Bette Davis and James Cagney are professionals and so is director William Keighley. They may have had to brave sweltering temperatures in Death Valley, but they have focused on the material and turned out an above-average picture. The script is rather intelligent and has a lot to say about the conditions these characters (and actors) are experiencing.Regarding the actual production of the film, it is said the stars did not want to do the project, that they did not get along, and that a rewrite was ordered. All of that seems irrelevant when one looks at the finished product; it is clear to see that this is a great screwball comedy and it works better than a lot of other films that attempt to cover similar territory.

Shown on TCM, this was the third of three comedies I recorded one morning a few days ago. As usual, I knew nothing about it before watching. The Bride Came COD stars James Cagney and Bette Davis. It brought to mind It Happened One Night because the premise is quite similar, although the actual plots are almost totally different.Both feature a young woman whose father objects to a new marriage, who is trying to get back with her husband/fiancé, who spends most of the movie with a man she detests, at least at first. The men are seeking financial reward and aren't interested in the woman, at least at first. The fun mostly involves the unexpected things that delay them in their quests and the sharp dialog between each pair. While you might well guess the outcome of their new relationships early on, the fun is watching how they warm up to each other.But that's where similarities end. It Happened mostly has the heroes traveling from Miami to New York, trying to avoid detectives hired by the girl's father. COD has the characters stranded in a ghost town for most of the film after airplane troubles flying from Los Angeles toward Las Vegas forced an emergency landing. It Happened has the male star, Clark Gable, portray a newspaperman after a story. COD has James Cagney play a Steve Collins, a cargo pilot who arranged to meet the girl's father in Amarillo, where he could deliver her, COD, for a payoff that will let him pay what he owes on his airplane.Bette Davis is Joan Winfield, daughter of oil millionaire Lucius Winfield, played magnificently by the gravelly-voiced Eugene Palette. She was eager to marry singer/musician Allen Brice (Jack Carson), even though she had only known him for four weeks.After the plane is forced to land and they sleep out under the stars, they discover a town a short hike away—but it is a ghost town. Like all movie/TV ghost towns, there is one inhabitant, an old prospector/minor who happily lives all alone. In this case, it is Pop Tolliver, played by Harry Davenport. He happily offers to cook breakfast for the pair (not by any means a couple, as Steve wants to pretend they were headed to Las Vegas to get married and she wants an opportunity to tell Pop that she has been kidnapped by her companion.) Whatever Steve says about his breakfast choices on bacon or ham or eggs straight up or scrambled, she tries to order the opposite. Pop says to her, that she'll have them like Steve because he doesn't want to get the orders mixed up.Pop does find out from the radio that the girl has been kidnapped and locks Steve in the decrepit old jail while he and Joan try to resurrect an old, old car to drive the long distance to the nearest living town, while Steve laughs through the jail window because the car is so rickety and sputtering. Sure enough, they don't make it and return to the ghost town.Joan and Steve wind up spending much more time together than they planned, more or less waiting for rescuers to come. Of course the finishing scenes, helped by William Frawley as Sheriff McGee, feature all sorts of confusion as a planned wedding doesn't come off nearly as expected. But it works out in the end like you would have wanted, as far as a Hollywood fiction story goes. Along the way it is full of laughs and characters you come to like.My favorite line comes when Allen meets his fiancée's father and tries to find out why he is opposed to the marriage. "What's wrong with me, may I ask?"Mr. Winfield explains, "We've had horse thieves in our family, but no tenors!"If part of the film looks like Death Valley, IMDb shows it was indeed filmed there. Fans of TV's Dennis the Menace should look closely for Dennis' father, Herb Anderson, as a reporter in a few scenes. A pilot with a tiny role was played by "DeWolf Hopper." Fans of TV's Perry Mason know him as William Hopper, aka Paul Drake, Perry's detective. His full name is William DeWolf Hopper, Jr., son of the famous Vaudevillian actor DeWolf Hopper, best known for making the poem "Casey at the Bat" a big hit by dramatically reciting it many, many times.

When Meryl Streep first became humorous in "She Devil", everybody was shocked that the star of "Sophie's Choice" and "Out of Africa" could be funny. Why? They didn't remember Bette Davis in this or "June Bride", Joan Crawford in "Love on the Run" or "They All Kissed the Bride", Katharine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby" or "The Philadelphia Story" or Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve" or "Christmas in Connecticut"? Even a "drama queen" can get loose every once in a while, and here, Bette makes her drama queen society débutante one of the funniest characters in screwball comedy history. Opposite James Cagney (away from gangster or serious tough guy roles, although his pilot is a bit of a tough guy), Davis is trying to escape her tyrannical father (Eugene Palette) to elope with staid radio star Jack Carson, and Cagney is hired by pops to kidnap her. Thanks to Davis's interference, the plane crashes in the desert, and Cagney and Davis fight, fall in love, feud over her freedom, and end up in many hysterically funny predicaments. One of those concerns Cagney's reaction to a slap across the face he receives from the temperamental Ms. D.Everything explodes into riotous humor when they encounter the reclusive Henry Travers who lives in an abandoned ghost town where even the ghosts seem to have skipped out. Travers, who loves people as long as he's nowhere near him, at first thinks that Cagney is guilty of her kidnapping, but soon learns otherwise, and Cagney is free to try to tame the shrewish Bette who isn't about to admit she is gaining feelings for her abductor. They end up in abandoned coal mine where, thanks to Davis's attempt to escape, the entrance is blocked, and Cagney teaches her a hysterical lesson. Then, Carson and Palette arrive, along with cop William Frawley, and everything ends up in a farcial delightful conclusion where Davis meets her biggest desert nemesis once again: an ill-place cactus that keeps greeting her in a most inconvenient place.While Davis had done comedy before ("The Golden Arrow" and "It's Love I'm After"), this was the real first time where she got to let her hair down and play dirty, and she is very funny. Cagney uses his dancing talents as his comic timing seems almost choreographed, and Travers is a delight with his lovable reclusive grouch getting to be sentimental with such reflections as his love of weddings so great he married three times just to go through the ceremony. Palette, Carson and Frawley also offer amusing performances, but it is Davis, Cagney and Travers who are given the funniest material. While the heyday of screwball comedy was slowly winding down, this is one of the better later ones, if not quite Preston Sturges still a delightfully entertaining romp in the cactus patch.

I had always avoided this flick because I love both its stars and had read and heard not-so-flattering things about it. Finally caught up with it on the beautiful DVD transfer, and was either laughing or smiling from beginning to end, and believe me that's a rarity! How nice to see all those naysayers proved wrong. Granted, this is one of the most contrived and tortured "meet cute" setups in screwball history, but the plot mechanics are dispensed with quickly and it's all Cagney and Davis at their most sparkling from there on. I actually think it's best to watch this not knowing what happens, so I'll just say WATCH IT if you have a liking for either -- or both -- of these stars. And the Epstein-brothers' script is hilarious; it should be studied by today's comedy writers.