NO TIME FOR COMEDY: and no chance of being entertained either

What do you get when you cross two MGM stars with Warner Bros sense of social realism and put them into a movie written by the two brothers most closely associated with the script for 'Casablanca'?
The answer is a deeply unsatisfying flop.

Rosalind Russell and James Stewart, on loan from MGM, are completely mismatched with the material, and the material is totally wrong for Warner Bros. By 1940 Warners had built a solid reputation as the studio which looked at life from the working man's point of view, which recognised that capitalism was not a perfect system but was still infinitely preferable to the alternatives, and which told it like it was. A Warner Bros film was most at home in a tenement, or a prison cell, or backstage on Broadway, and its stars spoke the language of the ordinary working man and woman.
Warner Bros was absolutely not about the sophisticated people or world portrayed in NO TIME FOR COMEDY.
Both Stewart and Russell came to Warner Bros hot off a string of successes, including 'Mr Smith Goes to Washington', 'The Shop Around the Corner', 'His Girl Friday' and 'The Women'  and one can only assume the studio was hoping some of that gold would rub off on this most un-Warner Bros-like production.
Stewart plays the ridiculously named Gaylord Esterbrook, an idealistic playwright from a small town in Iowa, whose frothy comedy about the upper classes becomes an unexpected Broadway hit. He gets hitched to the show's leading lady, Linda Paige (Rosalind Russell) and they live happily ever after until a patroness of the arts (Genevieve Tobin) persuades him to abandon his winning formula and write a tragedy instead.
The only thing less plausible than Stewart's rapid conversion from adorably naive bumpkin to jaded, pretentious artiste with delusions of grandeur is the ridiculous dialogue he's given to spout. He's palpably uncomfortable with the wordy windy lines written for him by Julius and Philip Epstein, and I got the strong sense that he didn't fully understand half of what he was saying. He disgorges words and phrases a Jimmy Stewart character just doesn't say. Director William Keighley and his superiors at Warner Bros aren't simply mishandling the Stewart persona, they're beating it to the ground and then giving it a vicious and prolonged kicking.
While Rosalind Russell is more at home in the New York society setting, her character is no more believable, and her super-cool laid back attitude to her husband's supposed philandering with Tobin's character rings completely hollow. The only member of the cast who emerges with any credibility is Charles Ruggles, wonderfully dry and resigned as Tobin's long suffering husband.
What's most surprising is just how badly wrong Warner Bros got it when they put their two borrowed stars into this project. No studio got it right 100 per cent of the time but Warners had a pretty good track record for matching stars with material and one has to wonder just what Jack Warner was thinking when he gave the go-ahead for NO TIME FOR COMEDY. The title is spot on - it's just a shame there's nothing else about this film that is.