There were so many inventive, witty, sparklingly funny romantic comedies produced by Hollywood in the 1930s that the only logical reason that some of them aren't famous classics is that there were already too many famous classics in this genre and the Westerns were getting jealous. as noted already in our regular DVD roundup, today marks the first appearance on shiny steel discs for two winners, Easy Living (1937), which is not to be confused with a 1949 Jacques Tourneur film of the same title starring Victor Mature and Lucille Ball, and Midnight (1939), which is not to be confused with any of the fifty or sixty other movies with that same title, many of which center around a heavyset person who attempts to work out some childhood trauma that had been nagging at him by dismembering a co-ed. If you are unfamiliar with these films and the trend in fast-paced, fast-talking, sexy entertainment from which they arose, you might wonder how they compare with the modern sex comedies you can enjoy in today's theaters. There is no question that, when compared to a movie like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, they are in some ways deficient. For instance, you will search through these DVDs in vain for a single moment in which the penis of the third-string male lead of How I Met Your Mother is comically, and graphically, deployed. You won't be seeing Don Ameche unzip either. But they do have other things going for them.
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