Miss Polly Reviews

This is a rather delightful -- and, in its own way, serious -- satire of small-town life, perhaps not up to the level of, say, Nothing Sacred or Hail the Conquering Hero. Director Fred Guiol shows as deft a hand juggling the comic elements here as he did working with Laurel & Hardy in the late '20s -- he's able to switch gears easily enough and he has an attractive, appealing cast of veteran character players, led by ZaSu Pitts in one of the most genial roles of her career. Her Pandora Polly is wise, gentle, kind, and thoughtful, as well as feisty -- the perfect foil for Slim Summerville's portrayal of her inept inventor gardener, and Kathleen Howard as an overbearing battleaxe of a neighbor. A lot of the gag set pieces have been recycled from earlier movies, especially the films of Laurel & Hardy, but it still works, mostly because Pitts is so charming. The whole piece is a good comic exercise in people not throwing stones when they live in glass houses, done in enjoyably slapstick style. It's a brand of comedy that appealed to a small-town audience that still made up the majority of the moviegoing public on the eve of World War II -- but there the topicality enters into the picture with the scene of truckloads of soldiers on their way from camp on leave, a sequence we would not have seen in a movie made even a year earlier.