Here Comes Cookie
 

Director: Norman Z. McLeod
Writers: Don Hartman, Sam Mintz
Cast:

• Gracie Allen — Gracie Allen
• George Burns — George Burns
    
• Andrew Tombes — Botts  (the butler)
• George Barbier — Harrison Allen
• Betty Furness — Phyllis Allen
• Rafael Alcayde — Ramon del Ramos
    
• — and many, many more

Paramount: 1935

Here Comes Cookie is a runaway comedy of a film. What launches everything is millionaire Harrison Allen worried that one of his daughters is about to marry a fortune hunter, so he makes the outstandingly rash decision to temporarily transfer his entire fortune for safekeeping to his other daughter: Gracie Allen. Well. Already we fall off a cliff, as it were.

We think we anticipate hijinks in a Burns and Allen movie, but really, we have no idea. Disasters come thick and fast, almost-reasonable confusion followed by unutterable confusion and slapstick. And it all keeps coming. I will not give you one of those spoilsport "reviews" which provide some Easy Notes summary, or worse, a play-by-play of the whole thing, undermining all the surprises.
  

Gracie Allen is a live wire here, pure comic lightning. George Burns, Andrew Tombes, and the rest of the cast give excellent performances with a hilarious storyline. To say that Here Comes Cookie hurls at us a laugh a minute throughout isn't too overstated. In a way, we as audience are lucky the film is only an hour long: too much more and we might be dragged into a state of laughter beyond overwhelmed, into some unearthly realm of bedazzled incoherence. I'll coin a special phrase with its acronym for Gracie Allen's literally wonderful performance here: GABAR — that is, Gracie Allen'd Beyond All Recognition.
  

  
© 2024 Robert Wilfred Franson