There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Apart from George Burns, the delightfully dizzy Gracie Allen seemed like half a team, like Desi without Lucy. George and Gracie had made a mixed bag of comedies and musicals throughout the 1930's, but what worked was how they played off of each other, evident in their very long running T.V. series. George would throw Gracie one simple of dialog, and Gracie would simply pull a Jackie Gleason by silently putting into motion, "And away we go...." That aspect made her delightful malapropisms and metaphors hysterical, especially while describing her equally befuddled family. Even with the weakest of plots, Gracie was hard to resist.Unfortunately, that's not the case in this last ditched effort to continue a decade long series of Philo Vance mysteries, with Philo (or Fido as she mispronounces his name as) a secondary character, not appearing until almost half way through the movie. It's mostly a Gracie vaudeville routine, although she has one very funny moment while sneaking around a room filled with covered furniture, she becomes literally afraid of every movement, including seeing herself in a mirror, and like "The Man Who Knew Too Much", an altercation with a stuffed cat. She even gets to sing briefly, but unlike "A Damsel in Distress", that moment takes away from the plot which there really isn't much of, only the investigation to the death of a gangster found in a nightclub office. There's tons of popular performer characters of the day including William Demarest and "Pa Jones" (Jed Prouty) who visits Gracie in jail, something she promises to do for him some day. Judith Barrett makes an appealing femme fatal, but romantic heroine Ellen Drew has nothing to do. After one last try on her own ("Mr. and Mrs. North"), Gracie would never separate from her husband again, except this time on some little medium called television.

I don't even think you've got to be a Philo Vance fan or a classic mystery buff to be utterly disappointed by this movie; but if you've seen other Philo Vance movies beforehand, this one will surely make you wonder WHO on earth had the idea to try and combine one of his cases with a Gracie Allen comedy.I usually try and put myself in the place of the audience of the time to find out why a movie that doesn't appeal to me at all today was popular then - but in this case, that's not even necessary, because even then it was a flop; and that's no wonder.Gracie Allen was a very popular radio comedy star together with her husband George Burns; and their domestic little jokes obviously appealed to quite a lot of fans who weren't too hard to please. I've got some of their broadcasts on cassette, and it's - well, just VERY light comedy, much lighter than, for example, W.C. Fields, Bergen & McCarthy, or even Abbott and Costello. But it was comedy, and it was popular.The 'Philo Vance' movie series, on the other hand, which had started 10 years before this movie was made, was composed of classic murder mysteries, with suspense, clever plots - and humor; Philo Vance's OWN kind of dry, slightly sarcastic gentleman's humor. That was just about enough humor those films needed to lighten up the atmosphere of crime and murder a little bit, and it was intelligent and well-dosed and in a way quite charming. And then, since the success of the long-running film series seemed to fade a little, the producers seemed to try a NEW feature that would radically alter the style, and (hence the title) lure more people into the theaters with the big name of Gracie Allen.But what was the result? Unsuspecting Gracie Allen fans were probably scared by the murder plot, the strangers lurking in dark apartments, the poisoned flowers and cigarettes (which they only described as smelling like 'bitter almond', not even bothering to mention that this, as everybody who has read or watched more than two or three murder mysteries, means of course cyanide, or prussic acid...) - while Philo Vance fans must have simply gone MAD with rage at this nut case who doesn't stop talking nonsense for a single moment, until they probably wished somebody would at last murder HER...Don't get me wrong, I LOVE crime comedies, from "Arsenic and Old Lace" to "Murder by Death" to "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" - but all those WERE real crime comedies, parodies on the genre without losing the grip on the suspense and the atmosphere of the genre itself. They don't try to mix PURE comedy with PURE mystery, like "The Gracie Allen Murder Case" did - but the outcome is neither a comedy nor a mystery; and it's CERTAINLY not recommended for serious fans of serious classic murder mysteries.

There are two ways to approach this movie. If you take it as a mystery, and a chapter of the "Philo Vance" series, it's only OK and rather sketchy. But if you take it as a comedy, it works much better. Gracie Allen is a great comedienne. I wouldn't exactly classify her character as "dumb"; she simply has her own stream-of-consciousness "logic" about everything, which baffles everyone around her. She has a lot of very funny lines here ("Were you ever a Girl Scout, Bill?" - "What would I do with a bunch of girls?" - "Well, if you don't know, I'm not gonna tell you!"), and a few bits of equally funny physical comedy: the highlight may be the scene where she imitates Philo's mannerisms as he's looking around a room for clues (the final gag of the film goes on too long, though). And there is an underlying sweetness about her that just puts a smile on your face. It's a pity her only other experiment with the mystery-comedy genre, "Mr. And Mrs. North", is so hard to find today. **1/2 out of 4.

If you are interested in the arc of development of the mystery gene, follow the Philo Vance series. When they started, they were complex puzzles, incredibly complex and imaginative. They had a hard time conveying elements of the mystery cinematically (instead of by exposition), but they tried and sometimes succeeded. They were important and sometimes entertaining as well. But when a narrative form is mature, it starts to die, the tension to evolve being exhausted. Then what usually happens is that some comic layer is applied, humor being our storehouse of packaged tension.Here we have Philo Vance essentially at the end, with the bare skeleton of a mystery, serving as a rack for Gracie's dumb comedy act. If you don't know Gracie, it really is the comedy of stupidity. She gets everything wrong. We are supposed to laugh both at the character, who unconvincingly pretends to be pretty and therefore dumb. Thankfully, sex isn't part of the formula.Its a character that actually worked when with husband George because he was so amazingly patient and loving, the humor was in the apparent normalcy of her. Here, she's abnormal. The actual jokes are all verbal humor and have some power outside of the character. Its a comic tradition we seem to have lost because it depends on people actually listening to words and having some sense what is correct. The Marx brothers used this as well. No one does today, but there is something similar in spoof movies which misquote movie "language."The mystery involves poisoned vapors.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.