Mamma's Boy

A sybaritic fever dream unfurls when urban gadabout Eddie, dispatched to a pastoral sanatorium for neurasthenic nerves, discovers that bucolic silence has been swapped for a harem of irrepressible chambermaids: flappers with spit-curls, farm-girls with shepherd’s-crook eyelashes, chorines on loan from a forgotten Ziegfeld reel. The estate’s hedgerows become proscenium arches; every butter-churn is a potential punchline. At first the lad is ricocheted from hammock to hayloft by a blur of gingham and lace, his monocle fogged, his pajama seams popping under the assault of polka-dotted femininity. Yet the picture pivots on a dime when Eddie—fed up with being the marble in a pin-table of pulchritude—unleashes his inner Neanderthal: he whistles, stamps, and through a sequence of proto-deadpan training montages worthy of a Soviet agitprop poster, converts the giggling coterie into a synchronized cadre of domestic drudges who peel grapes in 4/4 time. The transformation is less Pygmalion than it is a lampoon of post-war gender shell-shock, a slaphappy Versailles treaty in which every teacup finds its saucer and every ego gets a custard pie. Hal Roach’s gag writers lace the proceedings with enough Freudian banana peels to make even Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm blush, while the Vanity Fair Girls high-kick through routines that feel like they’ve been storyboarded on absinthe. By the final iris-in, Eddie lounges like a pasha, the maids now an Art-Deco machine of feather-dusters and folded napkins, the countryside itself pacified into a giant boudoir. It is as if the film took one look at the polite rusticity of Comin’ Thro’ the Rye and detonated it with a crate of nitrate giggles.