LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE

 

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE is a 1934 film produced by RKO, starring Ben Lyon and Thelma Todd. 

The movie attempts to be a wild madcap comedy, with a beginning set during a rainy, stormy night, that features gun shots, screams, and a couple of disappearing cops. Next morning, in the same neighborhood, a playboy named Steve (Ben Lyon) wakes up from a drunken revelry the night before to find he brought back home with him a smart-aleck vaudeville comic (Walter Catlett) and his fan-dancer wife (Pert Kelton). The conniving pair decides to make themselves at home, while Steve tries to figure out a way to get rid of them before his rich dizzy aunt (Laura Hope Crews) and his fiancee (Thelma Todd) show up. 

The aunt shows up unexpectedly, and it's mistaken identity time, as she believes that the fan-dancer and the comic are Steve's fiancee and her Navy captain father (a situation the couple takes advantage of). As Steve tries to fend off his real fiancee, the film keeps cutting to the cops who disappeared wandering around in the sewers, while a suspicious looking fellow holding a gun keeps popping in and out of the closets in Steve's house. 

The climax is decidedly anti-climatic, with an explanation that weakly ties up everything (it's as if the cast & crew decided to wrap the whole thing up and go home). LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE only runs a little over an hour, and it doesn't have enough time to properly integrate all the crazy complications going on. 

Thelma Todd fans will be particularly disappointed with her role here. Usually when Thelma was cast in a feature film, she was the "other woman", or the bad girl, but she was still able to overshadow the actual leading lady. Here the situation is reversed--she's the nice girl, and the true love of the leading man, while Pert Kelton gets the juicy role of the fan dancer with an attitude. Thelma winds up with very little to do. One does wonder if she still appreciated being in this movie, since she was the top-billed female, she got the guy in the end, and she didn't have to engage in any slapstick (or get her skirt torn off again.) Ironically, after Todd's death, Pert Kelton would wind up filling in for her in a Hal Roach short with Patsy Kelly. 

The rest of the cast doesn't get much of a chance to shine, except for Fred Kelsey, who shows up in the second half of the story as a (you guessed it) blustery cop. There's a lot of running around and frantic behavior, but it never really amounts to much. Journeyman Ben Holmes directed, and he also got a story credit. 

LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE isn't the type of movie that one wants to watch twice.