Nothing Sacred

Spoiler on the original poster!

Nothing Sacred
United Artists
November 25, 1937
Comedy, Romance
DVD
C+

I really don't know what I think of this movie and I was on the C/C+ fence in the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes.  Ultimately, I can marginally recommend it, for its cast and some of its script.  I like some of the offbeat humor, like the Calvin Coolidge joke (yes, I am the world's oldest 52-year-old), as well as its observations about the press.  Given the title, I guess I shouldn't be too shocked that a couple has a fistfight, while declaring their love, even though he keeps telling her to shut up and she's lied to him and the world, especially New York City, about having radium poisoning.  This is that odd movie that is a comedy and a romance without at all being a romcom, although, yeah, it's got a heck of a meet-cute.

William A. Wellman directed this eighteen years before Blood Alley.

Speak Easily

Speak Easily
MGM
August 13, 1932
Comedy
DVD
C+

While this is never as funny as it promises to be, it's an amiable enough movie, both as pre-Code saucy as Thelma Todd (cast to type as someone with "sex appeal") and as bumblingly innocent as Buster Keaton playing an unworldly professor.  Jimmy Durante tells a lot of deliberately bad jokes, and the film meanders, but it's a pleasant 80 minutes or so.  (And a time capsule of course, with "drag" used in the "Varsity Drag" sense.)  Edward Sedgwick directed.