Caught in the Act (1941) User Reviews

How can something unfinished be finished?

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 20 November 2020]

A suit, a symphony...I had to look it up myself to see exactly what that meant when Henry Armetta goes into a tailor shop to get a suit that his boss has arranged for him thanks to a sudden promotion he was not expecting. Of course, the actor playing the tailor (unbilled) is a combination of Franklin Pangborn and Clinton Sundberg, the typical fussy clerk, and that flusters Armetta to the point that he runs out of the shop.

An encounter with a female carjacker (Maxine Leslie) leads to an innocent scene in front of his house where gossipy neighbors (two old biddies) spot Leslie kissing him on the cheek. As Armetta is preparing for his daughter's wedding, this creates a lot of complications between him and wife Inez Palange, especially since Leslie has a criminal record.

This poverty row B picture is a mix of racket crime drama and ethnic comedy with the stereotypical italian immigrant jolly but dim, resulting in a lot of malapropisms and slapstick in the most ridiculous of ways. He's guilty by association simply because of Leslie's appearance, and that becomes rather aggregating. This PRC comedy is basically an extended short with Armetta taking on the Leon Errol/Edgar Kennedy role and not nearly as funny.

a dumb-a movie

[NewtonFigg · 5/10 · 4 January 2015]

Up until the 1950s, Italians in the movies were usually sinister gangsters or buffoons named Tony who sold bananas from pushcarts. This movie raises the buffoon character one level. His name is Mike and he is a competent construction foreman. However, after 15 years working for the same company in the construction trades, he seems never to have heard of crooked contractors, and he's still a talka like-a dis. As the movie opens, Mike has been afraid to ask his boss for the afternoon off to attend his daughter's wedding. The boss calls him in to the office before Mike can ask for time off and promotes him to the exalted position of sales rep for the company. I guess there's more to Mike than we see because you get the impression he'd have trouble keeping the banana pushcart business straight. Now for the "plot": as Mike is driving home, a glamorous blonde jumps into his car at a stoplight and forces him to drive at high speed to the suburbs. Naturally, the blonde is, by some coincidence, the moll of the gangster who is trying to create trouble for Mike's boss who won't buy the gang's porous concrete. Naturally, the police see Mike driving the gangster's girl friend and assume Mike is one of the gang. Naturally, the police arrest Mike and, when he tells them who his boss is, they naturally arrest the boss. When Mike is arrested, his wife assaults the cop, and she is arrested and, naturally, placed in the same cell the blonde is in. That's all the synopsis you'll get as I don't want to be blacklisted for writing spoilers. I only stayed to the end because nobody has ever seen or rated this movie before. My public service gesture for the New Year.

Unfunny Henry Armetta Vehicle

[jfrentzen-942-204211 · 2/10 · 23 October 2020]

Al Martin, who in 1941 had just written the oddball horror film, THE MAD DOCTOR OF MARKET STREET, and eventually would write INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN, was a journeyman scriptwriter who must have been pretty hard up when he got the gig to write CAUGHT IN THE ACT. A vehicle for forgotten B-movie comic Henry Armetta, the script wants this to be an alleged screwball comedy but is a slow-paced, unfunny mess. Armetta plays a fractured-English Italian immigrant meatball called Mike Ripportella, a construction foreman who winds up a victim of circumstance when a mobster attempts to bring down his boss. Flavorless direction by Jean Yarbrough has the under-rehearsed cast unable to enliven the unfunny mistaken identity scenario and poorly delivered punch lines. There is a cute moment in the penultimate fight scene, in which Mike sprays seltzer water to disable an attacking thug,. Of all the actors caught in this fiasco only Charles Miller, as Mike's boss, displays the dry delivery style required by the script. This film used to be a mainstay on late-night TV and can be found today on YouTube.