Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Any industry with an accelerated worker shelf life (which includes sales, pro sports, and certainly show business) is ripe for serving as a prime example of what corporations do to 90 per cent of Americans (i.e., the working class): look for pretty faces, then chew them up and spit them out. Set in the context of the fictitious "Body and Brain" health magazine editorial offices, MORE THAN A SECRETARY would have been slightly more plausible in a moving pictures studio (but THAT would have struck Columbia Pictures too close to home).All the secretaries portrayed in this film, other than elderly spinster Helen (of undisclosed sexual orientation, though she jumps at the chance for an intimate two-girl camping trip with her roommate, Carol) blatantly state they are only jumping into the secretarial pool with an eye toward matrimony (i.e., giving themselves to the boss, body and soul). Some try to learn typing and spelling; others conclude, "Why bother?" As a harder, more educated, and more intelligent worker than her corporate boss Fred, Carol rights his Body & Brain sinking ship virtually overnight with her working class common sense. Fred's reward to Carol? He finagles a way to get her out of his sight completely while dumping ALL of his remaining work load in her lap. What's left in good ol' Fred's lap? It's not hard to imagine, seeing him weak in bed after drunken all-nighters with Carol's replacement in the private secretary slot, mercenary no-talent total airhead Maizie, Carol's secretarial school flunk-out from the movie's prologue. The film hammers home its didactic moral by showing that the richer and more powerful a corporate goon, the bigger a fool: Maizie lets go of Fred only to get her hooks into a much bigger fish, Fred's boss, magazine mogul Mr. Crosby. (If regular grade school math teachers ran Wall Street, instead of 12th generation Mayflower descendant Ivy League frat boys, the U.S. would have been spared the trauma of both this movie's Great Depression and today's Great Recession).To summarize, MORE THAN A SECRETARY's message is that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hide behind corporate shenanigans in what is still predominantly a good ol' boy's club, enslaving the remaining 90% of us to do all the useful work as long as we're youthful, and preferably pretty.

With Jean Arthur, Ruth Donnelly, and Lionel Stander in the cast, More Than A Secretary starts to look like a road company Mr. Deeds Goes To Town. Too bad it isn't quite up to the standard of that comedy classic.But this was more an example of the fluff that Jean Arthur was asked to carry in her career. Not every film could be a Mr. Deeds.Jean and Ruth Donnelly run a secretarial school from which they graduate women of all kinds including Dorothea Kent, a poor man's Marie Wilson. Dorothea's typing and shorthand leave much to be desired, but she does have other assets and his certainly decorative enough. Jean goes to work for health magazine editor George Brent who is maniacal on the subject of fitness, sexist in his views of women, and something of a puritan. But Jean proves pretty indispensable as his magazine circulation starts to boom.But then Reginald Denny who has a jealous wife dumps Dorothea back on George who with Jean has to put up with her incompetence. Something has to give.The whole thing was rather silly to me. Why they don't just fire this bimbo is beyond me. Maybe Denny's hormones are making the decision for him, but Brent's certainly aren't.Maybe I'm too harsh on the film though. I in fact worked for a woman who headed a state agency and she was so stupid she couldn't probably spell the word. I could have seen her like Kent, running Tina's Nail Salon on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn. But she also was in her job because somebody's hormones went into overdrive.George Brent was borrowed from Warner Brothers by Harry Cohn for this film. My only question is why did he use a favor from Jack Warner for this. Or was Brent being punished?

Jean Arthur is a secretarial teacher who becomes "More Than a Secretary," a 1936 comedy also starring George Brent, Lionel Stander, Ruth Donnelly, Reginald Denny and Dorothea Kent. Arthur and Donnelly run a secretarial school for dizzy young women who plan on using their skills to nab husbands in corporate America. One gal in particular, Maizie (Kent) is a total dropout but seems to have the man magnet technique down, to the disgust of the bespectacled Carol, who hasn't given up on love. When a client fires another secretary, Carol decides to replace her and goes to work for a health magazine run by Fred Gilbert (Brent). Carol falls for him...and then complications arise in the form of the aforementioned Maizie.This is a very dated, slow, and ultimately boring comedy that fails to hold interest. Brent is actually quite good as a passionate health nut. Comedy is a departure for him, and he's successful at it. Arthur is very good, but it's not a role with the type of range one is used to seeing her do. And it's hard to get past the extremely dated notion of women going to work only to meet men and then quitting their jobs, their goal accomplished. But the typewriters are a hoot as are the phrases being dictated. If you're old enough to remember Peter Piper picked a peck etc., standard manual typewriters and manual returns, you'll have a good laugh.

Did anyone wonder why the trailer had no door? Must have been a creation of the prop department. Why in the world would anyone want the guy after fooling around with Mazie. The guy seems like a real jerk rather than a leading man. And that mustache does not help George Brent either. I thought it was real weak acting from pros than sure can do better. Stander and Donnely really stand out, and The girl that plays Mazie isn't too bad either. There are so many loose plot lines in this that it's hard to accept any of them. I like comedies from this period, but this one is a waste of time unless you are a BIG Jean Arthur fan. Columbia should have thrown the Three Stooges in for some serious plot twist.