Danger – Love at Work

A film by Otto Preminger

Danger – Love at Work was Otto Preminger’s second film for the Hollywood studios, and offers great insight into the Austrian director who went on to create classic masterpieces such as Laura (1944) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

In this 1930s screwball family comedy, similar in style to Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) or Frank Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You (1938), lackadaisical lawyer Henry MacMorrow (played by Jack Haley) seeks to get the kooky Pemberton family to agree on a large property deal involving part of their estate. Frustrated by the family’s scatty entourage, which includes a Dali look-alike (Herbert Pemberton, played by John Carradine), a precocious child and their whimsical parents, he turns to the beautiful Toni Pemberton (Ann Sothern), the independently minded daughter of the family, with a fake sob story. The two of them join forces in a bid to gather the signatures from her decidedly odd family – but will it be love or trouble?

At this early stage in his career, shortly after he had moved from Vienna to Hollywood, Preminger was still billing himself as Otto L (for Ludwig). After the initial miscasting of French actress Simone Simon, whose English was too limited for such as fast-paced, frenetic comedy with its overlapping dialogue, studio boss Darryl F Zanuck settled with Ann Sothern who had already appeared in a string of smart, zippy comedies like Don’t Gamble with Love (1936) and My American Wife (1936). John Carradine hams it up as a self-styled post-surrealist painter evidently modelled on Salvador Dali. Danger – Love at Work is released by BFI Video in collaboration with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Inc.