Edward Buzzell's Mary Had a Little... isn't just a bad comedy, it's a stupid one. The plot is stupid: a desperate playwright enters into an absurd bet to trick a doctor into thinking an actress is pregnant so he can try and influence the hypothetical baby's development into a perfect child. The characters are stupid: none of them act like human beings. The jokes are stupid; the most painful one being where two people are accidentally hypnotized at the same time to repeat the phrase "I am having a beautiful baby" whenever they hear the word "baby." And, surprise, one of them is a man! That gag literally had me rolling my eyes. By the end I had lost track of what was going on. But it wasn't because the film was confusing. The reason was that I had stopped caring enough to follow it. The ending involves a mob of desperate people running around trying to get married, trying not to get married, and trying to get laid. The climax of this sequence ends in what I think was a police station. Just imagine a dumbed down version of the court-room denouement from Peter Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc? (1972).
4/10
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