Stepping Out

I've enjoyed the couple of Charlotte Greenwood performance I've seen, so when I noticed that Stepping Out was on the schedule, I decided to DVR it to watch and do a post on later. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so now we get the post on it.

Charlotte Greenwood plays Sally Smith, who's married to Holywood producer Tubby Smith (Harry Stubbs). Harry is working on producing a new movie with fellow producer Tom Martin (Reginald Denny), who is married to Sally's friend Eve (Leila Hyams). The two couples are together at dinner one evening when Sally points out that she's mildly disappointed with all the work that Hollywood producers have to put in. So she's thinking of going on vacation with Eve down to Agua Caliente, Mexico, hoping that perhaps the husbands can join them.

Tubby, however, has different ideas. He's arranging for a meeting with two lovely young ladies, under the guise of a studio meeting. Before that, however, there's some business to attend to. There's a good chance that the current movie the two men are working on is going to go over budget and lose money. So their lawyer draws up agreements that will have the two husbands surreptitiously sign over much of their wealth to their wives, only without the wives knowing about this since one of the tropes of the time is that wives were on an allowance and overspent. The agreements are then stored in Tom's safe until the end of production on the new movie, at which point they can be ripped up.

After that, it's time for Tubby and Tom to have a little bit of fun with the two young women they've brought over, thinking Sally and Eve have already left. The wives have left, but Eve forgets a bag, and at any rate, Sally suggests Eve needs some jewels to look fashionable down in Mexico. So the wives return home, which is how Sally finds out that the husbands are stepping out on them. Meanwhile, when Eve gets the jewelry from the safe, she obviously finds the agreements signing over Tom's and Tubby's wealth to the wives.

Newly-acquired wealth in hand, the two wives head down to Mexico with the plan of looking obviously rich. This brings two broke men, Hal (Kane Richmond) and Paul (Cliff Edwards) into their orbit, and the two men try putting the moves on the wives, although they're really just hoping to get a couple of meals and some pocket money. Meanwhile, the two husbands decide to go chasing after their wives to patch things up, only to find there are two strange men in the women's bungalow....

Stepping Out is a movie with a fun premise, but one which unfortunately doesn't quite live up to that premise as well as some other pre-Codes. I'm thinking in particular of Greenwood's earlier movie So Long, Letty, which has a ridiculous wife-swapping plot and a really spirited performance from Greenwood. She doesn't get to do quite as much in Stepping Out, which is a shame.

Stepping Out Is a passable pre-Code comedy that's worth one watch, although I'd definitely recommend some others first. It's one of those movies that probably should have gotten a release on one of those four-film sets TCM used to put out in conjunction with Warner Home Video; instead, it only seems to be available on that standalone Warner Archive release.