Strike Me Pink (film)

Strike Me Pink is a 1936 American musical comedy film directed by Norman Taurog, starring Eddie Cantor and Ethel Merman, and produced by Samuel Goldwyn.

Cantor plays a nebbishy employee of an amusement park, forced to assert himself against a gang of slot-machine racketeers. The climax involves a wild chase over a roller coaster and in a hot-air balloon, filmed at The Pike in Long Beach, California. The film's sets were designed by the art director Richard Day.

The film was Eddie Cantor's sixth of six films for Goldwyn, all produced and released within seven years. The story derives from the novel Dreamland by the once-popular writer Clarence Budington Kelland, reworked as a 1933 stage musical comedy by Ray Henderson for Jimmy Durante.

Cast

 * Eddie Cantor as Eddie Pink
 * Ethel Merman as Joyce Lennox
 * Sally Eilers as Claribel Higg
 * Parkyakarkus as Parkyakarkus
 * William Frawley as Mr. Copple
 * Helene Lowell as Hattie 'Ma' Carson
 * Gordon Jones as Butch Carson
 * Brian Donlevy as Vance
 * Jack LaRue as Mr. Thrust
 * Sunnie O'Dea as Sunnie
 * Rita Rio as Mademoiselle Fifi
 * Edward Brophy as Killer
 * Sidney H. Fields as Chorley Lennox
 * Don Brodie as Mr. Marsh
 * Charles McAvoy as Mr. Selby
 * the Goldwyn Girls as Themselves

Critical reception
Writing for The Spectator in 1936, Graham Greene gave the film a good review, pointing out that in addition to the comedic value, the actorly qualities of Eddie Cantor made the film a true success. Although Greene suggests that Cantor is not perhaps quite at the level of Charlie Chaplin, he describes the scene between Pink and the gunman is "superb", and suggests that "one will have to wait a very long time for any film funnier than this one".