LET'S LIVE A LITTLE

US, 1948, 85 minutes, Black and white.
Hedy Lamarr, Robert Cummings, Anna Sten, Robert Shayne, Norma Varden.
Directed by Richard Wallace.

This is a very slight romantic comedy, the main reason for seeing it being Hedy Lamarr, always a beautiful and attractive screen presence. Some might think it a stretch for her to be playing a psychiatrist but, in life, she had some scientific and engineering achievements.

Robert Cummings, not always the most sympathetic of romantic comedy characters, plays a rather of obnoxious and over-busy advertising man, racing around the studio, ordering people about, having called shadows to calm down, forgetting whether he had them or not, putting on his clothes back-to-front, hearing phones when they are not ringing… He is also given quite a number of lines which seem now particularly misogynistic. He has been engaged to a rather haughty executive of a perfume company, wanting her to sign contracts. She is played by Anna Sten.

A book comes across his desk Let’s Live a Little, written by the psychiatrist, and he decides that he wants a promotion contract. He goes to the office, not suspecting that the doctor is a woman. He is not very good at dealing with women – at all. The doctor is intrigued, gets her doctor partner to take her to a nightclub where she meets the advertising man and his date.

All that might be expected actually happens, he falling in love with her without realising it, she falling in love with him. There are ups and downs, some clashes, she becoming unsure of herself and hearing phones ring…

Typical enough of the slight romantic comedies of the 1940s.