The Strawberry Blonde (1941)'s comments

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RonJensen

https://ok.ru/video/260807068323

4 years 2 months ago

The Strawberry Blonde is a fun enough comedy-romance about the one that got away and figuring out that ideal is all in your head, and you've got it better at home. Told mostly in flashback to explain why James Cagney's hot-blooded dentist wants revenge on a patient, it presents two friends and the two ladies they court, but it's the back end of the frame tale that makes me like the movie, where Cagney finds a kind of emancipation. If I'm less enamored of the meat of the story, it's that Olivia de Havilland's would-be suffragette and Rita Hayworth's manipulative gold digger are both, different as they are, worthy of much better men. We're meant to think that of Jack Carson's braying Hugo, but Cagney isn't any better. Both are man-children who need mothers as much as wives, period sexists (it's set at the turn of the century when spaghetti was exotic) who see women as more or less interchangeable wigs and get into fights at the drop of a hat. That's just the kind of hairpins they are, but it makes me wish both ladies had better prospects. I love the sing-along at the end, but also... isn't that Cagney's song with the OTHER girl rather than with his wife?! Well, let no good song go to waste.

4 years ago