KING’S THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 35, Issue 8, 4 October 1941, Page 12

KING’S THEATRE

Says one-time screeu favourite Harold Lloyd, producer of “The Navy Steps Out”: “I believe no better contribution can be made to the mental state of a people than pictures that stimulate the muscles and the glands which make them laugh. A nation without a sense of humour is doomed !” But Harold Lloyd evidently doesn’t believe in saying things and just leaving it at that—he produced “The Navy Steps Out,” and as entertainment for a jittery world it’s the finest comedy that’s come out of Hollywood for a long time. When George Murphy, Lucille Ball aud Edmond O’Brien “go to town,” the riot squad is called out. George Murphy is the navy’s representative and when "The Navy Steps Out” George steps' into trouble and usually drags everyone else with him. Edmond O’Brien first finds trouble when Lucille’s bag hits him ou the head at an opera. Trouble pursues him when Lucille is engaged as his secretary, and she in turn introduces more trouble in the person of George Murphy, a sailor who is leaving the navy in order to marry Lucille and settle down. It is no time before O’Brien is drawn into a street fight with his new-found friends. .A loaded bag wielded by Lucille, and intended for one of the participants,_ lays out O’Brien, who is hastily carried off to Lucille’s home. The dignified young business executive likes it so much that he spends the evening there and later makes a "night” of it with Lucille and Murphy, realizing that for the first time in his life he is really having fun. But, of course, the employer and employee relationship soon gives way to love, though O'Brien doesn't realize it and still does all lie can to assist Murphy in his various schemes to make enough money to enable him to get married. Most of these schemes go astray in one hilarious tangle after another. and O’Brien gets drawn deeper and deeper into the whirlpool of trouble which includes losing his erstwhile fiancee —which doesn’t seem to worry him overmuch. The showdown occurs when Murphy manages with O’Brien's aid to raise enough money to get married, but realizes that Lucille is in love with her boss and he with her. though neither seems to be fully conscious of the fact. How the strange trio work out their oddly tangled destinies from then on provides some of the most laughable sequences in a highly amusing film.