In the last week or two, I've inadvertently watched several movies which have aviation as a theme, as we saw with Conquest of the Air which I recommended at the beginning the week. Recently, I popped in a DVD from a Universal James Stewart box set and watched You Gotta Stay Happy, which I have to admit was a new-to-me title when I first saw the set on Amazon.
Stewart plays Marvin Payne, a cargo pilot who has just flown into New York and shows up at a hotel looking for a friend of his who is able to get a cheap rate on one of the rooms because Payne always leaves well before checkout time. Meanwhile, also showing up at the hotel is Dee Dee Dillwood (Joan Fontaine). She's one of those flighty heiress types who were common in screwball comedies of the 1930s, but this movie was released in 1948. She's finally agreed to get married to lawyer Henry (Willard Parker), but she doesn't really want to do it. So she runs out of the bridal suite and into... the suite that Payne has for the night.
Dee Dee obviously doesn't want Payne to know the truth of what's going on, and doesn't want to get caught by Henry either, so she makes Payne's life a bit of a living hell by delaying him from getting out of the room. She's like to go west like Payne is, but of course Payne is running a cargo airline, and they're not supposed to take paying passengers. So Dee Dee winds up becoming technically an employee of the company until she can get off in Chicago.
Payne co-owns the company with "Bullets" Baker (Eddie Albert), who at this point in his career was playing sort of the lighter and not quite so oily Jack Carson types. He's the co-pilot for the flight, and in order to make a little extra money, he too takes on a couple of illicit passengers. There's a newlywed couple (Marcy McGuire and Arthur Walsh), and an embezzler (Porter Hall) who had a blonde secretary. Dee Dee is a blonde, too, although I'm giving a bit away, not that she's an embezzler. Rounding out the cargo is a coffin with a dead body that needs to be at its funeral in Los Angeles by a certain time, and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee.
If you've seen any of the 1930s screwball comedies, you can figure out much of what happens well before it does. Dee Dee doesn't stay in Chicago, getting back on the plane instead, and then further west the plane has to make an emergency landing, where everybody is forced to spend a night on a farm owned by Mr. Racknell (Percy Kilbride). Payne and Dee Dee find out that night that they might just be in love. Since they're the two leads, we sort of expect them to get together in the final reel, but how is that going to happen.
You Gotta Stay Happy is modest stuff for both Stewart and Fontaine. Not that it's terrible; it's more that the material is old-fashioned and uninventive. Both players try their hardest and the movie is entertaining enough for one watch, but it's also the sort of thing that's forgettable after you've watched it. I'm glad it's on the box set, but I don't think it's something I'd pick up as a standalone unless it was at bargain bin prices.
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