Four's a Crowd (1938)

OK! This is not the great hidden screwball masterpiece. The screwy cleverness is pretty obvious, but it's still funny. The story is adequate enough to keep the laughs coming with the right cast. I won't bother too much with the details because you'll get the idea pretty quickly. This is the right cast however and they keep the laughs coming.

For me the highlights are the scenes with Errol Flynn and Rosalind Russell. Russell has always been great as a comedienne and she delivers here as well, but Flynn is a revelation. Like Frank Morgan and Walter Pidgeon before him, he is the guy who not only can, but will, sell refrigerators to the Eskimos. When he turns the charm on Russell it's like being with that cousin who got you into network marketing.

The final act gets the ensemble (de Havilland,Flynn, Knowles and Russell) colliding together like bumper cars with Justice of the Peace, Hugh Herbert misdirecting traffic. He may have delivered the ultimate screwball line ever with "Children, please don't fight! There'll be time for that after you're married."

Realistically, it's obvious why the suits would not let Flynn take this direction, he was the king of swashbucklers and this would have weakened the brand. However, this movie shows what he could have been. As a screwball lead he had charm, athleticism, comic timing, sexy looks and a great voice, but so did Grant, Barrymore and Cooper and others and they were kind enough to leave the pirate market to him. A loss but I'll console myself with another hundred views of Captain Blood.