James Cagney ought to be more famous for comedies than gangster movies, because he’s never more delightful than when spinning like a dynamo, throwing off rat-a-tat dialogue and now and then bursting into a graceful dance. Exhibit A: Boy Meets Girl, now available on demand from Warner Archive. Hollywood has made so many good comedies at its own expense that you might be forgiven for never having heard of this one, yet it’s among the best. The script by Bella & Samuel Spewack, based on their play, has it all: brilliant lines, excellent characters, and a smooth, surprising plot to wrap them in.
Cagney and Pat O’Brien, together again (as the trailer trumpets, or perhaps trombones — that’s a joke in the movie), play a frantic, irreverent screenwriting duo supposedly inspired by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. In this homage to the audacity and wackiness of creativity, they are mischievous devices to spin the narrative. Supposedly their motive is to preserve their jobs by spewing out variations of the “boy meets girl” plot for their studio, but the accidental by-product of their manipulations is, of course, true love.
The naive, slow-talking lovers (Marie Wilson, Bruce Lester) are an excellent contrast to the loud, shallow, worldly types surrounding them. Instead of slowing the movie to a dull crawl, as is often the case with romantic subplots, they’re so unconsciously funny and good-hearted that their scenes are a refreshing break, even as the movie gently spoofs them.
Wilson’s character taunts the Production Code by refusing to explain why her baby hasn’t got a husband until the very end; the Code must have gotten back at her by refusing to let her look pregnant even when she’s about to deliver. This is modified from the Spewacks’ play, where the character was truly an unwed mother, but the move’s cleaned-up explanation is as hilarious and sly as one of the moralistic afterthoughts Alfred Hitchcock used to offer on his TV series.
Ralph Bellamy has one of his best comic roles, not as “the Ralph Bellamy type” (quoted in His Girl Friday, with which this movie shares a creative ballpark) but as a Darryl Zanuck type named, interestingly, Friday. He’s an Eastern college-boy and self-described intellectual who’s running a studio. Some of the wittiest lines involve his production Young England, while he’s also making cowboy pictures for an unlikeable hero (Dick Foran) who resents co-starring with a baby. Also in the picture are Frank McHugh as a hardbitten agent and Ronald Reagan as an emcee at a movie premiere.
Reliable director Lloyd Bacon is in his element, keeping the jaded shenanigans hopping as he did with many Cagney and/or O’Brien pictures for Warner. Boy Meets Girl deserves to be more widely known.