Film Forum

U.S., 1948
Directed by Richard Fleischer
Starring Henry Morgan, Virginia Grey, Rudy Vallée
Approx. 79 min. 35mm.

“Henry Morgan plays the Indiana cigar-salesman hero in this adaptation of Ring Lardner’s The Big Town. Morgan and his wife (Virginia Grey) take her sister (Dona Drake) to the big city to find a husband: the prospects include Rudy Vallee as a millionaire, Hugh Herbert as an explorer, Leo Gorcey as a jockey, and Bill Goodwin as an egomaniac actor. From a screenplay by Carl Foreman.” – Pauline Kael

35mm preservation print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Presented with support from The Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s and The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“It often has the zaniness and machine-gun pacing of a Preston Sturges comedy, but the screenplay—by Carl Foreman and Herbert Baker—is also reminiscent of the acid touches of Billy Wilder.”
– The New York Times