Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Odelecol Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

mark.waltz Don't attack your machines. The "typewriter is an instrument, not a man." So says secretarial instructor Jean Arthur. She ends up working as a secretary herself when she arrives at fitness magazine editor George Brent's office, turning the magazine upside down and predictably falling for the son of a brute. He's not really likable here, and Arthur gives the lesson to him that women can be of enormous help if given half the chance. Given a bit of an early feminist stance, this is a bit of a misfire because it tries to put a new twist on an old plot but doesn't come off as truthful. With Ruth Donnelly and Lionel Stander as confidantes to Arthur and Brent, it manages to be the supporting characters who steal the scenes. Dorothea Kent plays a stereotypical dumb blonde from Arthur's school who succeeds at two things: turning married man's heads and causing trouble for the leading lady. She has an element of crafty bitchiness that isn't found in most of these types of characters.Arthur and Brent could have been a much better match had they had a better catch. Made around the same to be as the glossier MGM drama "Wife vs. Secretary", this one is no match when compared to Gable, Harlow and Loy. It is standard stuff with substandard writing.

charlytully Any industry with an accelerated worker shelf life (which includes sales, pro sports, and certainly show business) is ripe for serving as a prime example of what corporations do to 90 per cent of Americans (i.e., the working class): look for pretty faces, then chew them up and spit them out. Set in the context of the fictitious "Body and Brain" health magazine editorial offices, MORE THAN A SECRETARY would have been slightly more plausible in a moving pictures studio (but THAT would have struck Columbia Pictures too close to home).All the secretaries portrayed in this film, other than elderly spinster Helen (of undisclosed sexual orientation, though she jumps at the chance for an intimate two-girl camping trip with her roommate, Carol) blatantly state they are only jumping into the secretarial pool with an eye toward matrimony (i.e., giving themselves to the boss, body and soul). Some try to learn typing and spelling; others conclude, "Why bother?" As a harder, more educated, and more intelligent worker than her corporate boss Fred, Carol rights his Body & Brain sinking ship virtually overnight with her working class common sense. Fred's reward to Carol? He finagles a way to get her out of his sight completely while dumping ALL of his remaining work load in her lap. What's left in good ol' Fred's lap? It's not hard to imagine, seeing him weak in bed after drunken all-nighters with Carol's replacement in the private secretary slot, mercenary no-talent total airhead Maizie, Carol's secretarial school flunk-out from the movie's prologue. The film hammers home its didactic moral by showing that the richer and more powerful a corporate goon, the bigger a fool: Maizie lets go of Fred only to get her hooks into a much bigger fish, Fred's boss, magazine mogul Mr. Crosby. (If regular grade school math teachers ran Wall Street, instead of 12th generation Mayflower descendant Ivy League frat boys, the U.S. would have been spared the trauma of both this movie's Great Depression and today's Great Recession).To summarize, MORE THAN A SECRETARY's message is that the wealthiest 10% of Americans hide behind corporate shenanigans in what is still predominantly a good ol' boy's club, enslaving the remaining 90% of us to do all the useful work as long as we're youthful, and preferably pretty.

Harl Delos Romantic comedies aren't supposed to tax the brain, and so they tend to have weak plots. This one is far weaker than most romantic comedies.That's not to say that the characters aren't pleasant. Dorothea Kent as Maizie is an especially fun character, but the rest of the cast is certainly competent as well. If only they'd had a decent script, the resources put into this film could have resulted in a really nice movie.This movie was released on Christmas Eve 1936, but it would have fared better had it been released in late summer. In that era, movie theaters were among the few facilities that were air conditioned. Spending the day in a blast-furnace of a workplace, and sleeping in a bed soaked with sweat was miserable, so movie houses didn't need much in the way of entertainment to sell tickets; the cold air was sufficient for that.

stampspleez Did anyone wonder why the trailer had no door? Must have been a creation of the prop department. Why in the world would anyone want the guy after fooling around with Mazie. The guy seems like a real jerk rather than a leading man. And that mustache does not help George Brent either. I thought it was real weak acting from pros than sure can do better. Stander and Donnely really stand out, and The girl that plays Mazie isn't too bad either. There are so many loose plot lines in this that it's hard to accept any of them. I like comedies from this period, but this one is a waste of time unless you are a BIG Jean Arthur fan. Columbia should have thrown the Three Stooges in for some serious plot twist.