User Reviews

Cagney was always trying to break away from his tough guy image, and is obviously relishing this FAST paced screwball comedy (think THE FRONT PAGE/HIS GIRL Friday) about two zany screenwriters. He mugs, he shouts, he dances, he wise-cracks, acts fey-you name it, he does a million bits of business here. Not until ONE,TWO,THREE 25 years later will you see Cagney in this mode again. FRONT PAGE vet Pat O'Brian easily keeps up the pace, but he's playing the "straight" funny man here. Ralph Bellamy is a riot as the idiot producer (college-man) as is Dick Foran, who sends up his own cowboy image (who knew Foran was this good?). At times the pace gets away from the actors and certain scenes are TOO frenetic, and laughs are lost, but generally this is such an off-beat surprise, that despite an ugly, washed out print that makes the film feel even older and less stellar, there is enough entertainment here for those who can plug into the farcical tone of a film that pulls the pants of Hollywood down.

I didn't find this to be a hilarious comedy, but it's entertaining and has some good performances. Cagney of course is excellent, and Marie Wilson is particularly charming as the naive mother of Happy, Hollywood's newborn sensation. The dialogue is extremely fast (for a challenge, try keeping up with it with your closed-captioning on.) The plot is perhaps a bit silly by today's standards, but good performances make this a worthwhile film. Look out for "in-jokes" about the movie industry, a future American president in a small role, and a lot of trumpets (or are they trombones?) Personally this film never made me laugh out loud, but it made me smile a lot.

Prankster screenwriters Robert Law (James Cagney) and J.C. Benson (Pat O'Brien) are struggling with a script. Robert is tired of writing trash. Western star Larry Toms is tired of the two writers. They pitch the standard to producer C.F. Friday. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl. Flighty pregnant waitress Susie Seabrook faints in Friday's office. The boys take on the job of being the baby's Godfathers and come up with a new idea for the cowboy movie.

The screwball comedy from the writing duo has some good humor. At least, they bring plenty of energy and that's enough to raise the comedic level. I like that they randomly lead a revolt of the native Indian actors. The rest is less fun. I do like the dimwitted Susie sometimes. I don't care that much about any of the characters. The movie should really center on the two writers rather be scattered around the various characters. Overall, there are a few little chuckles in this screwball comedy.

Impressively ludicrous and hyperactive Hollywood self-spoof, Cagney and O'Brien play a pair of screenwriters sponging from a studio too free with its money. Double-talk turns to triple-talk as they do battle with various opposing forces (a hapless cowboy star, a college-educated producer, an effete English extra and even Ronald Reagan) to control a baby-star whose career they created while it was still in the womb; they are only defeated by the Eternal Power of Love as Boy Meets Girl, Boy Loses Girl, Boy Finds Girl Again. Cagney, a genius who always struggled to play anyone who remotely resembled a normal human being, and O'Brien speak so fast that even native speakers of English struggle to follow. They would have given the Marx Brothers a run for their manic money.

Yet the greatest lines (and facial expressions) are reserved for Ralph Bellamy, on top form as the dopey producer (presumably a caricature of some well-known figure). Only Bellamy could spin comic gold from a line like "Good Gad, you've been drinking my milk." "It's 1938" says O'Brien. "I know that," replies Bellamy, "but not everyone's an intellectual."

I adore James Cagney, and while I find a lot of the antics in this film to be over-the-top--annoying even--I do enjoy imagining how much fun Cagney must've had making this crazy film with his pals Pat O'Brien & Frank McHugh!

Cagney disguised in beret and thick sunglasses, is a different look. He also throws in some spontaneous dancing. This would be fun to watch in a theater with audience reaction, from a stage play. The true professional comedian here is McHugh whose timing is impeccable. Cagney and O'Brien turn up their famous verbal virtuosity as if as revenge for being valued below their own creations: the weak love interest involving a single mom, a singing cowboy who doesn't sing and the baby star. Here boy meets Marie Wilson and no one particularly wants them to get together but the plot could use it. Otherwise the Code might shut this down. Cagney and O'Brien are musketeers jousting with Bellamy and McHugh, enough for a rat pack.

