You certainly liked this movie more than I did. For the most part, I found this movie pretty dreadful. The first 15 minutes are basically trying to make you root for the main character by making him lose everything, but in the process all it does is make every character look annoying except for Harry and Lloyd Nolan. And then, Lloyd Nolan spends the rest of the movie making himself look annoying. Constantly tricking his girlfriend for his own benefit when all she wants is to go home while constantly getting angry at Harry for no reason at all, any sympathy you may have had for him completely goes out the window. It’s also not helped by his constant whining about his “hot scoop” that takes forever to amount to anything. There’s way too many characters, too, and they’re introduced with almost no context; by the time the movie was over, I didn’t care enough to put everything together.
How Harry got third billing in this is beyond me. He barely does anything in this movie outside of being yelled at by Lloyd Nolan. Yes, it is kind of amusing seeing him eating everything he sees, and there’s one part where Lloyd Nolan throws a pillow at him that I laughed at, but beyond that, this is one of the few supporting roles from him that I could see being played by anyone else. He literally spends the last act tied up in a closet. For the final trick, they bring in these two drunk guys that Lloyd Nolan spent about 5 seconds with and have them pull the fire alarms. They’re more important to the plot than Harry, and they’re in it even less than he is. Say what you will about HALLELUJAH I’M A BUM (which I actually kind of liked), but at least there, Harry helps move the plot forward in certain scenes. Here, it feels like he was just thrown in at the last minute in an unsuccessful attempt to save this dumpster fire of a movie.
Annoying characters and overly complicated plot made this a huge chore to sit through and unlike A SOLDIER’S PLAYTHING, there’s not enough Harry here to make it worth it. This is a bad movie, even by B movie standards.
