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Waste of time

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Seeing The Nuisance for the first time cured me of at least one illusion I had. That Walter Matthau in his Oscar winning performance as Whiplash Willie Gingrich had created something original. Billy Wilder when he did The Fortune Cookie must have seen this undeservedly forgotten MGM film with Lee Tracy in the title role.In fact I'll bet Matthau probably clerked in Tracy's office before taking the bar and learned everything well. Tracy is the shyster lawyer that shyster lawyers make jokes about. But he's cleaning out the insurance companies and in those Depression years they've decided to do something about it.What they've done is hire Madge Evans, a female PI to fake an accident and become a Tracy client. But as things go in these films of course she falls for the guy.Some other familiar faces populate the cast. Most familiar are Frank Morgan as an alcoholic doctor who treats Tracy like a son and helps Tracy with his fraudulent injury cases. And also there's the ever droll Charles Butterworth who makes a living faking being hit by automobiles for insurance settlements. He's running out of big cities to pull that racket.Still if you watch The Nuisance you'll know what inspired Billy Wilder in The Fortune Cookie.

No publicity agent could have created a more high flying life for Lee Tracy than the one he was living. An "actors" actor and born to play in those very racy pre-coders, he first found fame in the hit play that combined gangsters and showgirls - "Broadway". It ran for 603 performances. He then played Hildy Johnson in "The Front Page" and it was claimed he never missed a performance. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood, always on the lookout for new and different personalities beckoned. He could have been MGM's answer to James Cagney ( with a lot of humour thrown in) but his high living caught up with him and by 1934 the studio were washing their hands of him.Only in the early thirties could they make a comedy about "ambulance chasers" - and make it side splitting - people knew how to laugh then. "Ambulance chaser" shyster lawyer, J. Phineas Stevens wants to uphold the rights of every "forgotten man and forgotten women" - even if they want to be left forgotten!! With the help of an always intoxicated doctor, Prescott (Frank Morgan) and his pal "Floppy" Phil (Charles Butterworth) who is always willing to step in front of traffic, a bottle of Mercurochrome on hand, they stage accidents, always arrive first at real ones with a bunch of paid "eye witnesses" ready to swear that the drivers were doing the wrong thing. Stevens finds pretty Dorothy Mason (Madge Evans) sprawled at the site of a train wreck. He thinks she is just another pretty victim - in reality she has been hired by John Calhoun (John Miljan) head of a street car company, to try and find evidence to get Stevens disbarred. After the death of Prescott, she realises that Calhoun is just another mercenary corrupt official.The story line wouldn't fill a page but Tracy's lines have the rapidity of a machine gun - I found I was laughing non stop. Although Morgan is excellent, the pathos of his playing does seem a bit out of place. Madge Evans, as usual, makes a pretty but intelligent romantic diversion and Charles Butterworth is just wonderful as Steven's slippery sidekick. You may recognise Virginia Cherrill (she was the blind girl in Chaplin's "City Lights") as the flirtatious Miss Rutherford and Nat Pendleton as a dopey street car conductor brought before the court for stealing nickels and dimes.Highly, Highly Recommended.

I'd seen this before but was still knocked out by it. This holds true for "The Half-Naked Truth" too. To my great surprise it does not, for me, with "Blessed Event." The first time I saw that, I couldn't believe its brilliance. The second time, several years later, it still looked good but packed no real punch. (Tracy is also excellent in "Bombshell" with the sensational Jean Harlow and, decades later, in "The Best Man.") This movie is funny, starting, and touching. It moves with ease from one of these to another. Frank Morgan, another extremely versatile performer, is very touching as the alcoholic doctor who works with ambulance-chasing lawyer Tracy on his schemes.All the supporting cast is good, with special mention given to Charles Butterworth as floppy, the con many who was faking being hit by cars before Tracy meets up with him again and will probably be doing it till he finally really does get run over.

Versatility is an attribute in any performer, but so is doing one thing exceptionally well. Perhaps if Lee Tracy's screen career had not met a premature, unfortunate ending, he and his public would have felt a need for him to play something other than the kind of role which he performed with such natural ease and remarkable skill: the brash, fast-talking, wisecracking, slithery, finger-jabbing, opportunistic, less than trustworthy (to put it mildly) rascal. As a tour de force, this picture ranks with his best, even if there may be more twists and turns of the plot than the story requires. Though Frank Morgan's poignant portrayal of an alcoholic doctor is not an altogether comfortable fit here, and Tracy's explanation of his loss of youthful ideals too pat to be convincing, the movie is consistently entertaining, with fine performances by all the supporting players aiding and abetting another memorable star turn by Lee Tracy.