James Cagney had been in a dispute with Warner Brothers since 1936. In 1938 the situation was resolved, and Cagney returned to his home studio - to do THIS? It seemed like they were punishing him for the entire episode, but his autobiography mentions only that he was glad to team with his two pals O'Brien and Bellamy. He does admit that he never deliberately watched his own movies though, and only saw this one on TV after he retired.

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien are two Hollywood writers tasked by their studio with coming up with a script for the studio's top Western star, with Dick Foran basically doing a parody of himself in just about every role as a cowboy that he ever had. A waitress from the studio commissary brings up the writers' lunch and passes out. It turns out she is pregnant, and Cagney and O'Brien get the idea of making a baby central to Foran's next Western. In fact they make the waitress' baby a star. Everyone acts like this waitress invented the concept of infancy, because it never seems to occur to them that if something happened and this baby was unavailable that they could just go out and recruit another one. Marie Wilson plays the infant star's mother, and a little of her dumb and naive act goes a long way, in fact it goes too far and she is just annoying in short order. This was supposed to be a parody of Hollywood, but it was unfunny at best and tedious at its worst.

The first half is almost indescribably bad. It has everybody behaving hyperactively, talking so fast you can hardly understand them, and doing things that make no sense. It is exhibit A in everything that can go wrong in a comedy during the early years of the production code. This approach might have worked for the Marx Brothers, but it was - at the same time - chaotic and boring in this situation.

And then it's like a different director took over at the halfway point, everything calms down, and there's actually room for meaningful dialog, especially between Cagney and O'Brien. It's not particularly compelling, but if the entire film had been like the second half it would have been a respectable 6/10.

I love "screwball comedies" from the 1930s and 40s. Such films as ARSENIC AND OLD LACE and BRINGING UP BABY and HIS GIRL Friday are wonderful films--with a wonderfully breezy pace, high energy and lots of laughs. BOY MEETS GIRL is an attempt to do this same sort of comedy, though the laughs just aren't that noticeable and the film is too darn frenetic to be enjoyed. I am serious when I say that this film was even more fast-paced and hyper than ONE, TWO, THREE and ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Because of this, I really found the film to be, at times, truly annoying--particularly the characters played by Cagney and O'Brien. They were NOT particularly likable, well-developed or easy to follow! In many ways, it was like having an average actor pretend to be a Marx Brother from one of their REALLY hyper early films--like HORSEFEATHERS. The problem is, it worked for the Marxes--but not here. A frantic pace alone does not make a movie--a decent script and good characters need to be in place as well.

Not in plot. In style where it counts. The dialogue comes really thick and fast. Pat O'Brien plays smooth Hildy Johnson again, only this time he's called J. Carlyle Benson, screenwriter. He runs rings around Ralph Bellamy who is bemusedly befuddled once more, as he was about to be shortly in "His Girl Friday", the remake of "The Front Page". "Boy Meets Girl" can hold its head up high in the company of either of those films. There are crazy laughs and movie industry in-jokes aplenty.

There's a swipe at Canadians! There's a swipe at Mark Hellinger!! There's a swipe at Marcel Proust!!! "Lui-même!" as pretentious droppers of French phrases like Ralph Bellamy would say.

Pat O'Brien does a pratfall! In the part of conniving Walter Burns, you've got Jimmy Cagney who naturally has no trouble keeping up with Pat. Jimmy's real-life buddy Frank McHugh plays their nemesis, Rossetti, the agent.

There are good, well-written parts here even for minor characters like those played by Marie Wilson and Bruce Lester.

Because the movie is littered with gags of all kinds, I just assume that the "errors" I see are only more in-jokes. Two characters discuss Errol Flynn and agree that he really is English. Wrong! We know he's actually Australian. But it's just another joke, in disguise. Doubly ironic is the fact that the English character in the scene is played by a South African. There's a joke about exactly this sort of thing in a different scene! Art imitates life imitating art imitating life. Or something. A cowboy movie gets produced during the course of the film. It's called "Golden Nuggets" on the poster, then "Golden Nugget" a minute later in the movie trailer. A mistake? Or just another swipe, this time at more typical slipshod Hollywood productions?

