Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching was Boy Meets Girl. Considering the cast involved and the fact that this was made at Warner Bros., I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen this one before.
As the movie opens, agent Rossetti (Frank McHugh) is taking his client, cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran) to Royal pictures to talk about a comeback. Rosetti thinks that Royal's writing team of Law (James Cagney) and Benson (Pat O'Brien) has a script ready that would be perfect for Toms, although it turns out they've been lying because they're the sort of people who always seem to be trying to come up with some angle. It's the sort of role that had this been a 1940s picture would have been perfect for Jack Carson, except that this is also the sort of movie that wouldn't have been made after the US entered World War II in December 1941 since it's very much a product of its time.
Studio producer C.F. Friday (Ralph Bellamy) is none too happy with this. Meanwhile, he orders the studio equivalent of room service, which is brought up by commissary waitress Susie Seabrook (Marie Wilson). She faints in Friday's office, which as it turns out is because she's pregnant, which is rather shocking since she's not married and once the Production Code kicked in the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant and it not being a big moral failure is something you don't expect. In any case, when they find about the pregnance, Law and Benson have a brilliant idea, which is to promote Susie's unborn child as the next big star, to be paired with Larry in a series of movies. Meanwhile, showing up at Friday's office when Susie is recovering from fainting is an English extra, Rodney Bowman (Bruce Lester), who is going to show up later in the plot.
Susie's kid Happy does in fact become a star, bigger than Larry. This ticks Larry off, so Rossetti plans to get Larry and Susie married off so that Susie and Happy will retire. But this is bad news for Law and Benson. They need to come up with a way to break up the relation. Their plan is, at the premiere of the next Errol Flynn movie, they'll have some guy show up claiming to be Happy's father who didn't really die at all. Their plan hits a snag, though, when they hire extra Rodney Bowman to play the part of the man claiming to be Happy's father. They don't know that Happy and Susie have already met.
So Law and Bowman have to come up with another plan that will save the studio. Their plan is to make it look like the British Teddington Studios (an in-joke, as Teddington was in fact Warner Bros.' British arm to make pictures satisfying the British quota system) is going to be buying Royal Pictures in order to get Happy under contract. This brings everybody back to Royal Pictures, and things are concluded more or less happily.
Boy Meets Girl is a movie I had a lot of problems with, mostly down to the script. The screenplay requires everybody to be incredibly loud and obnoxious, as well as dishonest with trying to scam one another. This is supposed to be a comedy, but the characters just aren't very sympathetic in my book. Still, everybody here is professional and do the best they can with the material. Maybe audiences of the late 1930s would have appreciated Boy Meets Girl more than I do in 2026.
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