Watch Forty Naughty Girls For Free

I love this movie so much

Nice effects though.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The German language film is set during a performance of a musical revue. The production numbers of the musical review are staged as a musical. The murder mystery, in the theater while the performance progresses, is played as a standard detective story. This concept,of two independent stories played side by side, during a short time interval in the same theater in just over an hour, carries into the American remake. What is added to the American remake is that the inspector and the amateur sleuth are stock characters of a detective series. Neither the quality of the musical production numbers nor the plot line of the murder mystery live up to the German language original. The value of this film is more a valuable memory of films of this important era of the past than a film of high quality on its own right.

The least you can say about the 6 Hildegarde Withers films is that they tried to give us a different setting for murder in each episode; the New York Aquarium, The Continental Museum, Catalina Island, etc. In "Forty Naughty Girls", there are two extra elements: there is just one setting, a Broadway theater where the sold-out title show is being presented, and the story plays out in "real time". This is the most comedy-oriented entry in the series, with Hildegarde doing arguably more pratfalling than detecting; nonetheless, she does at least manage to solve the case herself (and it's a tough one), unlike the previous Zasu Pitts outing ("The Plot Thickens"), where Inspector Oscar Piper should take about 90% of the credit. Tom Kennedy, a "Torchy Blane" series regular at the time as dumb cop Gahagan, makes a guest appearance as....dumb cop Casey, and as usual he guarantees some good laughs ("There is the killer, and he brought his horse!"). For a B production, "Forty Naughty Girls" does a good job of "faking" a higher budget than it probably had. **1/2 out of 4.

... whoever is responsible for this travesty was very naughty and deserves to be grounded. It takes a great deal of effort to make either James Gleason or Zasu Pitts boring - in fact I'd never seen it happen before - but this film did it.This film was supposed to be a continuation of the James Gleason/Edna Mae Oliver crime mysteries starting with Penguin Pool murder in 1932. Those two had great chemistry and were a believable pair both in the sleuthing and possibly even romantic categories. The zingers and one liners flew in their films, even after the production code came in. Here Zasu Pitts is replacing Ms. Oliver as schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers as she and detective Oscar Piper (James Gleason) step out together to watch the show "Forty Naughty Girls". Beforehand there is a set-up of situations that show the eventual murder victim causing trouble for various people associated with the show. When he predictably turns up dead, Piper and Withers are on the scene to solve the mystery. The problem is, from that point forward they are not really acting as a team as they were before. They seem to be operating independently and just bump into each other as a matter of circumstance or slapstick.The show that acts as a backdrop for the mystery just doesn't seem very naughty or even funny for that matter, the suspects are not very interesting or memorable, and our two leads are poorly served by the entire mess. If you want to see what this crime series was at its peak watch "Penguin Pool Murder", "Murder on the Blackboard", or "Murder on a Honeymoon". If you want to see James Gleason and Zasu Pitts be entertaining, watch just about anything they ever did but this.

Schoolmarm Hildegarde Withers (Zasu Pitts) and her friend Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) go out for a night on Broadway. Naturally, no evening on the town can take place without murder, not when Hildegarde and the Inspector are around. This entry in the series is played more broadly for laughs than its predecessors but not much more than typical for the B-level crime movies of the day. The problem here, from my perspective, is that Zasu Pitts's character is so different from the great Edna May Oliver's that only the name appears to be the same. Edna May's Hildegard Withers was a feisty old girl who basically ran the Inspector's case for him despite his grousing. Zasu plays her standard ditz and the movie suffers for it. It's hard to imagine the Inspector putting up with her; moreover, some of the slapstick seems forced. On the other hand, this entry is saved by a very clever plot with plenty of false leads and twists. The film might have played better as a straight mystery rather than mystery/comedy. By the way, the lovely Marjorie Lord gets an early turn here as a singer/hoofer type.