does run a little long. Still, the slapstick is amusing, as are Main's caustic jibes. Worth finding. **1/2 from ****

krasnegar The original story that inspired this film -- "Loco Motive" -- was a collaboration between Craig Rice and Stuart Palmer, featuring her alcoholic Chicago lawyer detective, John J. Malone, and his New York old-maid schoolteacher sleuth, Hildegarde Withers; it was the first of several stories (collected as "The People vs, Withers and Malone") teaming the two, generally in ways calculated to enrage and/or frustrate Malone's Chicago nemesis, Captain von Flanagan or Hildie's long-suffering New York Homicide detective, Inspector Oscar Piper.Presumably because of rights issues -- money, perhaps, though this could have been during the time that Palmer (due to a divorce settlement) was intentionally making as little money as possible -- The Miss Withers part was rewritten to eliminate her.It wasn't till some time later that an attempt was made to bring Hildie to the screen on TV, embodied in the formidable person of Eve Arden.Other than disappointing fans of Miss Withers or of the original story in and of itself, this is a decent enough film of it.