Classic Hollywood made a lot of derivative, unimaginative, and badly made comedies, but some were so ham-handed and spiritless that they are insults to the genre and the medium. One of these is Columbia’s The Amazing Mr. Williams. I’d prefer to just let it rot in oblivion but it has enough fans that I can’t ignore it altogether. There are lots of positive fan reviews of it on IMDB and some critics even include it on lists of the better comedies of the interwar period. It’s a sleuth story, with Melvyn Douglas playing a supercop detective and Joan Blondell as his smart-woman love interest. It’s on the record that I don’t care much for Douglas as a comedian. He made this film immediately after he starred in Ninotchka. I’m not a fan of his acting in that great Lubitsch/Brackett-Wilder comedy, either, but it’s an Olympian performance compared with what he does in The Amazing Mr. Williams. But then he has nothing to work with. Stupid plot, stupid dialogue, stupid directing, stupid editing. As for Blondell, I have great affection for her, and she’s relatively endearing in the film, but she too is trapped in a maze of aimless stupidity. The high-point of the film, apparently, was to dress Douglas’s character in drag for an undercover operation. The most idiotic criminal in the world wouldn’t be fooled by the masquerade, which Douglas performs like an oaf. The only purpose for it that I can see is to concoct some pseudo-screwball humiliation for Douglas’s cocky macho cop, not unlike the equally lame and ugly humiliation of William Powell in the execrable Thin Man-knock off, The Ex-Mrs. Bradford.
The Amazing Mr. Williams is amazing for the fact that it was considered worth releasing at all.