With a war on and most men being drafted, Howard Oil Supply Company has no salesmen left. So daughter Jean hits the road and does not make one sale. She finally gets one tentative sale with... 1h 32min | Comedy | 9 June 1945
Director: Vincent Sherman
Stars: Ida Lupino, Sydney Greenstreet, Stuart Erwin, Ruth Donnelly.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037990/
Watched online, very good print.
I'm not sure how this came to my attention, but the musical performance here is Louis Armstrong on trumpet (band leader?) with Dorothy Dandridge (b. 1922, she looks even younger) singing. It was sweet/cute in a nightclub where they were the entertainment. It was a one-off, unfortunately.
This is not about women at work for the war effort; it just pretended such in the beginning. Instead it's a meet-cute rom-com, and an imitation of Miracle of Morgan's Creek (except the multi-birth couple is not the one who isn't married.) It's all terribly frenetic and irritating. I thought it might be fun to see IL and SG in a comedy, but this wasn't. She's an incompetent heiress, and comes back from a sales call where she finally "closed the deal" with her lipstick smeared. It's sexual harassment painted as normalcy.
Then the majority of the plot is consumed by her convincing a soldier to pretend to be her husband so she can rent a motor court cabin to get a night's sleep. But his C.O. is also staying there, so he can't slip away after registering as originally planned. Then his mother shows up for a visit, and the deception is revealed after the unmarried couple spent the night (he outside, she in).
If I haven't made it sound awful enough, go ahead, watch it. At least the print is good.
The plus is for Armstrong/Dandridge. Unfortunately I didn't note the time of their appearance; I think it was the first half of the film, perhaps when IL was out with her husband and the prospective buyer.
Warner, dir. Sherman; 5+
