Title Change
Anyone know why the movie is called "Guy With A Grin" with subtitle on opening credits as "formerly "No Time For Comedy"?
shareBecause Warners reissued the film in 1954, as "A Guy With a Grin", and the MPPDA (now MPPA)rules dictated that all re-releases had to carry a re-release tag on the opening frame...and all the advertising paper connected to the film. The reason it was re-released was because both stars were big at the box-office in 1954 and Warners wanted to take advantage of that, and they changed the title in the hopes that most film-goers wouldn't know they had seen it back in 1940. They also knew that most film-goes didn't read the fine print in their newspaper's move-ads section. Two years later, 1956, an independent distributor bought the distribution rights from Warners, and re-released it again. The print you saw was chained from one of the 16mm-prints that had been sold to televison. I suspect the print TCM shows has the original-print title card on it...unless Warners slapped the new title on every print they had, including the negative.
The people at Warners must have let one of the janitors pick the insipid re-release title.
Les Adams
No, TCM just played it Saturday night (12/19/09) and their print had the re-release title card. Kind of confusing to see "A Guy with a Grin" after Osborne had failed to mention the change in his introduction. Otherwise, it was another one of those movies where people fall in and out of love for no discernible reason.
shareThanks,
And that answers that question. Warners probably didn't keep an original negative after they sold it. And, most of the time, Osborne only knows what some interne researcher has written for him, anyway. I suspect the only films he can ad lib and talk about off the cuff are those in his Top Twenty.
Hppy Holidays,
Les
No discernable reason? You've got two people who fall in love but come from very different worlds and this tears them apart, until she realizes she doesn't care if he succeeds or fails as a playwright, because he's real, he tries, he's passionate, is alive, and that's truly what she was looking for all along. She was done playing it safe. So why she fell back in love is very clear. He always was in love she simply misunderstood him and pushed him away, so he never really fell out of love.
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