In which person?

Another of the movies that I DVRed and happens to be available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is In Person. So I recently sat down to watch it to do a review on it here.

George Brent plays Emory Muir, a man interested in things like bird photography. One day in a hotel elevator he runs into a mysterious woman wearing a veil. He follows her until she nearly gets run over by a taxi, resulting into fleeing to another hotel, but not before Emory gets to see the woman without her veil. It turns out she's an incredibly homely woman named Clara Colfax, with horn-rimmed glasses, buck teeth, and a bad hairdo among other things.

In the next scene, when she's escaped into that other hotel, we see a man referring to her as Carol Corliss, with her telling the man not to call her that. We then see Carol, who is of course also Clara, but minus the wig and other make-up job, and she's pretty darn good looking, which isn't a surprise considering that she's played by Ginger Rogers.

Emory has followed her up to the hotel suite, where he meets the other man, Dr. Sylvester (Samuel Hinds), along with one Judge Parks (Grant Mitchell), who is Carol's uncle. Carol apparently suffered from some sort of nervous reaction to one of her crowds of adoring fans, to the point that she's become afraid of going out in public, which explains the veil and disguise.

Dr. Sylvester has an idea. Not telling Emory the real identity of his patient, he suggests that Carol would do well by getting away from it all at a place up in the mountains, which Emory just so happens to have. Emory is just going to have to pretend to be some sort of therapist. But since he was intrigued by the woman in the veil, and he was planning on going up there anyway, he agrees.

Alone up in the cabin, Carol decides she can take off the disguise. Emory sees a newspaper clipping of Carol and realizes who she is, but for whatever reason, pretends not to know who she is and doesn't believe she's a Hollywood actress no matter what she does to try to prove it. Perhaps taking him to one of her movies in town will do the trick, when she can show by her adoring fans' reaction that they recognize her as Carol. It could cause other problems, however.

Meanwhile, Carol's acting partner Jay Holmes (Alan Mowbray) is in love with her, as well as wanting her to get back to work on her next movie. So he shows up at the cabin and causes a scene, although Emory is able to defuse it by claiming to be one of Carol's doctors. The local sheriff has seen Jay, however, and thinks that he's the man the sheriff's obnoxious young daughter is referring to when the daughter sees Carol's sorrow. We know who should end up together in the last reel, but it's going to take some time getting there.

In Person is a bit of a mess, in large part because it doesn't seem to know exactly what it wants to be. It shoehorns multiple plot lines together, not too successfully. It also varies between genres, with some it seeming to be a light drama, and others trying, but not doing particularly well, to be a comedy. Ginger also gets a couple of song and dance numbers. The one in the first movie-within-a-movie is particularly bad, as though the songwriters had been given the task of coming up with a bad song for an actress character to be saddled with in a movie.

Ginger Rogers tries her best with the material she's given, but ultimately I think that even she can't save it. In Person is the sort of movie that should have wound up on one of those four-movie box sets that TCM used to put out with Warner Home Video, rather than (or in addition to) a standalone disc. At that price point, it might be worth a watch, but at the Warner Archive price point, I'd go for a bunch of other Rogers movies first.