AllMovie

Okay, America! is a triumph of style and daring over substance and logic. The movie is a 80 brisk minutes of non-stop entertainment, paced so rapidly that even in 2010, nearly 80 years after its premiere, audiences were willing to overlook the leaps in logic and plotting that help drive its narrative. Director Tay Garnett never slows down long enough to permit such intrusions in what is one of the more entertaining cinematic conjuring tricks of its day -- a day when a lot of films, still in the process of adapting to the unique needs of the talkies, still creaked a bit at the seams. Not so Okay, America!, which rushes forward like an express train at full-throttle -- in lieu of usual Walter Winchell cinematic stand-in Lee Tracy, young leading man Lew Ayres, who had previously specialized in male ingenue-type roles, takes on the machine-gun like delivery needed for the role of columnist Larry Wayne, and brings just enough seriousness to the part so that he makes it work for him. Maureen O'Sullivan acquits herself well in the thankless role of his love-starved assistant, and the other supporting players (especially Walter Catlett in a comically antagonistic role) are fine as well -- and even an interlude in the Oval Office at the White House, which should defy all logic in its staging, gets pulled off successfully. The movie is a lot of fun, like a roller-coaster ride, and even the downbeat ending shouldn't hamper one's enjoyment of the previous 79 minutes.