Popkin Productions have taken up the crusade against the giveaway quiz program. The plot is good, the acting excellent, but the picture too long.

Ronald Colman is Mr. Popkin's knight on white horse, armed with an inexhaustible supply of knowledge. After watching a program called "Masquerade For Money," Colman decides that the level of intelligence encouraged by this program is the fore-runner of intellectual degeneration, and slowly forms a plan to kill the program.

The radio program asks contestants to represent something or someone, then answer questions pertinent to the personality of that object. Wearing a pair of book covers and a monacle, Colman appears as the Encyclopedia Britannica. He answers his first questions and wins the program's limit, $160. Rather than take the money he asks for a chance to appear again risking the money in the double or nothing procedure.

The remainder of the picture is taken up with the successive weeks of victory for Colman until he eventually is trying for the $40,000,000 question, the one which will put Milady Soap Company, the sponsors, out of business. Vincent Price, company owner, has tried to keep him off the program by paying him and stopping the show but it doesn't work. The public is behind Colman, and when he doesn't appear, no soap is sold. Price tries to muddle his mind, by sending Celeste Holm after him; he has tried to find his weak spot by getting the moronic quiz master (played appropriately by Art Linkletter, a real quiz master) to make love to his sister. Both agents fall in love with their enemies and consent to wed the day after the final question is asked in the Hollywood Bowl.

Vincent Price, turned humorist as the lather leviathan, is superb. He dismisses intelligence with the air of someone who has been acquainted with radio and television for a long time. A lampoon of this industry has been a long-time. A lampoon of this industry has been a long-time in coming but director Richard Whorf, known to some as a Shakespearean actor, has allowed the direction to get out of hand. There are too many irrelevancies and not enough of the quip situations in which Mr. Colman can handle himself best. The picture should have run an hour and it ran for two hours and 18 minutes.