Fancy Pants (film)

Last updated

Fancy Pants
Fancy Pants.jpg
Theatrical re-release poster ca. 1961
Directed by George Marshall
Screenplay by
Based onRuggles of Red Gap
by Harry Leon Wilson
Produced byRobert L. Welch
Starring
Cinematography Charles Lang
Edited by Archie Marshek
Music by Van Cleave
Color process Technicolor
Production
company
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release dates
  • August 30, 1950 (1950-08-30)(New York) [1]
  • September 20, 1950 (1950-09-20)(Los Angeles) [2]
Running time
92 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Box office$2.6 million (US rentals) [3]

Fancy Pants is a 1950 American romantic comedy Western film directed by George Marshall and starring Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. It is a musical adaptation of Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).

Contents

Plot

A British actor attempts to impress two visiting American women, Efflie Floud and her tomboyish daughter Agatha, by asking the cast of his drawing-room comedy to pose as his aristocratic family. Effie persuades the butler character, Humphrey, really a struggling American actor named Arthur Tyler, to accompany them to the United States and help to refine her husband and daughter. She sends a telegram home referring to the person whom she believes is Humphrey as a "gentleman's gentleman", which the rural western townfolk misunderstand as meaning that he is an aristocrat and presumably Agatha's future husband. Arthur must now pretend to the family that he is the British butler while pretending to the rest of the town, and the visiting President Theodore Roosevelt, that he is a politically savvy Englishman. The deception is eventually uncovered, and the actor and the family's daughter gradually fall in love.

Cast

Production

Three different endings were filmed, including a surprise ending shot on a closed set for secrecy. [4]

Reception

In a contemporary review for The New York Times , critic Bosley Crowther called Fancy Pants "a farce of unlimited proportions" and wrote: "Given appropriate assistance by red-headed Lucille Ball, Mr. Hope splits his vehicle wide open—and similarly imperils his audiences' sides. ... However, we've got to give credit to George Marshall and all the rest. They keep the nonsense spinning and accumulating without one slight relapse. ... Mr. Hope and everyone have taken a springy slapstick and laid it firmly and hilariously to 'Fancy Pants.'" [1]

Critic Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Slapstick runs rampant in the Technicolor production. George Marshall, who directed, is an expert at that sort of thing, and he and the writers, Edmund Hartmann and Robert O'Brien, seemed to have spared nothing. ... The total result is one of the weirdest, wildest jumbles of doings that has been seen on the screen in many a day, and a picture that has very little rhyme and certainly not much reason. Maybe they'll call it a burlesque, but even burlesque has to have a few sensible moments .... This is practically all nutty." [2]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Crowther, Bosley (1950-08-31). "The Screen in Review". The New York Times . p. 21.
  2. 1 2 Schallert, Edwin (1950-09-21). "Hope's 'Fancy Pants' Filled with Ants". Los Angeles Times . p. 12, Part III.
  3. ↑ "The Top Box Office Hits of 1950". Variety . January 3, 1951.
  4. ↑ Hopper, Hedda (1949-12-21). "Alice Marble May Advise on Net Saga". Los Angeles Times . p. 6, Part III.


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.