Three Girls About Town (1941) User Reviews

Screwball that falls short

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 16 September 2009]

A wonderful cast stars in this 1941 screwball comedy, "Three Girls About Town," which seems to have come onto the scene a little too late. By 1941, the screwball era was over. But when a film stars Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes, Robert Benchley, Eric Blore, Janet Blair, Una O'Connor, and John Howard, it's worth at least a look.

Blondell and Barnes play sisters, Hope and Faith, who are convention hostesses at a hotel. They're in trouble with the local moral yardstick, though being 1941, it's doubtful they've done anything more than stay up late and party with the guests. They have their younger sister Charity (Blair) in private school, and when she shows up unexpectedly, one wonders what she's learning there. She flirts with Tommy (Howard), Hope's fiancée, and likes hanging around in lingerie.

At this particular time, a magician's convention is just exiting the hotel and a mortician's convention is coming in, when a body is found in the room next door to the girls' room. The hotel manager (Robert Benchley) tries to help them get rid of it before Tommy, who is a reporter covering labor negotiations at the hotel, finds out about it.

This film gets a little tedious after a while, though there are some funny scenes and the acting is very good. You really can't go wrong with pros like Blondell, Barnes, Benchley, and Blore, even when the script doesn't support them.

Surprisingly funny film

[FlushingCaps · 7/10 · 10 September 2009]

A lot of the screwball comedies leave me wondering what was funny. This one, while not a classic, was very pleasant to watch and had lots of silly chuckles. My favorite scene was the one described by another reviewer, where the reporter and the dead man play poker. Having won the first hand, the other players won't let our hero take his "friend" "Joe" away. Desperate to get away, he tries everything to get his dead friend to lose a hand, but keeps winning.

I mostly remember Joan Blondell as Lottie on Here Come the Brides. She was a standout there and I can't help but think if given a chance, maybe in the 50s or early 60s, she could have easily been a huge TV star of a comedy series. I think she was a truly talented actress.

Body, body, who's got the body?

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 1 September 2015]

It's "Convention City" time for Joan Blondell again, and this time, her movie has managed to survive the ravages of time, "Convention City" apparently having offended so many people back in 1936 that Warner Brothers allegedly destroyed every print. Along with Blondell are Janet Blair and Binnie Barnes as the three tough-talking "Convention Girls" who discover a dead body in one of the rooms. He was ironically there for an undertaker convention, and the girls disguise themselves as charwomen in order to get rid of the corpse. "Just dump him any place. We know you've got good taste", Barnes tells Blondell's boyfriend John Howard. With all this going on, the farce just gets even zanier, leading the girls into a situation that they fear they might not be able to drag themselves out of.

In a case of art imitating life, Blondell mentions singer Dick Powell being in the hotel, this ironically coming during the last years of their marriage. The film is loaded with famous character actors: Charles Lane and Bess Flowers as a mortician and his wife who discover the dead body in their hotel suite; Almira Sessions and Una O'Connor as the spirited charwomen who keep finding the corpse; Larry Parks, Bruce Bennett and Lloyd Bridges as reporters; Vera Lewis and Sarah Edwards as busybody members of a moral society, and Eric Blore as a drunken convention member who has an amusing encounter with Howard that brings on a rather "gay" reference.

"Will all those planes and bombs dropping, a dead body ain't safe anymore", one potential coffin customer tells Lane while shopping, giving a timely war feel to the film. Another highlight is a card game with the corpse as one of the players where the others don't even know the man is dead! The film just proceeds to get sillier and sillier as it goes along, and when the dead card player is complemented as being "a lucky stiff", it reaches the nadir of good natured bad humor. At a very short running time, this doesn't outstay its welcome, and even if similar plots were done in two reel shorts, the "A" list cast makes this worth being a feature.

