Review of Riding on Air

Never was a movie more accurately titled! The characters in this movie never seem to be riding on a decent script but on one they are making up themselves as they plow along. The main plot is as trite as they come, and if I ever I see another movie where the main subsidiary male is a confidence man, I'll scream! Why the hell couldn't they have a super-attractive woman playing the number one confidence sharpie/bungler once in a while? In my (admittedly brief) days as a detective – well I don't suppose 90 days is all that brief (I still remember just about every day most poignantly – thanks mostly to the two idiots who outranked me being also assigned to the investigation) – I came across no less than four very sharp and very attractive lasses in the confidence game. Anyway, Joe E. Brown doesn't seem to notice not only that the script's plot is as trite as they come, but that Guy Kibbee is hard at work upstaging him. Fortunately for Brown, Kibbee's material soon runs out of puff and he is forced to repeat himself so often, he becomes almost as boring as good old Joe E. Hard to believe this boring charade was directed by Edward Sedgwick who did such a marvelous job on The Cameraman (1928), Father Brown, Detective (1934), Air Raid Wardens (1943) and A Southern Yankee (1948), to mention just four of a dozen or more! Available on an excellent Alpha DVD which also features one of Brown's best films, When's Your Birthday?