Miss Bluebeard

Plot

Bebe Daniels is Colette Girard, a French actress who is traveling to London to visit her friend Gloria (Diana Kane). On the train she meets Gloria's fiancé, Bob Hawley (Kenneth MacKenna). Hawley is posing as his friend, Larry Charters (Robert Frazer), a musician who is trying to dodge his many female fans. Colette and Hawley get left at a station and they ask the town's mayor where they can spend the night. The mayor misunderstands and marries them. Since Hawley has written Charters' name on the license (which he mistook for a hotel register), Colette isn't sure whom she is married to. Back in Paris, Charters meets Colette and is immediately taken with her, but when his friend Bertie Bird (Raymond Griffith) shows up with a couple of young women, a lot of confusion ensues. Then Gloria arrives for more mix-ups. Colette has fallen for Charters herself, and after testing his love (and accidentally winding up in a bed with Bird), everything is straightened out and they get married for real. ~ Janiss Garza, Rovi

Review

Frank Tuttle is mostly remembered today for his thrillers, including This Gun for Hire and Gunman in the Streets, but early in his career he was more of a generalist, and his work included a fair amount of comedy. Miss Bluebeard is a prime example, a breezy bedroom farce about a case of mistaken identity and misunderstanding that entails a set of romantic entanglements worthy of William Shakespeare. There's not a serious frame anywhere in it, and even 80 years later it plays about as well as the most charmingly light musicals of the 1930s and '40s, even as a silent. One can also see the elements of visual style, in the way that men and women react to each other -- and respond to being in each other's spaces -- that helped make Tuttle's thrillers so successful in the decades to come. The only problem for modern viewers will be that the extant sources for this movie tend to be on the grainy side, but the acting and shooting are so good and the direction so finely textured and nuanced that one can easily get past that technical impediment. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Cast

• Bebe Daniels - Colette Girard
• Robert W. Frazer - Larry Charters
• Raymond Griffith - The Honorable Bertie Bird
• Martha Madison - Lulu

Diana Kane - Gloria Harding; Lawrence D'Orsay - Col. Harding; Florence Billings - Eva; Ivan Simpson - Bounds; Kenneth MacKenna - Bob Hawley

Credit

Frank Tuttle - Director, Roy Hunt - Cinematographer, Townsend Martin - Screenwriter

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