Slightly Dangerous (1943)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) A trifle of a small-scale late-screwball comedy, Slightly Dangerous nonetheless has its charms. Many of them rest on the cute shoulders of a 22-year-old Lana Turner, playing a bored small-town waitress running off to New York City and slowly getting into a complex situation where she takes on the identity of a long-lost heiress. Meanwhile, the man blamed for her disappearance (staged to look like a suicide) travels to the big city to clear his name, and some very influential people are highly skeptical of her claims. Going for “web of lies” comedy, Slightly Dangerous has amusing moments—I really like the sequence in which Turner’s character deduces the heiress’s favourite childhood toy… and sinks even deeper in inextricable deception. Robert Young is okay as the male lead, but he’s playing catch-up on both a real and in-universe level to Turner herself—the comic impact of a hotel room scene is entirely dependent on him trying to escape the situation. The film gets a bit messy due to the heroine lying through her teeth in order to drive the plot forward (and you can certainly argue that the ending isn’t fully earned) but it gets there eventually and if the result remains primarily a Turner showpiece, it’s still quite watchable as a comedy.