Three Girls About Town (1941)

Joan Blondell, Binnie Barnes and Janet Blair

This is a high-speed comedy with Joan Blondell and John Howard as a reporter and a hotel hostess who are in love the tense old Hollywood way: they're too poor to get married so every little blip in their relationship turns into rampant misunderstandings.

Meanwhile, the hotel (operated by Robert Benchley as manager "Wilburforce Puddle") is filled with conventioneers, and in between the chaos the manager is pining for our other Hotel Hostess (played by Binnie Barnes) who is a sister to Blondell's hostess, and when not dreaming about her, he's trying to tamp down any hint of controversy around the huge hotel which seems to be full of opportunities for same (when the film starts we see an exiting flood of drunken magicians ending their event just as a flood of morticians arrive, with caskets, for their own convention, and on top of that is a major meeting between labour and aircraft industry leaders taking place, and all of these play important roles in the plot from the script by Richard Carroll).

Then the two girl's other sister unexpectedly shows up (played by Janet Blair in her first film role). She's supposed to be at an expensive all-female private school getting "the breaks" that the other two sisters never got, all of it paid for by their hard work at the hotel putting up with drunken conventioneers who leer, step on their feet while dancing and generally run wild like mischievous schoolboys.

Blair's youngest sister has been cooped-up in an all-female facility for too long and it shows: she's disgusted with the panting, over-attentive behavior of a room full of reporters at the hotel, but when John Howard appears and "rescues" her, an instant hypersexual infatuation blossoms (not that this character stops there: when the newsman's boss shows up, played by Paul Harvey, searching for Howard, "little sister"makes a pass at him and tries to drag him into her hotel room to discuss journalism).

Blondell and Barnes' are in a mad rush to get their grinning, hormone-soaked sister back to the all-girl school "where she belongs" but a problematic issue has cropped up: a dead body is found in the hotel. This could be just the scandal that gets the place shut down by the local Chief of Police (Hugh O'Connell) who is being constantly pushed by women's community groups to investigate the place because they're sure they know "what's really going on in there." When their group of all-in-black elderly widows (led by the indomitable Vera Lewis in another role as a sharp-eyed moral guardian) take just one look at Blondell and Barnes in their hostess dresses, they say that itself is enough proof.

The Chief insists it'll take more than curvy dresses to convince a judge, so when a bit later the unexplained dead body is found, the pressure builds fast to get the body secretly off the premises to be found elsewhere. This is something which turns out to be a lot harder than it seems as Blondell, Howard and Benchley have to keep relocating the body just one step ahead of discovery and then they lose track of it altogether. It, of course, gets to spend some time in caskets the mortician convention brought with them. In one long sequence the body is hidden in plain sight by John Howard by including it in on a poker game, but then the dead man keeps winning the pot with spectacular card hands and the other players won't let Howard or his closed-eyed buddy exit with their winnings. Howard begins trying (in vain) to set up losing hands before the drunken card players realize they're getting wiped out by a corpse.

Criticized as too late in the 1930's screwball comedy cycle Three Girls About Town has some odd flaws in it, such as an incredible suffeit of one-liners but not always the best ones assigned to ace-comedienne Blondell. On the other hand, Blondell gets a chance to hilariously parody Una O'Conner, who also appears in this film as a half-drunk hotel maid. The imitation by Blondell is played without the drunkenness but with the Irish accent turned up, lugging a wash bucket and shoe-black smeared on her cheeks, angry and ready to fight. By this point in the story the film is now parodying itself, along with the long list of Una O'Conner servant roles from the Hollywood past.

The farcical nature of this movie doesn't slow down and some reviews call it "exhausting," but as the tale is satirizing "big hotel" films from Hollywood (a sub-genre that gave us movies like Grand Hotel) and because our lead Blondell is, of course, mostly just playing Joan Blondell, I think we're supposed to be up to speed on most of the elements of the tale right from the start. Three Girls About Town comes from an era in which an incredibly estimated 90 million tickets were were being sold each week (the 21st century average is approximately 15 million) for Americans to go and attend motion picture theaters, and instead of (as with television) the audience isn't generally there to see repeating characters, but rather particular actors repeating their character types with (hopefully) a new, interesting twist. That's not really the case in Three Girls About Town for Blondell fans, nor John Howard fans, either, as here he plays the same sort of persistently and abruptly frustrated character he presented in other films (for example, in The Philadelphia Story, 1940); each one dignified and articulate but always on the edge of losing both attributes.

Three Girls About Town moves fast and director Leigh Jason keeps all of it mostly clear and uncluttered, a nice feat since we have to stay on top of a lot of wheels-within-wheels as the lost body tours the building. With a very broad cast of familiar Hollywood actors (Eric Blore as the magician "Charlemagne" appears in a small but key role, showing up throughout the story in a never-ending search for a lost pal named "Charlie") and Una O'Conner's three-woman team of hotel cleaners seem efficient and all-knowing about what's going on inside the hotel, that is, until they find some unguarded liquor in the rooms.

But, in the end, this isn't an "A" comedy. Blondell, though still playing the glamorous and spunky roles she is known for (like the other 1941 film she made, Topper Returns), is really just Joan Blondell here, and she even gets in a direct "Joan Blondell" joke by directing a drunken group of singing men needing an extra voice to try a hotel room she points at which she says contains Dick Powell (her actual husband at the time). That's a pretty good "4th wall" joke if you know Powell is both a singer and actor of 1930's Hollywood (and a director and actor in later years) but most of all if you know he is Blondell's famous husband. With these inside jokes, along with the grinning Janet Blair ("I like men. They're nice."), plus the amorous and nervous Benchley, and with Blondell and Howard delivering their particular kinds of humor, Three Girls About Town is a lot of fun if you're up to speed on everybody's oeuvre, and Hollywood's own Big Hotel movie genre. For the uneducated, though, the commotion may be hard to parse for relevance and the weight of the humor is lost without familiarity.

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