Here Comes Cookie / Love in Bloom / Six of a Kind
Three features (just over an hour each), showcase the well-honed comic patter of George Burns and Gracie Allen during the busiest time in their movie career, the mid-1930s. Gracie's dingbat malapropisms were so perfectly straightforward ("I really shouldn't drink coffee in the morning; it keeps me awake all day"), and Burns's straight-man timing so unerring, the pair was often funnier than their material. They road-trip west in Leo McCarey's amusingSix of a Kind, which is actually at its best when W.C. Fields is polishing one of his pool-playing routines.Love in Bloomcasts George and Gracie as carnival folk, in support of a sappy plot of young lovers in New York. They top-line inHere Comes Cookie, which has some nice screwball-among-the-rich energy. The Burns and Allen chemistry was really at its best in their short films, radio, and TV, but these Paramount features are pleasing entertainment nonetheless.--Robert Horton