The best James Bell’s comedy movies

Lovely Linda Mason has crooner Jim Hardy head over heels, but suave stepper Ted Hanover wants her for his new dance partner after femme fatale Lila Dixon gives him the brush. Jim's supper club—Holiday Inn—is the setting for the chase by Hanover and manager Danny Reed. The music's the thing.

Director Charles Lamont's 1955 comedy, about a girl from the sticks doing drudge work at a hotel and dreaming of a better life, stars Judy Canova, Robert Lowery, Jacqueline de Wit, Richard Deacon, Robert Burton, James Bell, Marjorie Bennett, Leon Tyler, William Fawcett and Mimi Gibson.

This pre-Code comedy-thriller centers on Robert Holden, a broke and discouraged veteran, who meets fellow American Elinor Green at a cafe in Paris. After their first encounter, Holden's attempt to return Green's thought-to-be stolen purse ends up rendering him a stowaway on board a ship bound for America. Also aboard is a collection of characters, including Green's banker fiancé, a famed scientist, and an opera singer. Romance begins to blossom between Holden and Green, just as a radiogram claims that an “infernal machine,” or bomb, is aboard the ship. Quickly each passenger accuses the others of planting the bomb until eventually Holden, jealous of Green's attention to her undeserving fiancé, falsely admits to being the culprit. In his role as assumed perpetrator, Holden tests the group further.

The king of an unnamed European country abdicates and tries to recapture the happiness with the wife he had to give up for the throne.