Brush salesman Tweeny (Jack Oakie) has just fallen in love with Angela
(Susan Fleming), daughter of the president of Klopstokia (W.C. Fields).
The president actually soon takes to Tweeny, but tells him he will only
give him his daughter's hand in marriage if he's able to somehow come up
with $ 8 million for the country's empty treasury, and soon, too. An
unsurmountable task it seems, but then Tweeny finds out that the land is
full of record-breaking athletes, and he decides to take them all to Los
Angeles to compete (and win) in the Olympic games. That should do the
trick of course, but there is opposition in form of the gouvernment led by
the secretary of the treasury (Hugh Herbert), who desperately want to
impeach the president - so they smuggle master spy Mata Machree (Lyda
Roberti), the woman no man can resist, onto the LA-bound boat, and she
soon creates unrest among the athletes and has them clobber each other out
of commission. Angela has soon seen through her game though, and she
clobbers her into admitting that she hasn't loved any of the athletes
right to their faces (and wins a gold medal for high diving in the
process), and already Klopstokia is on a winning streak. It's the
Olympic's game finale, weightlifting, and Klopstokia is only one win away
from reaching its goal. The contestant in this category is the president
himself, but he finds an unexpected adversary in his own secretary of the
treasury, who uses the charms of Mata Machree to motivate himself. At 900
pounds though, both men (and Mata Machree) are so out of breath, they are
already prepared to call it a draw - when Tweeny insults the president to
such an extent that he in his rage lifts the 1,000 pound weight and throws
it after Tweeny, winning the contest in the process ... A
little comedy that's just too nice to really amount to anything much,
that's too far-fetched to really convince, and that's totally unsuccessful
when it tries to go for political satire. That said, it's certainly not
the worst film I've ever seen, but I doubt that I'll even remember having
seen it in as little as a week.
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