Main Cast: Ronald Colman, Ginger Rogers, Jack Carson, Spring Byington, Cecilia Loftus
Release Year: 1940
Country: US
Run Time: 101 minutes
Plot
Lewis Milestone directs the lightweight romantic comedy Lucky Partners, based on a story by Sacha Guitry. David Grant (Ronald Colman) is an artist in New York's Greenwich Village. After he wishes good luck to passing ingenue Jean Newton (Ginger Rogers), she is immediately offered a beautiful dress. Thinking that David is lucky, she agrees to go in with him on a ticket for the Irish Sweepstakes. Their horse wins the race, and he asks her to accompany her to Niagara Falls to celebrate their winnings. Jean's fiancé, Freddie Harper (Jack Carson), is not pleased about the arrangement, so he follows them. Eventually Jean and David fall for each other and they end up in the courthouse, where the judge ($Harry Davenport) sorts everything out in favor of the new couple. Lucky Partners was released in 1940, the same year Rogers gave her Oscar-winning performance in Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman. ~ Andrea LeVasseur, All Movie Guide
Review
Any film that features Ronald Colman and Ginger Rogers in a lighthearted romance ought to turn out better than Lucky Partners, an innocuous but hardly memorable little time filler. Of course, really good frivolous comedies are much harder to pull off than they look. Partners has a ridiculous premise, but it's also the kind of premise that in the right, deft hands could turn into charming, captivating trifle. Unfortunately, Partners doesn't have the right hands, in either the directing or the writing. Lewis Milestone, of course, directed some truly fine pictures, but his forte really wasn't a bonbon like this, and he doesn't bring the appropriate sense of style to the material; more crucially, he doesn't seem to really BELIEVE in the story, and that's much more of a problem. For their part, the writers don't seem to know exactly what kind of story they want to tell, with the result that the film switches gears rather too often and its parts don't fit together. That leaves Colman and Rogers and "fifth wheel" Jack Carson to carry the picture, and they do an admirable job. Colman and Rogers don't have a great deal of chemistry, but they have panache and know-how to spare, and Carson, along with reliable Spring Byington, make the most of what they have. It's just too bad that nobody had more to work with. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide
Carroll Clark - Art Director, Van Nest Polglase - Art Director, Irene - Costume Designer, Argyle Nelson - First Assistant Director, Lewis Milestone - Director, Harry Berman - Editor, Harry E. Edington - Executive Producer, Dimitri Tiomkin - Composer (Music Score), Mel Burns - Makeup, Robert de Grasse - Cinematographer, George Haight - Producer, Darrell Silvera - Set Designer, Vernon Walker - Special Effects, Sacha Guitry - Screen Story, John van Druten - Screenwriter, Allan G. Scott - Screenwriter
