A little over half way through this Universal Production, James Stewart and Eddie Albert crash their cargo plane in a southwestern wilderness. While Joan Fontaine consoles a distraught monkey in one end of the plane and an escaped embezzler lies petrified in the other, Albert informs Stewart, "You don't look very happy." Stewart and the Astor audience, had nothing to be happy about at that point or at any other in the movie.

"You Gotta Stay Happy," an adaption of a Saturday Evening Post serial, has a number of "guaranteed" comedy situations and "funny" lines, but they all expired years ago with age and exhaustion. Stewart and Fontaine try hard enough, but they never succeed in convincing the audience, and don't seem to persuade themselves of the worth of the whole enterprise.

Rich Heiress Fontaine, complete with satin pajamas and psychiatrist, decides that she can't stand her new husband's cough--after an hour or so of marriage. So she spends her nuptial night in the hotel room down the hall. The room happens to be inhabited by pilot Stewart, who plods through the "you take the bedroom and I'll sleep on the couch." situation and later takes the heroine "way from it all" in his westbound plane--together with the cigar-smoking carnival monkey, the cringing embezzler, a corpse-loaded coffin, and other less interesting cargo.

After the crack-up, the local atmosphere--"typical farmer" and his "typical farm family"--so affects to embezzler that he confesses, and so affects Miss Fontaine that she falls in love with Mr. Stewart. From then on everything is according to Hoyle.

The principal disappointment comes from the waste of James Stewart and Joan Fontaine in this film; they usually appear in better movies. There must be better ways of staying happy, anything.