A Very Honorable Guy (1934)

(On Cable TV, June 2022) The nice thing about comedies is that they don’t need to be great in order to entertain – sometime, even a middling execution can be good enough for a few laughs and a good time. So it is that A Very Honorable Guy manages to get a few chuckles despite its messy execution. Rubber-faced Joe E. Brown stars as a man who, during the film’s abrasive opening sequence, gets everything wrong – to the point where, destitute, depressed and desperate, he sells his body to science while still alive. The doctor, strangely enough, gives him a tidy sum of money and thirty days, after which he’s to come back and gulp a fatal dose of poison to complete the agreement. (This is clearly a Pre-Code film.)  It would be easy to take the money and run, but our hero is honourable to a fault, and his money ends up snowballing as he wins the lottery, pays off his debt, gets the mob off his back and wins back the affection of his fiancée. Something is clarified right before the thirty days are up: the “doctor” is a psychopath with designs on his fiancée, explaining quite a lot about the initially ludicrous plot. It all wraps up neatly. Alas, the execution is rough – the curiously slack script doesn’t make the most of its assets, starting with Brown. It’s amusing all right, but it takes a while to get going, seems to waste its time in useless tangents, and doesn’t quite extract as much comedy from its odd ideas as it could have. This may serve to explain A Very Honorable Guy’s relative obscurity despite having Brown in the lead – it’s merely interesting even it could have been more.