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When even a script by Joseph Fields and Philip G. Epstein and the presence of Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Billy Gilbert can't save a movie, a viewer knows they're in trouble.

Fred Stone may have been a delightful and welcome personality to audiences in the first third of the century, but he's nothing but annoyingly obnoxious in this one. The movie paints him as a charming eccentric who seems to be doing wrong but comes out right but, in actuality, he's a stupid busybody who gets a couple of innocent people killed through his dimwitted schemes. Every time the movie threatens to become interesting or funny, Stone's character mucks it up by doing something that no one with three functioning brain cells would do.

The Monopoly scene is a decent one, but that's mainly due to Williams's talents and Stone's not being an active presence in the scene.

I'm a sucker for unknown and little-seen B pictures, but this is like one of those acts that closed vaudeville shows: intended to clear out the theatre to make room for the next audience.

My gosh, it's exhausting to watch this. The filmmaker(s) threw everything they could find and every technique they could think of into the blender, added a ton of amphetamines, and present everything at such a breathless pace that nothing ends up having any meaning--it's all so frantic and show-offy ("Look how innovative we can be in presenting this!") that the important information gets lost. If -everything- is vitally important, -nothing- is vitally important.

Guy-Blache's contribution to film history is too important to be presented in such a helter-skelter manner. Slow the hell down and let us absorb and appreciate it.

Even by the standard of the racial insensitivity of the early 60s, this one is a stunner.

Let me note here that I usually take the racism and stereotypes of the studio period in stride. It's ugly, but that's what the period was like.

This episode, though, obviously a backdoor pilot for a series featuring Jack Carter as a lovable con man fails, thanks to Carter's basic unlikeability in the role, the over-the-top characterizations of the Japanese characters (at least two Japanese-American actors are directed to use horrific accents), and the terrible stereotyped writing.

"Ensign O'Toole" was a problematic series at best, but this episode was the final nail in its coffin; a most unfortunate way for the show to go out.

Only for completists of the series or of Carter's work.

While "Beauty and the Boss" isn't a total loss - no movie with Warren William and Charles Butterworth could be - it's darn close, and the fault, dear Brutus, lies with its leading lady, Marion Marsh.

I'm a connoisseur of bad performances, and always held Wheeler Oakman's wooden acting in "Lights of New York" as the gold standard, but Marsh has taken the title in a first-round knockout.

Either director Roy Del Ruth was too busy to direct Marsh or was deliberately trying to end her contract, but the decision to let her speak all her lines as rapidly and with as little inflection as possible was fatal. Every time she's on screen, she kills the picture with her lack of ability to act.

Mary Doran, who plays the "other woman" is so far superior to her in terms of personality and intelligence that it's baffling how William's character throws her over for such a dimwit.

I blame Del Ruth, ultimately. Any director who let Marsh get away with that performance -and- cuts away from Butterworth doing the tango is clearly having a bad time of it.

Don't be fooled by the other positive reviews. It's shocking how so many talented people could so egregiously misunderstand Chekhov and his intentions in this play. He wrote a comedy (despite the shocking ending); a satire on artistic pretensions, artists, and those who refuse to take responsibility for their lives and actions. This film succumbs to every cliché about the gloominess and static inertia that Chekhov supposedly deals in. Despite some efforts that aren't half-bad (Mason isn't bad, but is decades too old, and Redgrave tries her best), this film never misses an opportunity to take a misstep and do exactly the wrong thing.

In a word, awful.