A film by and about screenwriters making fun of themselves, and everyone else while they're at it. A really funny, fast-moving story and a tangled plot. An ironic title. This is no simple "boy meets girl" movie.

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien: wow, there is a pair of talented Irishmen! Cagney is my all- time favorite actor and O'Brien is either excellent or annoying, depending on the role. In this both, to be honest, both of these guys look, sound and act stupid. Here is another "screwball comedy" that doesn't work, despite those two fabulous leading men. These guys look out of place in this film. It doesn't help that the dialog in here is just awful.

It's a fast-paced film, and I have no problems with that although it is a bit frantic at times. I just didn't like the main characters - "Robert Law" (Cagney) and "J.C. Benson" (O'Brien) - and thought the movie was dumb. And, yes, it's very dated and looks even dumber. Where are the laughs?

I understand this story was quite a successful play, so they must have screwed this up in the screen writing. Speaking of that, this story is a spoof about screenwriters who under pressure to come with a story for a has-been cowboy star. It's more of that than it is a "boy-meets- girl" story as the title implies, although Marie Wilson plays the female catch. This ditzy blonde wouldn't be a "catch" for me, not with that brutal voice of hers that grated on me like chalk on a blackboard. I liked her name in this movie: "Susie Seabrook." That was all I liked.

This is easily the 3rd worst Cagney movie of the 1930's (I'll leave it to you to decide whether GREAT GUY or SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT is #1, but the latter single-handedly sunk Grand National). The problem here isn't the performers--- Cagney is my all-time favorite actor--- but the script. The Broadway-anchored Spewacks just do a rotten attempt at replicating the energy of THE FRONT PAGE, likely reminded of Pat O'Brien being in that gem some 7 years earlier. Buddies Cagney & O'Brien obviously enjoyed the rapid-fire dialog but here, it's just too much that goes nowhere. Ralph Bellamy is a $50,000 year idiot producer and Dick Foran plays an oater star concerned about the direction of his nominal career. The picture doesn't generate laughs and is chock full of inside Warner cracks ("they broke the Vita-Glass!"--- okay, that was amusing I'll admit) and blatant name-dropping of lots of stars--- all Warner contractees. The main interest is the stellar cast that performs far beyond the call of duty: Penny Singleton does a bit as a manicurist, Marie Wilson co-stars as a dumb commissary employee who's preggers--- with questionable marital status (odd for a film made during the Hays Code) and a voice that could peel paint. In the highlight of the movie, a 27-year old Ronald Reagan appears in a well played bit as an announcer doing a remote at a film premier who cuts Wilson off a nanosecond before the Production Code would've kicked in. Also look for curvy Carol Landis in an uncredited role as a cashier. There's enough fodder for a movie nut but a casual viewer would find the movie a waste of DVR space. I found myself thinking about Cagney & O'Brien all appearing in RAGTIME 43 years later and the amazing never-got-the-girl career Bellamy had right up until he died in 1991. Note: I think the IMDb link to the alleged "Baby Happy" actor is wrong. The actor's birth date is listed as 1927 and this '38 release has an actual infant in it.

This was the first Names Cagney movie that I absolutely did not enjoy. To say I'm disappointed is putting it mildly. I found it annoying many times with all the yelling and loud talking. I think this movie was supposed to be a comedy. I didn't find it funny or entertaining in the least. It wasn't a good drama, either. I'm a Cagney fan, and if you are too, then skip this movie.

James Cagney and Pat O'Brien made their second of two films adapted from Broadway plays, the first being Ceiling Zero. Boy Meets Girl, written by the husband and wife team of Samuel and Bella Spewack ran for 664 performances and was directed on Broadway by the great George Abbott.

It would have been nice had Warner Brothers secured the services of Mr. Abbott to direct this film version. But even without his touch Boy Meets Girl nicely adapts from the stage to the screen. The parts of Benson and Law, based loosely on the writing team of Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht, fit Cagney and O'Brien very well indeed.

I've always been of the opinion though it is the strong performances of the supporting cast that make this film. Dick Foran showed what a really good sport he was in satirizing himself essentially. At the time Boy Meets Girl was made, Foran was Warner Brothers B picture singing cowboy star. A whole lot of other players would never have done what Foran did. Too bad they didn't give him a song to sing in this though.

