A quartet of loose ankles (or octad) tired of dancing the night away with horse-faced partners answer an unscrupulous personal add hoping to knock some ankles loose. Ted Wilde’s comedy weighs very little and dissolves like cotton candy, a sweet confection of Loretta Young wasted in such an insubstantial and immemorable film.
The setup is absurd: Ann is willed a $70,000/year stipend (not counting property!) but must marry to receive her inheritance and her two spinster aunts and portly uncle have 2/3 vote for any applying beau! One caveat: if there is ever a scandal then no one, neither Ann nor her relatives receive a penny from the Estate: it all goes to the local Dog & Cat hospital. So, Ann sets out to make the furry friends stinking rich by purchasing a personal add in search of an unscrupulous suitor. Moderate hilarity ensues.
The film begins with a close-up of a deliciously slender leg being caressed by a man, his hand slowly descends past her golden anklet to gently massage her bare foot. Quentin Tarantino would fucking love this film! This is how we’re introduced to our heroines Ann (Loretta Young) as she receives a pedicure and her comic-relief cohort Betty as she belts-out the film’s titular foot-tapping tune on a piano. Lovely. But the film descends into juvenile high-jinks and drunken shenanigans which tend to be drawn out too long. Yet there are some laugh-out-loud moments. For instance, when the naïve Gil (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) is convinced by his gigolo roommates to answer the add, he is dumbfounded by Ann’s request to be unscrupulous (which is pronounced differently by everyone in the film, it seems. I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but it made me laugh). So, her maid, armed with a giant pair of scissors, begins sneakily cutting his suspenders and pants when his back is turned! Gil’s reactions are hilarious. When he jumps from the second story window and through the greenhouse roof it’s a hoot. There is also a drunken revelry in the final act involving bootleg alcohol, Ann’s spinsterish aunts and Gil’s loosely ankled buddies. To see the husky and uptight god-fearing aunt get tight, wrestling on the floor with her escort in a speakeasy called the Circus Café while police bust in to potentially scandalous headlines is beautifully wonky.
Overall, a fun film that is forgotten soon after watching except for the adorable Loretta Young, whose participation is often pushed aside for vaudeville vicissitudes, but doesn’t overstay its welcome at 69 minutes.
Final Grade: (C+)