Without Reservations

Plot concerns what happens to a femme author when she meets the real-life counterpart of her tome's hero. The misadventures that befall her, her hero and his pal as they make a cross-country trip together are guaranteed hilarity. Claudette Colbert, the writer, is tripping west to adapt her book to the screen. On a crowded train she is picked up by two Marine fliers, John Wayne and Don DeFore. Without realizing her identity, boys proceed throughout the footage to impress her with how wrong the book's slant on life, love, returned heroes, etc., actually is.

Plot concerns what happens to a femme author when she meets the real-life counterpart of her tome’s hero. The misadventures that befall her, her hero and his pal as they make a cross-country trip together are guaranteed hilarity. Claudette Colbert, the writer, is tripping west to adapt her book to the screen. On a crowded train she is picked up by two Marine fliers, John Wayne and Don DeFore. Without realizing her identity, boys proceed throughout the footage to impress her with how wrong the book’s slant on life, love, returned heroes, etc., actually is.

Around this theme scripter Andrew Solt, working from a Jane Allen-Mae Livingston novel, has built delightful scenes and characters that, despite their laugh intentions, are a great deal closer to actual reality than most more serious writing. Mervyn LeRoy’s direction doesn’t miss a bet in underlying the laughs with a solid feeling of reality, and the players troupe the roles to the hilt. Colbert and Wayne prove particularly facile in building to a solid laugh.

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Surprise walkons are in the footage, such as Jack Benny approaching Colbert in a railway station and asking for an autograph; Cary Grant dancing with the writer; LeRoy himself dining with her. Louella Parsons plays herself as an air chatterer who breathlessly brings breathless news to fans about the doings of the novelist and Hollywood.

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