FOOLS FOR SCANDAL (1938)

I'm not a Carole Lombard fan, and this movie didn't convert me, but watching it was a pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning. It's basically a screwball comedy played at a relatively slow pace. Lombard is an American movie actress who is in Paris in disguise for the weekend with her boyfriend, insurance agent Ralph Bellamy (playing another in a long line of patsy stooges who exist as easy targets for the *real* romantic hero to knock down). She meets cute with down-on-his-luck French nobleman Fernand Gravet--maybe I missed something, but I never did figure out why he was so poor when all of Paris seemed to know him, and he was apparently a hell of a chef. They go through the usual on-again, off-again romantic shenanigans of this kind of movie until they wind up together at the end. Gravet was good, though he had an odd accent for a Frenchman: a little French, a little New York. At times, he sounded like Cary Grant. Allen Jenkins does his usual fine job as comic sidekick, and Marie Wilson is just as good, though in a role too small for her to shine. There's a big Noah's Ark costume ball where all the participants wear animal masks, and this leads to a cute payoff scene later when, with dozens of reporters camped out in Lombard's bedroom, Gravet serves her breakfast with a pig mask on. The scene toward the end where the lovers finally sort out their feelings goes on too long, but the very last shot, of the couple kissing onstage in the middle of an opera performance, was nice. There's a musical number in a nightclub called "Petit Harlem," and Lombard and Gravet do a little sing-songy thing halfway through that's like a musical number which no one had the heart to finish. Recommended, if not enthusiastically. [TCM]