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the audience applauded

That was an excellent one.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Ridiculous and utterly moronic film with Fred Allen as a circus barker who inherits $12 million and then it goes to $300,00, providing he can find the loot in a chair, stashed away by his murdered uncle.The premise is all right until we get to the locating of the chair. We chase around Mrs. Nussbaum's apartment for it, get involved with a brawl, and meet up with gangster William Bendix, ready to be overthrown by his gang of cut throats.Jack Benny plays himself and again shows how stingy he is. Had the film stuck with the original bad guy lawyer and his crowd, it would have been far better.Don Ameche and Victor Moore play themselves as has-beens and are in the huge brawl scene.Allen is funny, but no one could really rise above such a foolish script.

It helps if you like American radio shows of the 30s and 40s - it helps even more if you KNOW American radio shows of the 30s and 40s. Fred Allen had one of the best, Allen's Alley, and uses a great Russian novel by Petrov as a jumping-off point to wheel on some of those stars of radio. Fans of the novel may well be annoyed at the cavalier way in which it is treated but fans of laughter will rejoice in the chance to see Allen working with Jack Benny - they had an ongoing and lucrative 'feud' on radio - hear a clip from Amos 'n' Andy, and generally revel in a plot which has everything from John Carradine as a crooked organ-playing lawyer to William Bendix as a comic gangster (or should that be gagster). It doesn't often surface but it did so this week on English TV providing a welcome opportunity to enjoy it.

For anyone who is considering a career as a comedian, It's In The Bag should be required viewing. For the rest of us it gives us many laughs and it's the one and only opportunity to see Fred Allen's talents on full display.Allen's brand of absurdist humor has influenced so many people right down to today. You can see traces of his influence in Rowan&Martin's Laugh-In, the Mighty Carson Art Players from the Tonight Show and even Monty Python's Flying Circus and may be most of all the work of Mel Brooks on the screen. Because the cinema of necessity a tightly controlled script is in order, one aspect of Allen you don't see was his quick wit with an ad-lib. Some even consider him faster with a quip than Groucho Marx.The premise for this film is that Fred is the financially strapped owner of a flea circus, owing everybody in town including bookie Ben Welden and barely supporting wife Binnie Barnes and children Gloria Pope and Richard Tyler. A long unheard of uncle however is murdered and the uncle left Allen a set of five chairs. Our genius of a hero sells them off before a phonograph record from his late uncle tells him that $300,000.00 is hidden in one of the chairs together with clues as to who murdered him. Of course the perpetrators are shadowing Allen's every move as he seeks to retrieve the chairs from their new owners and find his fortune in the lining. The whole thing is an excuse for several skits as Allen goes on his quest for the chairs. One of the chairs was sold to Minerva Pious who is Mrs. Nussbaum and a regular on Allen's radio show. She happened to sell the chair to one Jack Benny. Benny's character as a miser has become so ingrained in the American culture that even today people who've heard the name know that about him and can appreciate the cheap jokes. What they might not realize is that Jack Benny and Fred Allen engaged in one of the great famous radio feuds so that dimension of the scene with Fred Allen might be lost.Another couple of chairs goes to a nightclub where folks like Don Ameche, Rudy Vallee, and Victor Moore are picking up some extra money as singing waiters. Another goes to William Bendix, head of the criminal Bendix gang. Bendix is terrific burlesquing his own tough guy image and John Carradine who played many a sinister role on screen looks like he's having a ball playing a crooked lawyer.Even Jerry Colonna is in this film, on loan from Bob Hope's radio show playing a zany psychiatrist. There is so much in It's In The Bag packed into less than 90 minutes you can hardly stop for breath.This film is a rare comic treat and should never be missed when broadcast. Demand TCM acquire this film and broadcast it.

"It's in the Bag" is pretty obscure, but it's very funny. I am a big fan of old radio comedy shows, and thus was interested in seeing Jack Benny, Fred Allen, and other OTR personalities in a movie. Jerry Colonna as a nutty psychiatrist is the funniest role in the movie. Lots of good typical one-liners from Allen, and the opening, featuring Allen making sarcastic comments about the credits as they appear on the screen, was, I presume, a very original idea for a 1940s movie. If your local video store has this movie and you want some good laughs, check this one out.