It's a Wonderful World allows Claudette Colbert to overdo it, playing an enthusiastic poetess whose chief personality flaw is that she overdoes it. Attaching herself, like a fly to honey, to private detective Jimmy Stewart, who isn't very sweet to her, she insists on helping him catch up with a murderer while evading the cops himself. Colbert and Stewart have a field day in an apple orchard where they bed down for the night, Stewart in a boy scout's uniform, affecting disaffection, Colbert in a flowered bonnet, pretending poetic dizzyness. The two take a boat somewhere, get stuck in summer stock upstate, lure a murderer to a backstage maze of dressing rooms.... But for all its attention to setting, there is absolutely no attempt to create a sense of “real” space in It's a Wonderful World, with its apple trees that look every bit as though they yield delightful wax fruit. Perhaps that overzealous poetess fantasized the entire thing. If all screwball comedies proceed according to screwball time, this one goes a step further and takes place entirely in screwball land. It's a wonderful world. (JB)