Ive Got Your Number (Warner Bros.) (1934)

DID YOU SEE THIS SHOW, MR. SHOWMAN? If not, talk to the fellows at the exchange ... . ask the guys on film row — — take it from us or take it from them — you ownan entertainment ace! It's press-time now and we can't wait for more reviews but here are the first two over the wires. Read ‘em and you'll see what we mean! Hollywood Reporter: You needn’t worry about the phone lines on “I’ve Got Your Number.” It’s an action melodrama in good working order! The whole cast mugs happily and heartily, and the audience liked it well enough to break out in applause. Shouts of laughter greeted Pat O’Brien’s lines and business. Joan Blondell is excellently cast for the hard-boiled phone girl. Glenda Farrell scores from the moment she appears as a medium who gets voices from the spirit world over the telephone until she staggers out of a night club to give another “reading.” Eugene Pallette does handsomely by the comedy as a permanently infuriated superintendent. Gordon Westcott does nicely by his part of the smoothie racketeer, and Louise Beavers, Hobart Cavanaugh and Renee Whitney turn in parts that add to the general hilarity. Good old action is the keynote of this film, but comedy pervades even those scenes when Terry is jumping off a burning building. Crisp, wise-cracking dialogue, Ray Enright’s sure direction, well chosen cast and the interesting inside slant on the workings of a telephone system ring the bell for this one! Daily Variety: “I’ve Got Your Number” has money written all over it. A fast, exciting, robust and more or less bawdy comedy through which a cast of pulling names romp for a sustained laugh fest, in this tale revolving around the adventures of two trouble-shooting telephone repair men. With canny showmanship it stirs together exciting, novel, romantic and melodramatic elements in just the right proportions with the laugh substance to get the widest audience appeal. Pat O’Brien and Allen Jenkins are the phone company trouble men whose repair calls always seem to lead them into spots inhabited by exhilarating dames, especially Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell, although a number of more ephemeral femmes are also encountered and summarily disposed of by O’Brien. The boys are caught in a fire. They bust up a phony mystic seance conducted by Miss Farrell, and Jenkins goes psychic. Blondell is a phone operator in a hotel. She is unwittingly used by a band of smooth gyppers to help them pull some fast ones at about the time she falls for O’Brien in a series of swift and spicy sequences. From then on the romance is all haywire with the trouble the high class crooks get Blondell and O’Brien into. Even the melodrama is played to the hilt for comedy! Blondell, O’Brien and Farrell swagger through the top spots with plenty gusto, learing a trail of guffaws, while Allen Jenkins does the best job of his career as a sort of stooge who hopes for nothing better than to find a repair spot without dames. Eugene Pallette, as the repair foreman always at odds with O’Brien, doesn’t miss a single bet, and Hobart Cavanaugh gets his share of cackles as the inventor whose contraptions all go haywire. Other parts are straight, with Gordon Westcott, Henry O’Neill, Renee Whitney, Douglas Cosgrove, Henry Kolker and Wallis Clark capably handling their assignments in the plot sequences. Lines are racy and toy ludicrously with the double entendre through the novel use of telephone and switchboard technical terms commonly understood. Direction of Ray Enright and screen story treatment by Warren Duff and Sidney Sutherland get away from the commonplace and usual routines in getting laughs and maintain breezy freshness. Wow of story is in bedroom where Pallette and his ribald cohorts invade the bridal chamber of O’Brien and Blondell to repair the phone—giving trouble shooter dose of his own medicine. —_—] ss —_— ir ss ——.C—*?