Lucky Night

Lucky Night gets off to a roaring start, with Loy and Taylor tearing up the town and obviously having a ball together. There's great chemistry and the situations they get themselves into are a lot of fun to watch. For awhile I was really thinking this movie was going to turn out to be an underrated and little-known gem.

Unfortunately, when the pair sober up the next morning, the story goes off the rails and becomes a dreary, incoherent mess. Taylor's character keeps rambling about how he has some "idea" about what life should be, but he can't articulate what he means. The dialogue actually becomes so bizarre at times that I wondered if the writer was all there.

This one is worth checking out if you're a fan of Loy -- she's always a pleasure to watch -- but if you start to get antsy halfway through, change the channel. You won't be missing anything.

Schizophrenic writing dominates "Lucky Night," a 1939 film starring Robert Taylor and Myrna Loy. Loy is Cora, an heiress who gives it all up for the excitement of looking for a job and living on her own; she meets up with unemployed and flat broke Dick (Taylor). The two of them embark on a wild night of gambling and winning, where everything they touch turns to gold. Pretty soon they're in love and, to the horror of Loy's father, tie the knot.

This film starts out like gangbusters, like a lost treasure - a fast- paced, deft comedy with wonderful dialogue and the two Golden Age stars playing off of each other beautifully. Suddenly, it all stops and gets very serious with bizarre dialogue. Cora wants to be safe and happy with home and hearth; Dick still craves the excitement. She leaves him.

The film picks up a little toward the end, but what a disappointment. Perhaps the marital problem storyline would have been fine, but not after the way this film started; it's too much of a let-down. Not only that, but Taylor's character starts talking in absolute riddles. Somebody at MGM was asleep at the wheel. This is the type of thing that under Thalberg would never have been released as it was.

Like Tyrone Power, Taylor gets short shrift in his acting because of those amazing looks, but jealous critics (mostly men probably) failed to notice that, like Power, he had a beautiful, rich speaking voice and loads of charm. Less ambitious and less complicated than Power, Taylor pretty much took what MGM handed him. "Lucky Night" is one example. Despite the script, he shows his affinity for comedy. Loy is lovely as the heiress, but thankfully, both these actors appeared in better films.

"Lucky Night" coulda been a contender; instead, it's that rarity in film history - a bad movie from the magic year 1939.

This may be the golden age of movies, but now and then (e.g. Penny Serenade) MGM could produce a certified turkey. This gets almost as bad as it gets. And it's 1939, the best year ever for films. Whew.

This movie presents some good ideas about the manner of living life. The characters ably portrayed the pulls and tugs of living safely versus serendipity. It also demonstrates a good working relationship between people in a marriage who are working together as a team. How often is honesty between people present in real life?

Cinematography, costumes, and sets rate at least a B if not higher, so I can not imagine the source of disapproval unless it is with the ideas presented. But of these things, even the millionaire steel company owner approved. Whether or not other reviewers saw these things, I can not tell.

Back in the Thirties every studio was making a film or three a year about an heiress and the guy she eventually would marry in the film. Probably the actresses most identified with playing heiresses were Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy. In Lucky Night Myrna Loy teamed for the one and only time with Robert Taylor where she is another madcap heiress that movies loved back in those Thirties.

Probably the genre was overdone by the time Lucky Night came out because there certainly isn't anything original about it. It probably could have been put over a lot better had they done this at Paramount with Loy lent out over there to appear with Bing Crosby. With a couple of songs this film might have worked better because the part that Taylor has here, the footloose and fancy free charmer was something Crosby could do in his sleep.

As it is Loy is bored with the stuffed shirts that she sees in her social set, none of them quite do it for her including the last one Joseph Allen. So she meets Robert Taylor sitting on a park bench and the two have a madcap evening and wind up the next day hung over and married. That doesn't please Loy's father Henry O'Neill a bit.

It's when they try to make a go of it as an ordinary 9 to 5 average American couple that the film just bogs down. And it never really gets back on track by the time it ends.

In the Citadel Film series book on The Films of Robert Taylor Lucky Night is described as the first of three dud films that Taylor made, the others being Lady Of The Tropics and Remember. It's not that Lucky Night was as bad as the other two, but it never does gel after the first third is over. It certainly created no demand to team Loy and Taylor again.