MovieChat Forums > Woman of the Year (1942) Discussion > The Kitchen Scene Ending - thumbs down

The Kitchen Scene Ending - thumbs down

posted 8 years ago by john-158-352579
3 replies | jump to latest

Maybe I was in a bad mood, but the kitchen ending really frustrated me. Somehow a highly educated woman was incapable of making a pot of coffee, or mixing some simple waffle batter? And Spencer had a entire bowl of yeast cakes waiting in his bachelor apartment refrigerator? And then, har dee har har, Katharine puts yeast cakes in the batter, so the waffles expand like a balloon? It wasn't funny when the Three Stooges did this type of gag, and here it was completely out of place. Resorting to such a tired old comic trope was extremely lazy, and I couldn't wait for this amateurish, overly-long scene to end.

Pant - Pant. Whew - thanks for letting me vent.

[–] TorontoBlueJay 8 years ago

She had a maid in her apartment, and from the looks of it, she probably was raised in a wealthy household where there would have been servants cooking and cleaning.

[–] john-158-352579 8 years ago

I agree - her privileged status was the premise for the joke. My quibble is that this Oscar-winning script recycled such tired and completely implausible 'humor' - copying gags that had already been used dozens of times before.

[–] louiseculmer 8 years ago

possibly they weren't so tired in the 1940s, when many women were struggling to come to terms with life without servants. it was a real shock to many women of her class, learning to do things like cooking for themselves. remember, you didn't have to be fabulously wealthy in those days to have servants. A lot of women who were not wealthy but merely comfortably off had servants.