Cinema: The New Pictures: Sep. 23, 1940

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No Time for Comedy (Warner Bros.) has the same title as a comedy by S. N. Behrman in which Katharine Cornell achieved a mild Broadway and cross-country success last year. While his characters lounged on soft settees gulping highballs for three acts, Behrman argued that playwrights whose talents run to comedy should stick to their typewriters in times of crisis, leave world-saving to professionals. So original was this notion that audiences gladly sat through two and a half hours of inaction.

Converting so much talk into a film required virtual scrapping of the Behrman version. Scripters Julius J. and Philip G. Epstein proceeded to remodel Hero Gaylord Esterbrook (James Stewart) into a country bumpkin with an odd flair for bright comedy. His hesitant romance and marriage with Actress Linda Paige (Rosalind Russell) becomes a slapstick backstage burlesque containing the only fun in the film. From then on Epstein gets tangled with Behrman in a confusing hodgepodge of drawing-room wit heavily weighted with dramatic overtones.