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Skimmed off the top of the froth, "Margie" is another throwback to the days of the flapper, raccoon coat and Stutz Bearcat. Told in easy retrospect, "Margie" is as pleasant as on evening over the family album, and as awkward as a picture of Mother conducting a high-school debate.
Margie McDuff is a thoroughly nice high-school girl, on love with most everyone around, equipped with a social conscience, a catarrhal boy-friend and a fortress of an aunt. Her major handicap schemed to be a pair of nervous drawers which succumb to the excitement at least three throughout the film and slump ignominiously to the ground, thereby embarrassing Miss McDuff only one quarter as much as all unsuspecting males in the audience. Miss McDuff's drawers become so excruciatingly annoying that at last debacle, when the sweet young thing is dancing in the arms of the handsome teacher at the Senior Ball, and the blasted things come loose for the last time, several unhappy swains in the audience were seen to blush crimson, cry out and run from the theatre.
But for all those who can weather 20th Century Fox's high-school belly-laughs, "Margie" has a certain nostalgia that is alien to the Swing generation but sacred to its patents. All the touches, from "oh you kid," through the Charleston and Irving Berlin's "Always," down to the high-school debate over whether the Marines should be withdrawn from Nicaragua-recreate the hoteha and ballyhoo of the years just preceding the depression. Especially typical is the portrayal of the high-school football hero, whose raccoon coat, honor-badge of the period, appears as standard equipment whenever the young buck comes in the screen, be it to hootchi-koo, crank up his roadster, or neck on a hot June night.
"Margie" is full of nonsense and sentiment. As anything but a long laugh for the sons and daughters of the late 20's- it's a dismal failure. But for those who drank their gin in tumblers, it's surefire. Except for Margie's drawers.
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