Wise Girl

In some ways, "Wise Girl" is much like "You Can't Take it With You"- -the film that won the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director just one year after "Wise Girl" debuted. However, despite its similarities (as both are about goofy rooming houses filled with weirdos), the film is inferior mostly because the film seems very forced--as if the director and actors act loudly in order to convey how wacky the film is supposed to be.

When the film begins, you learn that the Fletchers are very rich and they are horrified that John O'Halloran (Ray Milland) is raising two little girls who belonged to the sister of Susan Fletcher (Miriam Hopkins). After all, John is poor and lives a crazy bohemian lifestyle in a strange boarding house...and he doesn't even send these two little girls to school! Susan decides to investigate all this undercover and befriends this odd family...and naturally John feels stabbed in the back when he later learns that she and her father are going to court to take the kids! However, inexplicably, Susan has fallen in love with John and also has determined to make a success of him whether he likes it or not!

This film does have some cute moments though I had a hard time believing any of this and the film often got louder instead of more clever. Worth seeing but a pale imitation of the goofiness of "You Can't Take it With You".

Witty, high-energy comedy with a script to die for. You'll meet more memorable characters than you can possibly remember. Ray Milland is a charming artist and free spirit who lives in Greenwich Village, taking care of his dead brother's two young daughters. Their rich, beautiful, snobbish aunt (Mariam Hopkins) goes to the Village incognito to win the little girls' affection and steal them away from Milland so they can be raised by her rich daddy. The dialogue is incredibly good, the performances are Oscar-quality, and the plot is filled with more convolutions than Einstein's gray matter. `Wise Girl' should be considered one of the great comedy classics of all time

Years later the plot device of a paternal uncle and maternal aunt in a custody battle was used in the Clark Gable/Sophia Loren classic, It Happened In Naples. Only in that it was Sophia who was the Bohemian and Clark the square. Wise Girl does not have the international setting or the color ___location cinematography of the later film, but Ray Milland and Miriam Hopkins do play a pair of spirited antagonists.

Miriam's father Henry Stephenson who is rich enough to spoil Miriam had cut off her sister back when she married out of her class. Now with both his daughter and son-in-law dead he'd like custody of his two granddaughters. Miriam will be his accomplice in that endeavor.

But the trick is to get them away from their uncle Ray Milland who has them. He's a struggling artist and he supports the girls with odd jobs here and there. Miriam moves into Greenwich Village incognito to be near them all and naturally as things go in these type films she falls for Milland.

Looking at the set I can see where Alfred Hitchcock got the idea for his Greenwich Village set in Rear Window. And we meet a whole lot of colorful characters there and not just through a telescope. Milland's closest friends are prizefighter Guinn Williams and aspiring actor Walter Abel who has a bit of a thirst problem. Marianna Strelby and Kim Philson play the two young girls and Margaret Dumont has a great small part as the snooty woman running the Child Welfare League.

Wise Girl may not show Miriam Hopkins at her wisest, but it's a great comedy in the screwball tradition of the Thirties. Best scene is the chaos she causes at one of Guinn Williams' prizefights. Milland has his moments as well, especially trying to unsuccessfully sell vacuum cleaners door to door. All in all a lot of laughs.

Sometimes it's hard to define what separates a successful, delightful comedy from one that falls flat. In this case, the contrived plot about a spoiled rich girl who schemes to take her nieces away from the Greenwich Village 'bohemian' who is raising them, only to fall for him herself, is not promising. And nothing in director Leigh Jason's filmography suggests that he was an overlooked major talent. And yet he must have been responsible for creating a relaxed, happy atmosphere on the set that was faithfully recorded on film.

He also had the good sense to cast this movie properly. The one small flaw is Miriam Hopkins in a part that Ginger Rogers would have been perfect for. Hopkins is efficient but brittle, lacking the warmth and sexiness Rogers would have had. She is further hampered by a pair of bizarrely long and sooty false eyelashes that are sometimes a distraction. But a very young and very handsome Ray Milland couldn't be better in an exuberant, uninhibited comic performance of great charm.

And better than that, particularly for New York City residents, is the Hollywood depiction of Greenwich Village in 1937. Though completely synthetic and idealized, it remains recognizable to a contemporary viewer. Art director Van Nest Polglase created an amiable jumble of mews apartments and ramshackle shared backyards that is the perfect backdrop for this picture's collection of artists, strivers, smart-alecks and wannabes. Best in the supporting cast is Guinn Williams, bringing sweetness and light to his role as a prizefighter-sculptor-dressmaker, suggesting the self-invention and fluidity (sexual and otherwise) of life in the Village. Even more refreshing are Betty Philson and Marianna Strelby playing the little girls. Plain, intelligent and full of humor, these girls seem like real human beings and are nothing like the professional child actors of the time.

Of special interest are a couple of memorable comic set-pieces: Ray Milland's vacuum cleaner demonstration to a woman with a howling baby is played with more spontaneity than one expects (the baby and his contortions are marvelous 'found' moments) and a phony domestic 'play' in a department store window that degenerates into a free-for-all is also fun. The movie slides slowly downhill with a straight-faced custody trial and then never quite gets back on track when the action moves to Long Island, but this movie is still worth a look.

Forced, cloying, formulaic. Do these adjectives make you want to run to rent his? Miriam Hopkins was brilliant in the original "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde." A few other early movies of hers, notably "The Story of Temple Drake," are never shown but said to be excellent.

Here, she is cutesy, bossy, and thoroughly unappealing. Ray Milland as a Greeniwch Village bohemian not at all convincing.

The two child performers are creepy and also bear no relation to the Village as it was then.

Speaking as a native of Greenwich Village, I find the setting ersatz, generic, and phony. Not that I was around for a couple generations but my relatives were there in 1937. It isn't funny. It isn't remotely authentic. We don't care about the characters.

So many movies were made about the struggling masses vs the capitalists at this time, and done with elan. "Easy Living" comes to mind. It didn't take place in the Village. But it rings very true. This rings with a thudding knell.