DKosty123 This movie is very much a low budget RKO special. By 1937 the money from King Kong was beginning to die out. Still the beginning of the movie is such a hoot that I had fun with it. Girls finishing school named Dimsdale Hall? What is the message there? Marjorie Lord lecturing the girls on being finished..err.. polished at the school. Then the evils of that swing music her finance plays? Oh my, this is quite a pickle.Then the humor slows down as we get a murder. Alfred Hitchcock this is not. there is fun though. Just relax on the serious part and enjoy the rest. Marjorie Lord can sing before she got Rusty Hammered on make room for daddy with that Danny Williams guy.

gridoon2018 The least you can say about the 6 Hildegarde Withers films is that they tried to give us a different setting for murder in each episode; the New York Aquarium, The Continental Museum, Catalina Island, etc. In "Forty Naughty Girls", there are two extra elements: there is just one setting, a Broadway theater where the sold-out title show is being presented, and the story plays out in "real time". This is the most comedy-oriented entry in the series, with Hildegarde doing arguably more pratfalling than detecting; nonetheless, she does at least manage to solve the case herself (and it's a tough one), unlike the previous Zasu Pitts outing ("The Plot Thickens"), where Inspector Oscar Piper should take about 90% of the credit. Tom Kennedy, a "Torchy Blane" series regular at the time as dumb cop Gahagan, makes a guest appearance as....dumb cop Casey, and as usual he guarantees some good laughs ("There is the killer, and he brought his horse!"). For a B production, "Forty Naughty Girls" does a good job of "faking" a higher budget than it probably had. **1/2 out of 4.

Michael_Elliott Forty Naughty Girls (1937) * (out of 4) The sixth and final film in the RKO series has Zasu Pitts returning for her second stint as Hildegarde Withers and of course James Gleason is back as Inspector Piper. This time out Withers and Piper are attending a popular play on Broadway when the press agent is shot dead. The two begin the investigation and learn that he was trying to mess with an actress (Marjorie Lord), which didn't sit well with her boyfriend but there are a few others with a motive to kill the man. FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS has a horrible reputation and it even managed to get a rare BOMB rating from Leonard Maltin who rarely goes that low on older movies. After viewing the film I don't think it's that bad but at the same time this thing is still a complete disaster that has very little going for it. I think a lot of the blame can be pointed at RKO taking this "B" series and dropping it down to a "D" level. The screenplay, the look of the film and the overall production values are a lot lower than what was seen in earlier movies and I'm going to guess that someone needed to finish off a contract and this film was thrown together to do just that. The screenplay is just a boring mess with one suspect entering the picture every few minutes but the problem is that there's nothing here to make you care who the killer is. I'll admit that something would happen, I'd grow bored and then ten minutes later I couldn't remember what had just happened. Another problem is the performance of Pitts. There's no question she was a talented actress but her talents weren't going to be needed in every type of film and it's clear the producers didn't know how to use her here. As Withers she's not playing a character but instead she's pretty much playing that dumb moron she played in various comedies including her work with Hal Roach. There wasn't a single second where I actually believed she could come up with any clue let alone solve any type of murder. The humor is so forced that you have to wonder why the director or producer didn't cast someone else or at least change the story to better fit her. Gleason is obviously tired of the role as he sleepwalks through the film. The one saving grace is Lord who is good in her few scenes. It's easy to see why this marked the end of the series as there certainly wasn't much room to get worse.

calvinnme ... whoever is responsible for this travesty was very naughty and deserves to be grounded. It takes a great deal of effort to make either James Gleason or Zasu Pitts boring - in fact I'd never seen it happen before - but this film did it.This film was supposed to be a continuation of the James Gleason/Edna Mae Oliver crime mysteries starting with Penguin Pool murder in 1932. Those two had great chemistry and were a believable pair both in the sleuthing and possibly even romantic categories. The zingers and one liners flew in their films, even after the production code came in. Here Zasu Pitts is replacing Ms. Oliver as schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers as she and detective Oscar Piper (James Gleason) step out together to watch the show "Forty Naughty Girls". Beforehand there is a set-up of situations that show the eventual murder victim causing trouble for various people associated with the show. When he predictably turns up dead, Piper and Withers are on the scene to solve the mystery. The problem is, from that point forward they are not really acting as a team as they were before. They seem to be operating independently and just bump into each other as a matter of circumstance or slapstick.The show that acts as a backdrop for the mystery just doesn't seem very naughty or even funny for that matter, the suspects are not very interesting or memorable, and our two leads are poorly served by the entire mess. If you want to see what this crime series was at its peak watch "Penguin Pool Murder", "Murder on the Blackboard", or "Murder on a Honeymoon". If you want to see James Gleason and Zasu Pitts be entertaining, watch just about anything they ever did but this.