Admission: $2.50
Fred Allen, the laconic wit of radio's Golden Age, incorporated some of his best routines and favorite comic partners into his second film, It's in the Bag! Allen not only revived his legendary feud with Jack Benny, king of the misers, but invited into the fray Robert Benchley, Jerry Colonna, William Bendix, and the Benny/Allen radio foil, Mrs. Nussbaum (Minerva Pious). The screenplay, co-written by Alma Reville (Hitchcock's wife and screenwriter), is a burlesque of the Hollywood mystery thriller. Charles Hopkins writes, “This anything-goes comedy was squarely in the tradition of forties lunacy exemplified by such Preston Sturges films as The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and the Hope-Crosby Road pictures. Allen played the unhappy heir to a set of dining room chairs who discovers only after he has sold them that one chair contains the key to a fortune. (The plot was loosely based on the same source material as the Mel Brooks comedy The Twelve Chairs.)”