Before my recent viewing of Love Me Tonight, I had only seen Charles Butterworth in one other movie: Forsaking All Others, in which he’s hilarious. The whole film (starring Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Robert Montgomery, Billie Burke and Rosalind Russell) is so, so funny, and Butterworth as "Shep" (The IMDB has "Shemp" but trust me, they're wrong) has some of the best lines of all.
Eleanor: [commenting on bachelor parties] I wish I were a man.
Shep: Were, or had?
Sometimes it’s the way he says the lines, rather than the dialogue itself.
Shep: Look, a cow!
Jeff: Yes, Sheppy, a great big moo cow.
He’s so good at playing silly and witty at the same time. Shep’s not dumb, exactly, but definitely rather spacey. Everyone in this film is funny, but because of Butterworth’s delivery and demeanor, the character of Shep makes me laugh the most.
Forsaking All Others is filled with witty banter and amusing one-liners. I've seen the movie dozens of times, and it still makes me laugh every time.
Dill: I don’t need matches, I can start a fire by rubbing two Boy Scouts together!
(I don’t think you could get away with that today.)
Also, watching Eleanor and Shep "tango" is too cute. Butterworth often played the leading man’s daffy sidekick, in fact so well that script writers starting leaving blank chunks in the screenplays, so Butterworth would improvise and fill in with his own well-appreciated wit.
Butterworth graduated from Notre Dame with a degree in law, and also tried his hand at journalism before drifting into acting. He was best friends with Robert Benchley, and I have heard that Butterworth’s death in a car crash wasn’t an accident, but rather a suicide; he was despondent over Benchley’s death seven months before. Butterworth is buried in St. Joseph Valley Cemetery in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana.
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