Well a ha ha and a jolly hello, my screwball pals! Here I am with
another movie review for you, this time of a hoary old picture called Love on the Run! Ha ha, even reading the
back of the VHS box I could tell this was a picture that had been made in the
wake of It Happened One Night, with
the addition of some would-be Hitchcockian cloak-and-dagger!
Clark Gable, well known from his performance in Soldier of Fortune, plays good old Mike
Anthony, a newspaper reporter on assignment in England! He’s bunking for some
reason with his quasi-pal and top journalistic rival Barney Pells, and gets
hornswoggled into covering the society wedding of poor little rich girl Sally
Parker, played by the lovely Joan “The
Unknown” Crawford!
Through a series of unlikely events, which are the only sort
of events you’ll find in this picture, Mike and Sally don big shapeless flight
suits and take off in a stolen experimental aircraft bound for the Continent!
Barney Pells, hungry for his own big scoop, trails along in a Terminator-like pursuit! And the owners
of the plane, it turns out, are some species of spy; ha ha, Bolsheviks no
doubt! They’re all after a particularly weak McGuffin, a map which gets
mentioned maybe three times through the picture!
The picture has some great patter from Gable and Crawford
and from Franchot Tone (Mr. Crawford at the time) in the role of Barney Pells!
But the whole thing is such a wisp of a scrap of a titchy-mitchy-fitch of a
thing that, charming as it frequently is, it never gains any traction! There’s
a scene in the middle in which our pair of runaways find themselves at a palace,
possibly Versailles, where they break in and change into the clothes they find
there! Well, of course the security guard, played by Donald “Mark of the Vampire” Meek, takes Gable
for the Sun King himself and Crawford for his consort, and they all do a little
dance that stops the movie cold!
There’s romance and also a series of outrages perpetrated
against the gullible Pells, and occasionally the cod-Hitchcock elements assert
themselves, but poorly! I’d say the picture is about 65% It Happened One Night and the rest is trying to be The 39 Steps, and it doesn’t come near
to either of them! But it’s not without wit, and the stars have charm, and it’s
hardly a total loss! The movie was directed by Woody “One Take” Van Dyke, who
of course also brought us Another Thin Man, and the job he does here is professional but rather bland!
It’s a poufy entertainment and nothing more, but if it comes
on The Old Movie Channel and you’ve got nothing pressing to do, you might as
well sit back and watch it! I give Love
on the Run two invisible dogs!
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