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The Good Humor Man
Biff Jones is a driver/salesman for the Good Humor ice-cream company. He hopes to marry his girl Margie, who works as a secretary for Stuart Nagel, an insurance investigator. Margie won't marry Biff, though, because she is the sole support of her kid brother, Johnny. Biff gets involved with Bonnie, a young woman he tries to rescue from gangsters. But Biff's attempts to help her only get him accused of murder. When the police refuse to believe his story, it's up to Biff and Johnny to prove Biff's innocence and solve the crime.
Release : | 1950 |
Rating : | 6.3 |
Studio : | Columbia Pictures, |
Crew : | Camera Operator, Director of Photography, |
Cast : | Jack Carson Lola Albright Jean Wallace George Reeves Peter Miles |
Genre : | Adventure Comedy Crime |
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Reviews
The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.
Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.
Straight out of the style that made the "Fuller Brush" movies, this Columbia farce is top dog in what makes old fashioned comedy so much fun. It's all in a day's work for ice cream salesman Jack Carson who gets involved in more than just selling his products than he bargained for. Ringing bells make human voices impossible to understand, a kid with a speech impediment confuses him with an order, and melting ice cream bars in a furnace room create all sorts of havoc. But it's his coming to the aide of a young woman who claims that men are trying to kill her that guides the plot, literally putting him into a feel freeze, and leading to more mayhem when he does come upon a corpse and finds himself in a lot more trouble.Carson, coming off a long spell at Warner Brothers, gets his best part, and really shows off a great bag of comic tricks. Lola Albright supports Carson as his long suffering girlfriend who keeps showing up at the wring time. Carson, wearing a women's slip and covered in soot, ends up "caged" with a bunch of tough dames, and must try to square things with Albright. Frank Ferguson is very funny as a police lieutenant, while Peter Miles is lovable as Albright's younger brother. Look for a young Richard Egan as a police officer. It's a shame that Carson never got the chance to star in a sitcom; he would have been a nice contrast to the women dominated field of TV sitcoms in the 1950's, equally as funny as Gleason, Skelton, Backus and Arnaz. The ending with the villains dealing with Carson, Albright and an army of kids is absurd in its overuse of comedy but somehow works anyway.
Back when I saw this movie on TV, I was not having an otherwise happy childhood, and had undiagnosed Attention Deficit (not the hyper kind), so my recollections are so flawed I won't waste your time with them. What I recall now is only as a very happy dream. I may have seen most of this movie twice, on TV, in the 1960s. I have always wanted to see it again. It makes me sad that when I mention it to younger friends, all they know of is some horror movie by the same name. Some day I hope I can afford one of those VHS tapes going for so much online.What? I have to come up with ten lines of text about a movie I last saw over 35 years ago? All I can possibly do is write "spoilers. ... Okay, I've checked the box for "Spoiler alert."What I recall mostly is the last minutes of the movie, when a horde of kids fills the screen, on bicycles, scooters, pedal-powered cars and such, all racing to save their friend the ice cream truck driver. Of course I remember the buzz saw in the swimming pool, and was too young to think of how much sense that did not make. I loved the one-sided pie fight, especially because it said "Power to the kids!" at a time when I felt very powerless in my life.I found this movie healing and invigorating, and I still miss it.
I love it when human Popsicle Jack Carson goes floating down the gutter into a storm drain, only to be rescued at the last moment. The gags fly fast and furious in this cockamamie send-up of the friendly neighborhood ice-cream man. I guess some such is to be expected from scripter Frank Tashlin, who never gave up his love affair with cartoons or the comic book. The gags are nothing if not inventive, from the opening sound effect to the closing school house free-for-all. Just count how many times Carson gets to mug-up the outrageous happenings-- I doubt if there's a number big enough.This is a Carson showcase. Too bad this wonderfully versatile performer never received the recognition his prodigious talent deserved. Here, his man-boy good-humor man never annoys, unlike, say, a Jerry Lewis, who whined his way through a number of similar roles for Tashlin. I hope Carson got extra pay for all the physical contortions Tashlin and director Bacon put him through. Speaking of stunts, the luscious Lola Albright (the real Mrs. Carson) does her share, a decade before smouldering across the TV screen as Peter Gunn's torch-singing lady love.Note the clever touch with the plug-ugly newlyweds, a subject usually sentimentalized to a nauseating degree by Hollywood. None of that here. The bride may be a groom's nightmare, but she's an optometrist's dream. Here the screenplay had to tread lightly around the comedic potential of a near-sighted bride, still the edgy humor shines through. Still and all, I wonder how the same potential would be treated by today's no-holds-barred cinema.There were a number of these occupation-based slapsticks produced around this time-- Fuller Brush Man (Red Skelton), Fuller Brush Girl (Lucille Ball), Kill the Umpire (Bill Bendix) et al. None, however, are any funnier than this. My one complaint-- the schoolhouse slapstick goes on too long. It's as if Tashlin can't turn off the inventive engine once its started. But knowing when to stop can be as important as knowing how to start. Nonetheless, this remains a lively and chuckle-filled 80 minutes, and a lasting tribute to that under-rated performer Jack Carson, along with the wonderfully inventive Frank Tashlin.
I wholeheartedly endorse the previous reviewer's comments (q.v.), having seen "The Good Humor Man" at about the same time and at the same age. One interesting aspect has to do with the Captain Marvel "product placement." (The kids, customers of Carson's character who help him in the denouement, are members of the CM fan club). Shortly after the film was released, the Captain Marvel comics and other products disappeared when the copyright holders finally succumbed to a suit brought by DC Comics alleging too many resemblances between Captain M and that sissy Superman! That may be the reason that no video of this movie seems to be available through normal commercial sources.