Movie Crazy.

Review #2024: Movie Crazy.

Cast: 

Harold Lloyd (Harold Hall / Trouble), Constance Cummings (Mary Sears), Kenneth Thomson (Vance), Louise Closser Hale (Mrs Kitterman), Spencer Charters (J.L. O'Brien), Robert McWade (Wesley Kitterman, Producer), Eddie Fetherston (Bill - assistant director), Sydney Jarvis (The Director), Harold Goodwin (Miller), Mary Doran (Margie), DeWitt Jennings (Mr Hall), and Lucy Beaumont (Mrs Hall) Directed by Clyde Bruckman (#908 - The General, #1304 - Welcome Danger, #1621 - Feet First) and Harold Lloyd.

Review: 

I will admit that there it has been slow road to cover the talkie era of Harold Lloyd, who certainly deserves to be remembered for his contributions to comedy. He made the transition to sound at the age of 36 after countless silent comedies two-fold: Speedy was initially released as a silent feature in April of 1928 before a version that added a few sound sequences came out in December. The following year saw the release of Welcome Danger. Movie Crazy is the third Lloyd talkie film of the seven he would do as star, most of them with him as producer. Clyde Bruckman was recruited to direct Lloyd once again, having directed him for three previous features (which involved the sound version of Speedy, Welcome Danger, and Feet First). He had gone from would-be sportswriter to intertitle writer to gag man for Buster Keaton and later director for various comedy production. However, Bruckman soon fell under the influence of what curtailed his career: alcoholism. As such, it fell to Lloyd to assist in the directing chair (which wasn't too odd, as he had co-directed a few of his own films, such as The Kid Brother, which had four directors), although he did not claim credit. The dialogue and screenplay was done by Vincent Lawrence while the story was done by Agnes Christine Johnston, John Grey, and Felix Adler. Lloyd and Ernie Bushmiller also contributed un-credited work on the script. After Bruckman was relegated to writing for comedy rather than directing it by 1935, he got into the habit of "re-utilizing" certain gags from his older productions for comedy short-subjects that he was doing at Columbia Pictures (such as for The Three Stooges), and one of them is the magician's-coat sequence in Movie Crazy. He would crib the scene for multiple productions and was sued by Lloyd each time for copyright, which Lloyd would win (one might wonder why Lloyd was so easy to sue, but imagine being put in a spot where your director and usual gag-assistant is too drunk to really direct and then he decides years later to crib a scene that originally had you as star). Bruckman committed suicide in 1955 at the age of 60.

Stop if you have heard this before: a well-meaning boy or fumbler type of character tries to make it good in a place that seems to be too much for one too oblivious to know how to play the game. Lloyd may have been the shrewdest in marketing himself for selective appearances in the early sound era, but that does not certainly mean that he fared the best among the silent-to-sound transitioners. The film has been labeled by some as one of Lloyd's best in the sound era, and I suppose we shall see if that is fully true at the end of the road, although truthfully, I am salivating at the prospect seeing Leo McCarey direct him in The Milky Way (1936), just two films after this one. Of course, when compared to Feet First and Welcome Danger, Movie Crazy is practically an ice-cold water bottle on a hot day, so take that for what it is worth with a 98-minute movie built on a handful of sight gags and the classic misunderstandings that I am sure you all know from certain comedies and so on and so forth (such as the aforementioned use of a magician's coat to wreak havoc for a dance). Anyway, let's get to the point: the movie is fine. It definitely seems a bit more reliant on visual gags to go along with the fact that the movie is basically two-fold: the fumbling young man that stumbles through the motions of trying to make something in Hollywood and the fumbling young man that stumbles through his feelings for two totally-not similar looking women. Honestly, I could really do with more stuff involving him bumbling as an "innocent" when it comes to the movie industry rather than when trying to not fumble between "romances", because if he wants me to believe in something for a guy that doesn't exactly have that much time to make me think he is still the picture of innocence (the man was near 40), I would rather have the first part, but I'm sure getting the girl is giving what people want, not more scenes involving him try to not cause the camera to explode when he forgets a line or makes for a terrible extra. Actually, Cummings does do a pretty good job in terms of being as an assertive contrast required to help set the tone of what goes on with a rough industry that demands everything everywhere all at once, and her treating Lloyd as a relief rather than a hinderance makes it a curious experience. Of course, she is also playing a character that Lloyd also falls for and go figure that she has a problem with him falling for the "Mexican character" that she is playing in makeup. Thomson is a decent foil to the proceedings in terms of being someone for Lloyd to counter against when it comes to the most interesting sequence: the fight scene at the end, one told with little dialogue that takes place on a dripping wet ship set that is executed quite well in execution and pacing. As a whole, whether serving as Lloyd's best sound film or not, it is a fairly decent comedy film from its time that will prove just how long he had a grip on an audience that needed a laugh and found him comforting to go along with.

Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.

Feet First.

Review #1621: Feet First. 

Cast:
Harold Lloyd (Harold Horne), Barbara Kent (Barbara), Robert McWade (John Quincy Tanner), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Tanner), Henry Hall (Endicott), Noah Young (Sailor), Alec B. Francis (Mr. Carson), Arthur Housman (Drunken Clubman), and Willie Best (Janitor) Directed by Clyde Bruckman (#908 - The General and #1304 - Welcome Danger)

Review:
What is there to say that has not been said about Harold Lloyd? There were numerous stars and icons of the early years of cinema, which ranged from shorts to feature-length, and Lloyd was a pillar of both in a career that spanned three decades. He was as distinct in his persona as other icons of the era like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with his thrill sequences and notable stunts (with a share done by Lloyd, but not all of them contrary to perception, with crewmen like Robert A. Golden doing stunts) that resulted in a fair share of triumph for silent and sound films, and it is his attention to archiving his work that means one can readily enjoy most of his short films and all of his features without trouble (incidentally, Lloyd had complied gags from films such as this one for Harold Lloyd's World of Comedy in 1962, although he edited the film to remove dated material). How one enjoys their comedic presence of yesteryear is up to debate, but Lloyd was surely consistent enough in his silent output of eleven features, with the three big highlights being Grandma's Boy (1922), Safety Last! (1923), and The Freshman (1925). Not to be forgotten in this film is director Bruckman, because he certainly left as big of an imprint on comedy as Lloyd. He worked with a variety of comic legends in regards to gags and direction/writing. He started his young years as a sports writer before moving to further writing ventures and then film in intertitle writing in 1919. He moved on to a chance to assist with writing gags for Buster Keaton (it was Bruckman that found a book about a locomative chase in the Civil War that led to one of Keaton's best features with The General). Work with others soon followed, such as directing Laurel & Hardy with The Battle of the Century (1927, short subject), or work with Monty Banks (A Perfect Gentleman, 1928) and eventual work with comedians like W. C. Fields and The Three Stooges. Of course, this was the second collaboration between Lloyd and Bruckman, with their first talking feature not exactly being a winner. In fact, Welcome Danger (1929) was actually pretty dull, a hodgepodge that exists in sound and silent versions that played too loose with itself in landing anything more than pale in nearly two hours of film.

So, if there was a problem with too many cooks in the writing room and pacing before, does this film solve those quandries? Sort of, since it runs at 93 minutes, but there were six (!) credited writers this time around: John Grey, Alfred A. Cohn, and Bruckman contributed the story, while Felix Adler & Lex Neal did the scenario and Paul Gerard Smith did the dialogue. Lloyd played the bespectacled "Glasses" kid to a T for years and years, where he usually had to prove something (whether for a girl or for courage), so here we are in what seems to be a case of trying to drain from the well for what seems like the seventh time in a decade (after all, those Lloyd masterpieces all followed the same pattern), with varying results. It can best be described with a famous line used involving change: The more things change, the more they stay the same. What we have is a comedy of dueling masquerades, since Lloyd is doing his "Glasses" schtick to try and make an impression of the shoe place he works at in terms of personality while thinking that the lady he is wooing is the daughter of his boss, which leads to stints spent with high society, a sequence with a fussy parent, a boat, and a skyscraper. It is a fairly episodic film that naturally decides to spend nearly half of its time with the ocean liner (with gags that range from trying to hide papers with his face on it to running away in a mailbag as it goes off the boat) that goes on for over thirty minutes. Interestingly, the film then goes to a trip up (and down) a building in a series of gags that seem reminiscent of Safety Last! in his hanging(s) - the aspects with Best is the most dated part of the film, adhering to stereotypes that were omitted on re-release for TV and the ensuing compilation. Best was one of the first well known African American actors/comedians, although he generally was used to play roles considered demeaning - this was his first credited role (although he is credited under the horrid nicknname "Sleep 'n' Eat") in a career of two decades. The sequence is tedious enough, playing on making Best play a clownish janitor role that is referred to as a word relating to his skin is worse. The skyscraper sequence was shot the same way as with that film, in which there was construction done to put parts of the facade of a building (in this case a gas building in Los Angeles) onto a rooftop where a camera tower would be adjacent (stark in contrast to resorting to tricks like rear projection, although that is used for one momentary shot in the end). This sequence of dangling off the building goes on for near twenty minutes, and we are talking about a movie that only goes on for basically a minute after it stops yo-yoing off the building just to wrap things up abruptly and set up one more joke. Simply put, putting sound to a scene of someone trying to not fall down a building is too lengthy to really contemplate. Lost in all this is the acting, because it basically seems like a lamp post waiting to be tripped over for some mild gags, for which Lloyd is yet again the only notable one to stick out. Thing is, he was 37 when this came out, and there are only so many times one can be a square before it becomes a flat-footed mess. This was the second of two films for Kent with Lloyd, and she was the last leading lady to star in multiple films with Lloyd, and she certainly gives off nothing of interest in terms of romance or amusement with Lloyd, where one might as well be watching two broomsticks try not to bump into the other. McWade and Leighton are there in small notes that one hopes for time to serve as a foil, and yet here we are. As a whole, the episodes of gags should work better than they do, but average Lloyd might be well enough if one wants to see the progression of Lloyd continue yet again with a sound product that would fit best when there are no less average ideas available or for a completionist. 

