Critics reviews

A very early Vincente Minnelli movie or an archetypal Red Skelton vehicle, depending on how you want to look at it. It is pretty well impossible to contain both those aspects in your mind at the same time without spraining a lobe or two. And the film itself alternates between Skelton schtick, in a plot borrowed loosely from Buster Keaton's SPITE MARRIAGE and Minnelli ecstasies, with numbers constructed around Eleanor Powell or else guest stars like Lena Horne and Hazel Scott.

Vincente Minnelli in his second film has a lot to stitch together, an antebellum stage melodrama skewered by Skelton with glued-on Yankee beard, a saboteur thriller starring John Hodiak in the wings, plus many a recycled Powell cartwheel from Born to Dance and Honolulu. Where he really gets going, for anyone's money, is the sensational "Jericho" number.