Having Wonderful Time

Having Wonderful Time (1938)

The play that captured Broadway is on the screen at last!

Teddy Shaw, a bored New York office girl, goes to a camp in the Catskill Mountains for rest and finds Chick Kirkland.

Date of release
1938-07-01
TMDB
4.9 / 10 (17)
Runtime
1h 10m
Genres
Comedy, Romance
Director
Alfred Santell

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: California

Having Wonderful Time is a 1938 American romantic comedy film directed by Alfred Santell and starring Ginger Rogers and Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Lucille Ball and Eve Arden. It marked Red Skelton's film debut. The screenplay adapted from Arthur Kober's 1937 Broadway play of the same name. It was produced and distributed by the Hollywood studio RKO Pictures.

Production

The film was based on the play of the same name, as was the 1952 musical Wish You Were Here. (The play's title has quotation marks around it to reflect the custom of vacationers sending letters and picture postcards to keep friends and family informed of their activities.and the cliché postcard message: "Having Wonderful Time.

In the play, the resort is in the Catskills, the characters are Jewish, and much of the humor relies on an understanding of that context. TCM reports that Arthur Kober, author of the play and the screenplay told the New York Times: "Well, the Will Hays organization—and that, as you know, is the censor with a capital C—first went on record as saying that the play could not be done as a picture...

Skelton is credited as Richard (Red) Skelton. It includes the iconic "Doughnut Dunkers" routine that he developed with his wife, Edna (and eventually copyrighted in every possible combination of beverage and dunkable baked goods). That routine got him a job at New York City's Loew's State Theatre in 1937 and launched him into the big time on stage.

Skelton's part in this film was originally much larger. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. wrote in his memoir, "...the big bosses at the studio were unable to appreciate Skelton's broad, slapstick style and cut his part down to the barest minimum needed to hold the slender plot together."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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