But the performance I really like is that of Ralph Bellamy, the harassed studio executive who is being driven to his wit's end by the antics of Cagney and O'Brien. Forget The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, or even Sunrise at Campobello, this to me is Ralph Bellamy's career role. What makes it work is that Bellamy does play it so seriously against Cagney and O'Brien.

Frank McHugh, Marie Wilson, and Bruce Lester are involved in this also. And very prominently featured is the 40th President of the United States in one of the first roles that brought him some attention as a radio announcer. Since that's what Ronald Reagan was before coming to Hollywood, no strain here on any acting ability. Still he has some good moments as Cagney hatches a plot that does disrupt his broadcast.

Do you ever think Ralph Bellamy finally did cure all the problems that 'Young England' was facing?

Boy Meets Girl (1938)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely poor and unfunny spoof of Hollywood has two screenwriters (James Cagney/Pat O'Brien) coming up with a scheme to make their next film a hit. There's a lot of fast talking and some slapstick but I can't help but feel this should have been a film with The Marx Brothers instead. Cagney and O'Brien make a great team in dramas but their comedy act here just doesn't work and it comes off quite forced. The laughs are pushed so hard that it becomes rather annoying very quickly. Ralph Bellamy co-stars in this semi-redo of The Front Page. To date, this is the worst Cagney film I've seen.

Watched about twenty minutes of it until I realized that I was viewing "Hail Ceasar" with the satire deftly neutered and utterly toothless. With the possible exception of John Wayne and Ward Bond I cannot conceive of two actors less suited to zany, Marxian antics than James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. The former's verbal zingers are nasty/mean instead of nasty/funny while the later's physical comedy timing is lumbering rather than adroit. And you can double that for director Lloyd Bacon! Literally the only time I essayed a chuckle was when the Brit extra scolded Ralph Bellamy's boob studio exec on his lack of knowledge of limey military culture. And speaking of Bellamy when you compare his trite take with the brilliantly layered performance of Josh Brolin in the same role sixty eight years later the limitations of this 1938 Hollywood looks on itself offering cause you to do a double take. C minus.

Madcap screwball comedy doesn't get any madder than BOY MEETS GIRL which has JAMES CAGNEY and PAT O'BRIEN as two oddball screenwriters who play their annoying characters to the hilt. DICK FORAN plays an actor looking for a good story (lots of luck), claiming he gets fan mail from a lot of people who can't even write! FRANK McHUGH, RALPH BELLAMY and MARIE Wilson fill out the Warner contract players cast, all of them doing their usual schtick but with less funny results than usual. The script is nothing more than a fable about a Hollywood that never existed except as a playground for madness on a grand scale with all of the fast talking players caught up in an impossibly silly script about the search for a "new" story for Foran.

Not much can be said for Cagney and O'Brien--the ham is really overdone--and even RALPH BELLAMY overdoes the role of the studio head who has three films in production and doesn't know what's going on.

If you can stay with it through the first half-hour, this is your kind of screwball comedy. As for me, I had to tune out before it was over.

Trivia note: A bright moment has Bellamy declaring: "Do you boys know you're making more money than the president of the United States?"

That is the philosophy of J. Carlyle Benson (Pat O'Brien), fast talking screen writing hack at Monumental Pictures, a Hollywood dream creating factory run by C. Elliott Friday (Ralph Bellamy). Benson constantly insists that is the simple formula for every film script he and his partner Robert Law (James Cagney) do at Monumental. It must work because they are more than tolerated by the pretentious, "intellectual" Friday, who spends most of his time trying to salvage a movie set in Britain (at one point making the grandiloquent comment, "I'm trying to save "Young England"!"). Friday's intellectual triteness is easily shown - he so misunderstands just what a "trumpet" is, that he ends up making his sentinels blow some preposterous looking trombone while wearing beefeater costumes.

