Annabel Takes a Tour (1938)
(On Cable TV, October 2021) You can take my review of The Affairs of Annabel and use it almost as-is for sequel Annabel Takes a Tour—hurray for consistency in series-making, I guess, but given that my first impression wasn’t good, the second film could have at least improved on the first. But no—once again, we have the peppy young Lucille Ball as a Hollywood actress being manipulated into all sorts of shenanigans by her publicist. More diverting than entertaining, this is recognizably a comedy taking aim at the Hollywood hype machine, except that the comedy feels laborious and half-hearted at best. Ball herself gets a few smiles, but only because she goes beyond what the script specifies. But once again, Jack Oakie mugs for the camera and doesn’t have a fraction of Ball’s appeal—history has it that the Annabel series, which got off to a roaring start with two films in 1938 alone, stopped dead in its track when he asked for too much money for a third instalment. He may have done the world a favour, not only terminating a humdrum series before it went too far, but also freeing Ball to play elsewhere.
