This movie is hilarious. It is also an excellent musical. Thus, the movie gives you laughs and song; can't go wrong with that combination. There is chemistry between Clark Gable and Marion Davies, who play the title characters. Gable's comedic ability is once again evident. He was a great comic actor. As for Marion Davies, no could have done her role better. The story is amusing; Roscoe Karns again shows that when he came to comic roles, he was among the best. The story itself is amusing and endearing. Every character is likable. The movie depicts working class people in a positive, upbeat way. The entire supporting cast is excellent, especially Allen Jenkins. As entertainment, this movie delivers. The movie gives you laughs, music, a wonderful plot, and characters to whom the audience can relate. If that isn't enough, then maybe watching movies isn't for you.

The story has been done before and since, many times. Two headliners need their careers rehabilitated and decide to join forces for mutual help. They hate each other at first, but then, of course....Of course. Nothing new here. But what separates this picture from other comedies is the staggering amount of one-liners found throughout the story. Virtually every other line of dialogue is a one-line joke. Some are funny, some not so, some corny, some dated. You get on a 'roll', laughter-wise, and it doesn't let up for 90 minutes. This really isn't a screwball comedy but it is funnier than most of them, or any other kind of 30's comedy for that matter.Gable and Davies were very photogenic and very glamorous and I guess that helped to put the picture over at the time. Truth be told, he was better than she was. Marion Davies was a very unnatural actress with an unmodulated voice and a reviewer above hit the nail on the head by saying she was no Carole Lombard. Walter Catlett, Roscoe Karns and, especially, Ruth Donnelly, helped out immensely, as did the excellent musical score. Lots of good songs in the big production number toward the end of the picture."Cain And Mabel" is a forgotten gem nowadays, and I can't figure out why. If you haven't seen it and you've read this far, you should. Otherwise you would miss the best 30's comedy that hardly anyone knows about.

I really loved Marion Davies in her silent films, but I've never liked her talking pictures that much as a whole. In this case, the plot is plucked from about a half dozen other 30's films that came before it, but the film does have Clark Gable going for it as well as those terrific contract Warner Brothers players.The premise is rather unbelievable. Waitress Mabel O'Dare is fired from her job for feeding a hungry unemployed publicist. He decides to help Mabel out by getting her a job in a Broadway show. The leading man pretends to be the show's producer as a gag, and tells Mabel she has the lead without even auditioning her. Unbelievable point number one - Mabel believes him. Unbelievable point number two - when she shows up and finds out she has no job, not even a spot in the chorus, the leading man and the producer feel so bad for her they do give her the lead, even though she's never danced or sung professionally before.All of this I could live with, but then you have prizefighter Larry Cain (Clark Gable) and Mabel hating each other throughout two-thirds of the film for a multitude of mutual insults and injuries to one another. However, a single home-cooked pork chop by Mabel and her revelation to Larry that she used to be a waitress has him proposing inside of ten minutes? This is too much to swallow even for one of the screwball comedies of the thirties.Finally there is the most tiresome part of the film, and that is the musical portion. There are two numbers that try to copy Busby Berkeley to some extent, but dance director Bobby Connelly doesn't seem to understand that you can't top Berkeley simply by building a taller set and a larger crane. Your numbers have to have some substance. The whole thing is haunted by the ghosts of the largely failed musical films of the late 20's and very early 30's with tableaux and spectacles that are just plain boring.I'd say it's almost a toss of a coin as to whether or not this one is worth your time. I gave it a 6/10 mainly because I'm such a sucker for those Warner Brothers films of the 1930s.

Louis B. Mayer got some good currency lending his number one star Clark Gable out to Columbia for It Happened One Night, to 20th Century Fox for Call of the Wild and now to Warner Brothers for Cain and Mabel. Sad to say though this one doesn't measure up to the other two.It's a musical and musicals back in the day had some truly ridiculous plots, but this one kind of defied belief. Davies is a waitress who becomes a Broadway musical star, but after a while she yearns for the simple life. Gable as he describes himself is just a gas jockey with a good punch who becomes heavyweight champion. They get thrown together for publicity's sake due to press agent Roscoe Karns. But of course they get serious for real as it always goes in these films.For myself I could not swallow that these two people just want to get back to their former nonentity existences. I think that would have been a bit much for Thirties theater audiences as well.Harry Warren and Al Dubin wrote two songs for the film, I'll Sing You a Thousand Love Songs and Coney Island, both of which get a semi Busby Berkeley treatment by dance director Bobby Connolly. My guess is that Berkeley probably passed on Cain and Mabel himself.Look for good performances from Walter Catlett as the Broadway producer and the aforementioned Roscoe Karns. Robert Paige is in this also under the name David Carlyle and he takes care of the vocal department as Davies leading man and a pretty sappy one at that. Then again he's supposed to not get her.Davies was very good as a light comedienne, but this material is too much for her.