Two in a Crowd (1936) User Reviews (2)

An Undiscovered Treat For Screwball Comedy Fans

[bkoganbing · 7/10 · 31 July 2010]

At this point in his career Joel McCrea was under personal contract to Samuel Goldwyn who lent him out to Universal Pictures for this amusing comedy in which McCrea co-starred with Joan Bennett. This is one film that Preston Sturges might have seen and remembered when casting some of his Paramount films where he used McCrea to great effectiveness in comedy parts.

In Two In A Crowd McCrea is paired with Joan Bennett and they begin the film in exactly that way as two people lost in a crowd of New Year's revelers. Both bend down and pick up two halves of a thousand dollar bill tossed by some other partiers from a building. What McCrea and Bennett don't know is that the money is from a bank robbery and the next day the robbers are hot on the trail.

So are the cops as McCrea and his friend Elisha Cook, Jr. go in and cash the bill for some smaller change. The bank notes the serial number and sends Nat Pendleton who gives one hilarious performance as an inept and bumbling cop who trails McCrea to find out where the loot his hidden and who is accomplices are.

McCrea's idea with that thousand dollars is to get a racehorse he owns out of hock and entered in a stakes race and hope Cook can ride him to victory. Bennett for richer or poorer has her fate tied with McCrea. As for the horse he's earning his keep being hitched to a wagon delivering coal for Andy Clyde. McCrea, Bennett, and Cook all wind up boarding with Clyde as well after he's tossed from his apartment by landlady Allison Skipworth. Later on a couple of down on their luck park bench dwellers join them because they've bought a sweepstakes ticket on McCrea's horse. They're played very nicely by Reginald Denny and Donald Meek.

If someone like Preston Sturges or Leo McCarey had ever directed Two In A Crowd this film would be a comedy classic. As it is it's an undiscovered treat for film fans who like Thirties screwball comedy. And at least Joan Bennett was not playing an heiress.

And the world revolves around them.

[mark.waltz · 7/10 · 19 December 2020]

Never expect reality in a screwball comedy, and here, reality is about as likely to occur as a vacant Times Square on New Years Eve. It all surrounds a ripped up thousand dollar bill, tossed out of a window right on Broadway, with each half claimed by horse racing aficionado Joel McCrea and the down on her luck Joan Bennett, desperate for a job to send to her family up north. It turns out that she has no place to go so McCrea puts her up, and along with his pal Elisha Cook Jr., they scheme to turn the thousand dollars into something more.

Unfortunately, they have the bank robber (Bradley Page) who stole the money and a bank detective (Nat Pendleton) on their trail, but having gone from living in Allison Skipworth's apartment building to Andy Clyde's grain and fees businessmen, they're easy to lose. Lots of other wacky characters pop in and out of this wacky Universal farce including hobo Donald Meek and homeless British aristocrat Reginald Denny, a reflection of the aftermath of the depression.

The beautiful people played by McCrea and Bennett are easy to root for with McCrea a jokester but honorable and Bennett smart but loveable. Skipworth's landlady gets lots of funny moments, especially her reaction to the middle of the night raspberry she gets (as well as a delightful nickname), and silent comic Clyde is delightfully cantankerous but secretly a softy.

Page's villain is played for laughs (it's his drunken New York antics that causes the bill to be tossed out of the window in the first place), and Pendleton gets lots of laughs as well as his schemes to get the goods on McCrea and Bennett keeps blowing up in his face. Not among the great screwball comedies, it's still nice to see someone other than Carole Lombard, Jean Arthur or Claudette Colbert in this situation, and Bennett is well paired with McCrea. Truly a delightful find.