There's a major contract in the offing, but Tom Ricketts needs someone who can look like there's nothing going on upstairs. So he offers Edward Everett Horton a junior partnership at $2000 a week. And bring his wife to the house tonight. Ricketts has heard she's lovely. However, Horton's wife, Laura La Plante, has walked out after Horton has refused to let her buy a new rug on credit. Thinking fast of the wrong thing, Horton accepts and goes to a theatrical agency to hire Dorothy Revier to pretend to be his wife for the evening. Her husband the prizefighter wants her back by 11 or, presumably, he'll turn Horton's head into a pumpkin. When Horton, Miss Revier, and potential contract George Siegmann arrive, Siegmann says he needs to go to a hotel for a stenographer, but Ricketts has a stenographer on hand, newly hired Miss La Plante. Who is told that Horton has been a partner for three years, ever since he got married, and the twins are lovely.
And so it gets set up for a farcical go around. It's nicely done, if abruptly ended, and Horton gives a typically fine performance, as does Miss La Plante. They have good chemistry. We forget, because of his long starring support career from the 1930s through the early 1970s, that Horton was a staring comic actor in the silent era, with half a dozen features, and even a series of shorts produced by Harold Lloyd for release by Paramount. Here, in a standard but solid comedy from director Harry Pollard, he runs through his paces very nicely.
And so it gets set up for a farcical go around. It's nicely done, if abruptly ended, and Horton gives a typically fine performance, as does Miss La Plante. They have good chemistry. We forget, because of his long starring support career from the 1930s through the early 1970s, that Horton was a staring comic actor in the silent era, with half a dozen features, and even a series of shorts produced by Harold Lloyd for release by Paramount. Here, in a standard but solid comedy from director Harry Pollard, he runs through his paces very nicely.