Missed Opportunity

[dougdoepke · 23 September 2009]

The director (Leigh Jason) keeps up the madcap pacing, while the scriptwriter comes up with a clever premise (hiding a body during a morticians convention). Then too, add some very capable performers, Blondell, Barnes, the incomparable Robert Benchley, and an extremely winsome Janet Blair. It looks promising, yet, the results are mixed at best, at least in my little book. It seems to me, a key element of screwball or madcap is flustered frustration. The classics—Bringing Up Baby (1939); Murder, He Says (1945), for example—get laughs from comedic exasperation. Petty annoyances keep thwarting a Grant or a MacMurray as they try to accomplish their goals, whether catching a big cat or escaping a deranged family. We laugh at the way everything seems to work against them, in a light-hearted way, of course. But it's that sense of comedic frustration, mounting over time and petty adversity that carries the momentum.

Now, there's a rich source of frustration here with getting the body out of the hotel. One problem is that the focus switches back and forth too often among the players, so that the crucial sense of comedic exasperation is dissipated among Blondell, Howard, the cleaning ladies and the police chief. Note that the one scene that really works, the poker-playing skit, keeps the focus on Howard and his mounting frustration in trying to get away. In short, the movie suffers because there's no one person (a Grant or a MacMurray) to identify with as he or she encounters the series of petty plot adversities. Thus, a key element of comedic continuity is lost, as, for example, when the cleaning ladies booze it up, an amusing but unconnected event. Add to that, Howard's limitations as a comedic performer and the really unfortunate casting of an inapt Hugh O'Connell as the police chief. In fact, O'Connell's role turns out to be much bigger than expected and really requires the flustered antics of an expert performer, say, a Donald McBride or a James Burke, familiar cop faces from that era.

Anyway, the movie does have its compensations, especially the clever twist ending. I'm just sorry that so many promising elements produce such a generally mild result.

The case of the lucky stiff.

[weezeralfalfa · 6/10 · 2 March 2017]

There's a lot going on at the Merchant's hotel. A magician's convention is just breaking up, while a mortician's convention is about to get started. In addition, a mediation between aircraft manufacturers and workers will soon take place. There is no obvious connection between these 3 groups in the beginning, but each will have some relevance to the central plot of a body being discovered in one of the guest rooms, and the hotel personnel trying to hush up the incident, fearing it will harm the hotel's reputation. To accomplish this, the body is moved around from place to place, trying to keep the police from finding it. This is sometimes accomplished by 2 hostess sisters(Hope and Faith Banner, played by Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes)or by the hotel manager Puddle(Robert Benchley) or by Tommy (John Howard): the hotel's press agent. In addition, there is a bonkers magician(Eric Blore) who hasn't left because he's looking for "Charlie".

Frank McGlynn plays the chairman of the morticians convention.. looking appropriately creepy, fitting the Hollywood stereotype of what undertakers should look like.

Janet Blair(as Charity) plays the much younger sister of Hope and Faith. She's been going to an all girls private school, financed by Hope. Evidently, she's been man-starved, as she throws herself at most any man, giving Tommy a passionate kiss or two. Hope and Tommy have occasionally talked about marriage, but when Hope catches Charity and Tommy kissing, she assumes Charity has taken her place. Charity says she doesn't want to go back to school; she wants to be a hostess, like Hope and Faith.

Robert Benchley plays his usual role as hotel or apartment manager, or a similar type of profession. Unfortunately, he's not as funny as in some films I've seen....I was impressed with John Howard as Tommy.

In the incident where the body, abetted by Tommy, is playing poker with several men, the body keeps winning: "He's a lucky stiff" one remarks. But Tommy wants to lose so he has an excuse to leave with the body.

I won't tell you how the magician, the morticians and the labor mediation conference further fit into the story. See the film on YouTube to find out how things work out.

I rate this film as a lesser screwball comedy, which may be worthwhile for you to check out. The title is misleading, as the action all takes place within or just outside of a hotel.

Breathlessly funny comedy

[silentfilm-2 · 9/10 · 3 September 2002]

This film is an undiscovered classic comedy. Robert Benchly is the desk clerk of a hotel where a wild magician's convention is breaking up at the same time a somber mortician's convention is starting. Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes play two hostesses at the hotel who are in hot water with the local moral guardians. To complicate matters even more, their little sister arrives after escaping from a "proper" private school. All she does is wear lingerie and make passes at older men.

