Hideaway Girl (1937) Review: A messy, yacht-bound screwball that is way too much fun

If you have seventy minutes to spare tonight and want something light, Hideaway Girl is absolutely worth your time. Anyone who loves breezy 1930s screwball antics and fast-talking dames will have a great time with this. But if you are the kind of person who gets annoyed when characters make incredibly dumb decisions just to keep the plot moving, you will probably want to throw your remote at the screen.

The whole thing starts with a woman in a wedding dress speeding down the highway in a stolen car. That is a great hook, and the movie does not waste any time getting her onto a rich guy's yacht.

The Yacht of Confusions

Shirley Ross plays Toni, though she spends most of the movie pretending to be a stewardess named Belinda Hipplewaite. That name alone tells you exactly what kind of movie we are dealing with here.

She meets Michael (Robert Cummings), a wealthy guy who basically shrugs his shoulders and lets this random woman sleep on his boat. Before you know it, the press thinks they are married, his actual fiancee shows up furious, and everyone is lying to the police. It has that same frantic, slightly exhausting energy you find in Dangerous Curves.

I love how nobody in this movie seems to care about basic law and order. The cops just wander onto the yacht whenever they want, and people are constantly hiding stolen diamond necklaces in underwear drawers.

"I am not married to her, she is just my stewardess who sleeps in my cabin!" is the kind of logic this movie expects us to accept. And honestly? I bought it.

Some Thoughts I Wrote Down

• The way Robert Cummings looks constantly startled, like a deer caught in headlights.
• Martha Raye shows up and immediately steals every single scene she is in with her wild facial expressions. 🤪
• The yacht sets look incredibly cheap, like they just painted some cardboard white and hoped we wouldn't notice.
• A very weird musical number happens almost out of nowhere because it is 1937 and apparently every movie needed one.

The plot gets pretty messy near the end when we find out the count who owned the necklace is actually a crook named Jake. And then his fiancee Muriel turns out to be a notorious thief named Lady Jane. It is a lot of names to keep track of for a movie that is barely over an hour long. It is not quite as clever as Affairs of a Gentleman, but it has double the energy.

There is this one scene where Toni and Michael are forced to share a cabin and they just lay there in the dark talking about how they do not actually want to marry their real partners. It is surprisingly sweet, even if the romance feels like it developed over a total of twelve minutes.

Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. But the jokes fly fast, the actors are having a blast, and it is the perfect cure for a rainy Tuesday night. 🍿