Così fan tutte

I've suggested quite a few times here that I think Warner Bros. had the best B movies of any of the studios. (To be fair, I haven't seen that many Paramount Bs since they don't show up much.) Other studios were varying levels of weaker, depending on how good their A movies were. So a studio like RKO, lower on the pecking order in A movies, had some real duds for the B movies. An example of one that doesn't hold up is Everybody's Doing It.

The movie starts off with a billboard for a breakfast cereal called "Tantalizing Tasties", cutting to a shot of the three little girls in the illustration crying at a subsequent ad shoot; apparently the cereal is neither tantalizing nor tasty. That's a problem for the company's owner, Mr. Beyers (Cecil Kellaway), as well as the folks in the advertising department.

Among the latter is Penny Wilton (Sally Eilers). A working girl, she's engaged to illustrator Bruce Keene (Preston Foster), who also happens to work in the ad department of the Beyers comapny. To top off their employment troubles, Bruce also likes to drink and apparently never seems to have enough money. One night he takes Penny out to eat, but doesn't have any money to actually order anything. So he offers to produce a drawing for the proprietor.

That drawing is a rebus that captivates the patrons of the restaruant, and that gives Penny an idea. Bruce can create a series of puzzles for Tantalizing Tasties, each one printed on the back of a box of the cereal. Each puzzle will have a specific answer, and if anybody can solve all the puzzles, appearing over a series of six months or so, they'll have a chance at a $100,000 grand prize, which was a lot in the late 1930s. The catch, of course, is that the entry form has to be cut out of the back of the box, no facsimilies, meaning a purchase is indeed necessary to enter. The contest becomes a national sensation, getting everybody interested in the possibility of easy money. Among those interested is Steve Devers (Richard Lane), who has the idea that he can put some influence on the people behind the contest in order that he'll be the only one with all the right answers.

But then Bruce starts drinking again, and is having trouble meeting the deadlines to produce the puzzles, which is a pretty big problem. After all, if they've been spending months getting people to buy the cereal and enter the contest, the people are going to be mighty pissed if the contest goes belly-up. So Penny decides she's going to have Bruce "kidnapped" and taken to one of those mountain health camps, sort of a prototype but with a much lower budget than today's health spas. The only thing is that the man she hires to pull this off, Softy Blane (Guinn "Big Boy" Williams), is actually in the employ of Steve Devers.

It's all the sort of premise that fits a B movie of the late 1930s: comic gangsters, get rich quick schemes, romance, and a bit of big business. But none of it ever really meshes together. It feels like the producers tried to put too much into the movie, and got a bunch of subpar acting performances as well. I'm guessing it's supposed to be more comedy than anything else, but it's never truly funny either.

Everybody's Doing It is the sort of movie that I don't think is well remembered at all, and that's for a good reason.