Joan's boyfriend John Howard is at the hotel covering the negotiations for a labor strike. When the mediator turns up dead, the girls try to spirit the body out of the hotel to avoid bad publicity. This breathless comedy is just fantastic, as the body is continually being moved, either intentionally or unintentionally. The ending of this film is definitely a surprise, but it fits the film perfectly.

In one of the best scenes, Howard and his dead "buddy" duck into a poker game just to avoid the police. He wins a hand while the police go by, but the other players won't let him out of the game. Howard does everything he can to lose, but still wins all the hands anyway!

It tries too hard....

[planktonrules · 4/10 · 25 April 2017]

Hope (Joan Blondell), Faith (Binnie Barnes) and Charity (Janet Blair) are three oddly named sisters. The first two work at a hotel and the third has arrived for a visit. This hotel specializes in hosting conventions and exactly what their job entails is a big vague (perhaps it was implied that they were 'good time girls'). One group of conventioners are morticians and another is a meeting of a labor and management with a federal mediator. However, the mediator never arrives...and Tommy Hopkins (John Howard) is a reporter waiting and waiting and waiting. However, suddenly and without warning, a body appears...it's the mediator! Well, since he is a reporter, Tommy is planning on exploiting this to the max...but then the body disappears...and keeps appearing and disappearing...much like in the film "Weekend at Bernies".

This film's biggest problem is that it tries way too hard. It's supposed to be a screwball comedy but continually bashes you over the head as if to say "now you MUST laugh". The ending is even worse, as the actors seem to have no idea what to do and start mugging badly at the camera...as if they are begging for more laughs. As a result, the film really grates on you when it should have been funny and Eric Blore (a very funny guy) is sadly wasted here as well.

The 1940s are too modern for me!

[1930s_Time_Machine · 4/10 · 15 June 2023]

What's so fascinating about films from the 1930s, particularly those from the early 30s is that they let us taste a world so different to our own. They had a certain primitive charm, an innocent simplicity which had vanished by the 1940s. To quote Jon Anderson's song 'The Friends of Mr Cairo,' "Citizen Kane came fast and quickly, Conquering ol' New York City, Poking fun at superstition, Media became television" OK, films from the 40s were generally better made but the magic had gone.

This is what this film demonstrates. It stars the ultimate sex symbol, the ultimate sassy broad of the 1930s, Joan Blondell but here she's just one of the countless clones of the 40s. She's nothing special anymore, she doesn't look any different to everyone else, in the 40s she can no longer be that girl who gave'us' a smile through The Depression. This film itself is so spectacularly un-special that you're likely to forget you were watching it if you go out of the room for five minutes to make a cup of tea.

It's a typical family fun picture with generic 1940s Hollywood humour. It's not a bad film, it's actually reasonably amusing - although the story of an inconvenient corpse was done a million times better in Fawlty Towers (the Mr Leeman episode).

Odd that although the 40s are hardly modern times, seeing the stars from a decade earlier makes you nostalgic for a time you clearly never even knew (and in reality would certainly never want to experience). If you're not inexplicably obsessed with the 30s however, you might enjoy this because it's an above average example of its genre.

Failed Screwball Comedy

[aberlour36 · 3/10 · 25 July 2007]

This film should have succeeded. The cast is exceptional, and Columbia Pictures had been on a winning streak at the time. But the script is dreadful and illustrates the truth that good screwball comedy is rare and requires more than good actors. In this movie, people are running around frantically (poor Eric Blore), screaming lines (poor Joan Blondell and Binny Barnes), and trying on-so-hard to be wild and wacky. And it doesn't come off. The plot is tedious and unconvincing. And if you can find more than three laughs in the film, you deserve an award for credulity or inattention. In short, this is a dud. And the era of screwball comedy was just about over. Three Girls About Town is unavailable on DVD or VHS. (I bought a bad copy on e-Bay, probably taken off of television.) Few film buffs or comedy fans should cry for its reappearance.