Pat O'Brien and James Cagney formed one of the most legendary friendships in Hollywood history, lasting from the 1930s until the 1980s. It was the backbone of what was called the "Irish Mafia" (O'Brien, Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Frank McHugh, Lynn Overman). They co-starred in many films, most notably ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES, TORRID ZONE, THE FIGHTING 69TH, and this, their only real comedy together (the other films have comic moments, but are basically dramatic). BOY MEETS GIRL was a farce about Hollywood film making by Samuel and Bella Spivak, that was a Broadway hit. It translate well to the screen, as it follows the antics of O'Brien and Cagney as frustrated writers turned into meaningless hacks. In fact, despite the financial benefits for surrendering their talents, it takes a toll on the men. Cagney feels disgusted at the loss of his real writing talent (he almost got the Pulitzer Prize). O'Brien finds his marriage suffering due to his feelings, and his wife eventually walks out on him.

So they take their revenge on several targets, most notably Mr. Friday, but also the Dick Foran, a popular cowboy star at the lot, and his obnoxious agent Frank McHugh (one of the few McHugh - Cagney films where McHugh is not a close friend of Cagney's). Then they meet an employee of the studio (Marie Wilson), who has a baby but no living husband. Wilson's baby is quite adorable, so Benson and Law create a series of films involving the baby in the old west, and so force Foran into a co-starring position that he resents. Lest you think this is extreme, the 1930s saw many film series in which children or babies dominate. Shirley Temple is the best known example, but Jane Withers was the central figure in several movies, as was young Jackie Cooper, and even the Dionne Quintuplets. Further, there was a silent film called "Three Godfathers" that John Ford directed (he would later remake it with John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., and Pedro Armendariz), in which the western heroes give their all for a baby that is left with them.

The speed of the farce is matched by the delivery of lines by both it's Irish-American stars. O'Brien had learned to deliver lines snappily early on, and his speed is infectious on Cagney. But they can slow down for effect, especially as they give capsule descriptions of their gooey plots (at one moment, Cagney reveals the obvious point - when badman Foran is about to hide his loot from a robbery, he looks down at the place he chose, and "What do you think he finds? A Baabee!" dramatizes Jimmy). He also tries to make up dialog to explain the missing father of the baby, by suggesting that he may not have died on the Morro Castle (burned in 1934).

If the situation seems somewhat more dated today because screen writing is recognize (when well done) as the equivalent of a good novel, short story, essay, or play, the movie's gusto and humor still work quite well. So while not a film meriting a "10" it still gets a "9".

Gotta' credit Warner Bros. with a lot of guts for taking its top gangster star, James Cagney, and stiffly heroic Pat O'Brien and teaming them as a pair of screen writing con artists in a zany farce. But thanks to the wordplay of Sam and Bella Spewack, who adapted "Boy Meets Girl" from their Broadway hit, it works beautifully. And often hilariously. The set-up is simple. Challenged to come up with a script for sputtering cowboy star Dick Foran, Cagney and O'Brien are at wits' (or more like halfwits') end until commissary waitress Marie Wilson collapses while serving lunch. Seems she's about to have a baby (sans husband, a surprise given the strength of the Hays Office in 1938 although her slim figure suggests at least some degree of censorship.) The plucky screenwriters build a storyline around the baby who's born shortly thereafter and goes on to become an 8-month old superstar, eclipsing the increasingly furious Foran. There's also Ralph Bellamy as a pretentious mini-mogul, Bruce Lester as a British extra who's not what he seems, Ronald Reagan in a brief bit as a radio announcer, pre-Blondie Penny Singleton seen even more briefly as a manicurist, a squad of angry rock-throwing Indians and a relay team of slide trombonists to add to the comic confusion. All-in-all, a very entertaining movie -- and when Cagney illustrates a story point with an impromptu tap dance, you get a preview of the "Yankee Doodle" dandy he'll play five years later.

Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien are a couple of overpaid, practical-joking screen writers who promote Marie Wilson's newborn baby into a major movie star.

It's an exceedingly late crazy comedy, based on a stage play by Bella and Sam Spewack, Cagney & O'Brien's roles are said to be based on Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; Ralph Bellamy is very silly as a pompous producer, and Miss Wilson plays her wide-eyed blonde with all the stops pulled out. There are lots of in-gags, and if sometimes it seems frantic rather than funny, that's when Cagney & O'Brien start talking faster than a hockey announcer. Look for quick, uncredited appearances by Ronald Reagan, Carole Landis, Penny Singleton, and Curt Bois.