Fri 4 Mar 2011
A Movie Review by Stan Burns: NO TIME FOR LOVE (1943).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[5] Comments
NO TIME FOR LOVE. Paramount Pictures, 1943. Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Ilka Chase, Richard Haydn, Paul McGrath, June Havoc, Marjorie Gateson. Director: Mitchell Leisen.
Sandhog Jim Ryan (Fred MacMurray, who is surprisingly buff with his shirt off) is suspended for four months from his job digging a tunnel because of a “friendly” fight with fellow workers that was by happenstance shot by society photographer Katherine Grant (Claudette Colbert).
Because the picture was run by her jealous boyfriend in his magazine (without her knowledge and against her wishes), and its publication led to Ryan’s job loss, Katherine feels responsible and hires Ryan to assist her while he is suspended for four months — which turns into a disaster as he clashes with her on all of her assignments, including picking a fight with a body builder she is try to photograph.
The two are the perfect mismatched pair: she is elegant and refined, and he thinks all her friends are stuck-up jerks and chases after blond floozies. Obviously they are going to fall in love.
A few good lines, but mostly the movie is carried by the charm of the lead actors. The underground tunnel set is very well created and the movie was deservedly nominated for an Oscar for Art Direction. The actors must have loved working in all that mud!
Definitely worth a look, but MacMurray and Colbert are much better paired in The Egg and I.
Rating: B.
March 4th, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Those underground sequences are stunning, but this one is best known today for a fantasy sequence in which Colbert dreams of MacMurray as a super hero battling villain Bill Quinn.
In one of those incredible coincidences that usually spawn conspiracy theories Fred sports a uniform that is the spitting image of that worn by Fawcett superhero Captain Marvel — all the more incredible because creator C.C. Beck always claimed he modeled the Big Red Cheese on MacMurray.
It works out the timeline is all wrong. The producers and art designers for the film could not have seen Beck’s creation and Beck could not have seen the movie, but the resemblence is startling.
Well done film with a fine cast. MacMurray and Colbert are good together, but then he did so many of these films with the best actresses in screen comedy it is little wonder he was good at it.
March 5th, 2011 at 5:05 pm
I’ve not seen this one. Has TCM ever shown it? I see that it’s available on DVD in a box set of Claudette Colbert films. I’m thinking about it. But I have over $500 of stuff in my Amazon shopping cart right now, and some is going to have to wait for next month.
Beck wouldn’t have been able to see the movie before he created Captain Marvel, but the claim that he used Fred MacMurray as a model has been around for a long time and could still be true, not so?
March 5th, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Beck changed his story a few times, but it is pretty much agreed than MacMurray was his model for Captain Marvel — hard for a lot of people who grew up on MY THREE SONS to imagine, but Fred was, as the review points out, a hunk back then.
But it is an odd coincidence that Beck modeled CM on MacMurray, and then MacMurray did a film in which he wore almost the exact uniform design (both designs are a mix of Superman, Flash Gordon, and Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations for THE PRISONER OF ZENDA).
Incidentally several superheroes from comics and pulps had their screen models. Doc Savage was modeled on Clark Gable (which is why he is Clark Savage), Harold Foste modeled his Tarzan on Henry Wilcoxin, Clark Kent is modeled on Harold Lloyd, and Blackhawk was modeled on Tyrone Power (also Skyman, Doll Man, and the Black Condor).
But it is generally accepted that Beck was using Fred as the model for CM even though later in THE GOOD HUMOR MAN, Jack Carson looked uncannily like Beck’s creation when he donned the uniform (in a film ironically co-starring George Reeves — what would Louis Nizer say?).
March 6th, 2011 at 5:25 pm
I have a copy of The Good Humor Man on tape, and watched it last year. A fun film – silly, but entertaining. Makes a good double bill with The Fuller Brush Man or Whistling in the Dark on a rainy night, curling up with fresh popped popcorn and a cold Coke.
March 6th, 2011 at 6:12 pm
Stan, you can download the Fawcett comic book promoting THE GOOD HUMOR MAN at Digital Comic Museum — it’s not an adaptation of the film, but a promo in which Jack Carson in the character of the Good Humor Man helps Captain Marvel.