"As in much of Sturges’s work to this point, the humor grows in proportion to how maddening the circumstances are, and those circumstances are played terrifyingly straight, wound so tight it’s surprising that any number of the players don’t burst a blood vessel on screen. The film is a strange variation on the themes of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), in which the protagonist is innately good but buckles under the town’s estimation of him. To impart that thick, suffocating aura of expectation, Sturges rattles off some of his densest compositions, the crowd not far behind Woodrow no matter how he tries to duck it"

Patrick Preziosi for Screen Slate.
Featured 1/26 and 2/2 at Film Forum.