Kiss and Tell

CinemaSerfJul 2022

3.0

Poor old Porter Hall gets most of the acting plaudits here. He is "Bill" who, together with his wife "Janet" (Katharine Alexander) and daughter "Corliss" (Shirley Temple) lives next to the "Pringle" family. Their two daughters like to get up to some teen mischief, and after one such trivial incident their mothers fall out. Meantime the slightly older "Mildred Pringle" (Virginia Welles) falls for a squaddie gets pregnant and they elope. She swears her best pal "Corliss" to secrecy, but the parents get the wrong end of the stick and conclude that it's actually "Corliss" who has been up to naughties with gangly boy-next-door "Dexter" (Jerome Courtland) and that the baby is their's. Oh, the scandal! Chaos ensues and that's where Hall comes to the fore - his paternal frustrations are well demonstrated with quite a fun few moments of amusing parental angst. Courtland is also quite good as the "holy cow" youth, sweet on "Corliss", who is all to happy to reap the advantages of this snowballing misunderstanding. It borders on farce just a bit to much for me, though - to many implausible co-incidences and the character of "Corliss" is quite unpleasantly selfish and manipulative. Still, it doesn't hang about, and there is nothing wrong with it as 90 minutes of lightly comedic wartime entertainment that passes the time fine.