Best movie ever!

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Both Roz Russell and James Stewart shine in this 1940 comedy where a young guy from Minnesota writes a play, comes to New York and meets the star of it and quickly marries her. The play turns into a success and the playwright is established.Four years later, Stewart develops writer's fatigue or bloc and he soon finds inspiration from Genevieve Tobin whose voice sounded almost like Billie Burke.With the world at war now, Stewart gets the idea to write a dramatic play. Spending more time with his inspiration writer, Russell becomes jealous and is warned by her husband, humorously played by Charles Ruggles, an investment guy from Wall Street. Things change rapidly and both parties agree to divorce to marry each other's mate.The ending is so good where Russell sees something in his drama, which others deemed as a plot as the two reunite.Louise Beaves alternates as an actress and maid to the Stewart-Russell couple.An enjoyable comedy so rich in substance.

No Time For Comedy is one of those glittering baubles about the theatre of the 1930s. Originally staged in New York for Katherine Cornell and featuring a callow young Laurence Olivier as her earnest playwright husband who drinks too much because he's convinced he's wasting his talent writing comedy when the world is such a wretched place, it was reworked for Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell, and for me the movie plays as well if not better than the play.I was familiar with S.N. Behrman's elegant script and as I saw the film I was a bit confused. A whole new act had been added at the beginning to define the playwright as an awkward kid from Minnesota, swimming with sharks for the first time as his play is produced in New York. Jimmy Stewart was at his best, transitioning from a stammering yahoo to a gentleman drunk, and rising to the occasion to hammer out what he hopes will be a masterpiece with the help of a conniving female (Genevieve Tobin). Rosalind Russell is up to the role of the glamorous actress, the foil for the insecure playwright on the way up (and down), and Charlie Ruggles is wise and sophisticated and totally believable as the husband of the conniver and later suitor to the actress. Tobin is quite adroit, playing the conniver as a Billie Burke-type, although not quite pretty enough to convince me Stewart would leave Russell for her.It's a very satisfying film if you like the genre, and it's always a pleasure to see Jimmy Stewart so at home in a "stagey" piece.

Russell and Stewart. Both actors with career highs the previous year, 1939 -- she with THE WOMEN, he with MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON which earned him his first Academy nod for Best Actor. Both with careers entering high gear at the dawn of the 40s with fine performances, she in HIS GIRL Friday, he with THE PHILADELPHIA STORY for which he finally did win the Oscar. Together they should have succeeded together as main players in a movie.So what failed? The fact that this was a truly awful story, ill-conceived for any medium, stage or film, and the fact that Stewart's role is not very sympathetic -- a rarity. He comes across too petty, irritatingly self-involved with his own success as a writer that one also wonders why Russell's character, a successful stage actress, would stay with him at all. In today's world, a divorce would have been in order faster than yesterday's news, and even then they were taking place within the rich and famous. Which makes me go to the second problem in the film --Russell plays a role that Greer Garson could practically sleepwalk through, and does so in a way that makes you feel sorry for her, but also makes you want to dive into the screen and smack her with something hard. Comedy was her specialty -- this was Russell trying to prove she could also do drama, and it does not work in her favor.And what on Earth is Genvieve Tobin doing in this film? She looks crazy from the start, so completely affected she makes "stage British" look genuine, and her presence brings the film to a dead halt. That she doesn't quite get her comeuppance for nearly destroying a marriage is beyond me.Louise Beavers fares even worse: she plays Russell's maid and what she does is repeat her "resigned, but jolly" role until it's dead on the floor. But, to give her credit, she does get screen time, and high billing in a time when black actors/actresses were barely seen.NO TIME FOR COMEDY drains the life out of the comedy and remains only a footnote mention in both Russell's and Stewart's careers.

...and why doesn't Warner Brothers know what to do with them? This feeble adaptation of a Broadway hit is comedy-drama of the clumsiest kind, veering uncertainly and arbitrarily between one genre or the other with no grace or logic. Nor are the stars well used: Despite his natural charm, Stewart can't hide the fact that his character is basically a lush and a spoiled child. Russell keeps doing irritating Greer Garson great-lady things, pointing her nose and clipping her diction and suffering with a noble smile. Louise Beavers, another trouper, is made to do demeaning dumb-maid stuff. Then there's that noisy Warner Brothers music, telling us exactly how to feel every damn minute.One grace note: Charles Ruggles and Genevieve Tobin, who were paired so well in "One Hour with You" nearly a decade earlier, are coincidentally back in similar parts. He's as dry a light comedian as you could ask; she makes much out of little. But the movie keeps yelling how charming it's being, and trying to pass off boilerplate dialogue as repartee. 'Tain't funny, and it's not convincing as drama, either.