Overall, I give it 6 out of 10 stars.

Grand Hotel (1932).

Review #1338: Grand Hotel.

Cast: 
Greta Garbo (Grusinskaya, the dancer), John Barrymore (Baron Felix von Geigern), Joan Crawford (Flaemmchen, the stenographer), Wallace Beery (General Director Preysing), Lionel Barrymore (Otto Kringelein), Lewis Stone (Dr. Otternschlag), Jean Hersholt (Senf, the porter), Robert McWade (Meierheim), Purnell B. Pratt (Zinnowitz), Ferdinand Gottschalk (Pimenov), Rafaela Ottiano (Suzette), and Morgan Wallace (Chauffeur) Directed by Edmund Goulding (#1332 - Hell's Angels)

Review: 
"Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come. People go. Nothing ever happens."

Theatricality goes a long way when you have the star-power to go with it. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the studio for stars in the 1930s, and Irving Thalberg was precisely the person to create big films through the power of picks - selecting scripts, gathering staff, etc. He had purchased the rights to adapt the novel Menschen im Hotel (1929) by Vicki Baum (who had been a chambermaid at a few high-class Berlin hotels), which was turned into a play by William A. Drake the following year (a musical of the same name was also adapted from the novel and play in 1989). Drake, alongside un-credited writers in Béla Balázs and Edgar Allan Woolf, helped to turn it into a film through writing, which comes together like a series of vignettes or an anthology piece, but it was one of the first films to utilize more than two stars to serve as headliners, which now seems like a common thing (as proven by future big-name productions in the following decades to be covered another time). It also has one key distinction - the only Best Picture winner to have no nominations in any other category. MGM would continue this trend with the comedy Dinner at Eight (which also features both Barrymores and Beery) the following year, and it would be re-made by the studio in 1945 as Week-End at the Waldorf. In any case, this is a film that has an undeniable staying power with its core five cast that a lesser cast or less capable director would've turned into plain old-hat melodrama. At 112 minutes, it pulls off entertainment that worked for Great Depression audiences and still works for modern audiences, where one shining star doesn't shine too bright over everybody else, mostly because not all of them share the stage at one point in the film. One starts with Garbo, who had risen from parts in films in her native Sweden to star in Hollywood in the span of six years, with her naturalistic acting (which worked well for silent and sound) being just as known as her reclusive nature, right down to the most memorable line of the film being how she just wants to be alone. She fares just fine, mostly when sharing the passion and focus with Barrymore, with her personally requesting red front-lighting for her love scenes, which certainly work. J. Barrymore (nicknamed "The Great Profile" with a noted career of stage and film since 1903) fares just as calmly, where one does not dwell on the considerable age difference between him and Garbo but instead focuses on his charm, which can go for either romance or dialogue with L. Barrymore. Crawford (a resilient star through self promotion alongside talent) shines with resourcefulness, a lady for the moment, whether it is hope or desperation (a role that was trimmed by the censors of the time for various reasons). L. Barrymore proves to be a fair surrogate for the audience, where one wants to see someone's attempt at a mild-mannered attempt at a first and last great gesture of life, although that makes it seem more tragic than it really is, particularly since this part could've been more grating (or on the other hand a sad one) with a different actor. Beery goes for the ham with a German accent in tow (with a promise that only he would have to put on an accent convincing him to sign on), with mixed results, really, although if a heavy is needed, one can't go wrong with someone like Beery. In any case, one will find themselves pulled into a film with spectacle to spare, from its production quality (most signified in its lobby scenes, along with art direction from Cedric Gibbons) down to its reasonable direction from Goulding that keeps everything going to the right room without missing a beat, which makes it endure to this very day.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.