Lucky Partners

In New York a painter wishes a girl he sees in the street good luck, and she has a small piece of luck the same day. So they buy a lottery ticket together. He sets one condition: if they win they will spend the money together, on a purely experimental honeymoon. Her fiancé does not care for it. The film is not interested in romance. It is interested in the limits of an agreement: it argues continuously about what two people have consented to and what they are implying, and finally carries the matter into a courtroom. It reads as a dodge written around the censorship rules of the period. The form is late-thirties studio comedy: fast dialogue, hotel rooms, a train journey and a courtroom scene. Lewis Milestone directed. He was known chiefly for heavy work like All Quiet on the Western Front, and this light comedy sits oddly in his filmography. Ronald Colman plays the painter, Ginger Rogers the girl and Jack Carson the fiancé. Who it is for: viewers who like classical romantic comedy and Ginger Rogers. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a contemporary understanding of relationships. The setup is uncomfortable today, and the film's humour largely walks on that ambiguity.