The decor alone is worth the price -- I want to live in Hope and Ball's apartment!
Maybe it's because I saw it at such a young age, but it's always been a favorite of mine. Good dialogue, great cast, and just a lot of fun. (Years later I worked with Soupy Sales and told him how much I'd liked his cameo as a desk clerk. He told me that he'd had no idea he was going to do the movie until he got a call from Hope the morning of the shoot asking him, "Wanna come out to Burbank today and do bit with me?")
And to those reviewers who complain that Hope's character "walks out" on the show he's reviewing at the top of the film, there were no such things then as "critic's previews." Nowadays critics attend a production during the final week or two of previews and write their reviews at leisure, to be published the day after the official opening night.
Back then, all the critics attended on opening night, and it was standard operating procedure to leave the theater in time to make it back to the paper to file the review before the deadline. It's not meant to imply that the character doesn't take his job seriously or is a "bad critic" as others have written. The only thing that's inaccurate about that part of the film is that in reality, ALL the other drama critics from ALL the other daily papers would have been "walking out" at the exact same moment to make the exact same deadline.
Maybe it's because I saw it at such a young age, but it's always been a favorite of mine. Good dialogue, great cast, and just a lot of fun. (Years later I worked with Soupy Sales and told him how much I'd liked his cameo as a desk clerk. He told me that he'd had no idea he was going to do the movie until he got a call from Hope the morning of the shoot asking him, "Wanna come out to Burbank today and do bit with me?")
And to those reviewers who complain that Hope's character "walks out" on the show he's reviewing at the top of the film, there were no such things then as "critic's previews." Nowadays critics attend a production during the final week or two of previews and write their reviews at leisure, to be published the day after the official opening night.
Back then, all the critics attended on opening night, and it was standard operating procedure to leave the theater in time to make it back to the paper to file the review before the deadline. It's not meant to imply that the character doesn't take his job seriously or is a "bad critic" as others have written. The only thing that's inaccurate about that part of the film is that in reality, ALL the other drama critics from ALL the other daily papers would have been "walking out" at the exact same moment to make the exact same deadline.