MOVIE OF THE DAY: "HOLLYWOOD PARTY" (1934)

 No other movie represents the occasional downside of the old "assembly line" style of moviemaking and M-G-M's utter ineptitude in making zany comedies like Hollywood Party. What was planned as a straightforward all-star musical revue became, over the course of a year's creation, a ludicrous 68-minute musical comedy so disjointed that a new ending was tacked on explaining it was only a nightmare. Which most people considered it to be.

They look good even after their showers.

But you know what? I like Hollywood Party. In parts, anyway. By and large, it looks great, from James Wong Howe's classy cinematography to the massive art deco set where most of the movie takes place. One of the extravagant numbers features women taking showers, which seemed to be a legal requirement in those pre-code days. 

But then there's the story -- or, rather, idea for a story. Jimmy Durante has carved out a movie career as jungle hero Schnarzan. Having heard that audiences are tired of him fighting stuffed lions in his films, Durante throws a party in honor of the untrustworthy Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl, in his final movie, thank God), who claims to have captured a half-dozen real lions. Competing with Durante for the lions is another jungle movie hero, Liondora. 

This leaves only 63 more minutes to kill before the movie ends, so it's up to the comedians to save whatever is left. And by comedians, I'm not talking about the inexplicably popular Charles Butterworth and Eddie Quillan, two of the most one-note actors in movie history, who get way too much screentime. 

What's sad is that he's in better shape than me.

Outside of the unfortunate talkies he made with the alcoholic Buster Keaton, Jimmy Durante is always welcome. The Schnarzan trailer we see in a theater scene (following another Metro picture, Queen Christina) is not only stupidly funny in a good way but shows why they're called trailers -- they used to trail the feature rather than appearing before them. Props, too, for looking like a real Metro trailer, too. 

The Stooges enjoy their last big budget movie.

If Durante isn't up your alley, wait roughly 35 minutes for a brief appearance by Ted Healey & The Three Stooges as, respectively, a photographer and autograph hounds. "The boys" aren't mentioned in the opening credits, so either M-G-M thought so little of them (the Stooges decamped to Columbia later that year) or their scene was hastily filmed after the credits were created. No need to describe what they do here -- you can probably figure it out yourself and still laugh when you see it.

Mickey's pissed that Disney loaned him out to
 be in this mess.

Mickey Mouse drops by to introduce a weird Technicolor Disney cartoon short about a war between chocolate soldiers and gingerbread men, all of whom are eventually crippled, blown to bits, or melt in the sun. No wonder Disney parceled this thing out to M-G-M. Even by my standards, it's a disturbing seven minutes.

Stan reminds Ollie to get this scene done in one 
take so they can get back to the Hal Roach 
studio, pronto.

Only one -- make that two -- comedians rivaled Mickey Mouse in popularity at the time, so top-billed Laurel & Hardy stroll in 10 minutes before the end of Hollywood Party to show us what comedies are supposed to be. Their tit-for-tat egg-smashing bit with Lupe Velez was probably dreamed up by Stan Laurel a half hour before filming, but is nevertheless the undisputed highlight of the movie, and further proof that he and Hardy were geniuses at turning the simplest bits into hilarious set pieces. Watch Ollie's face in close-up as one icky broken egg slides down the front of his pants and a second down the back, as he silently registers shock, disgust and, finally, relief, in just a matter of seconds. Brilliant. 

Nobody in this scene listed Hollywood Party 
on their resumes. 

For a musical with three songwriting teams, Hollywood Party doesn't have much in the way of good songs. One number, "Hello", is clearly "influenced" by Animal Crackers'  "Hooray for Captain Spaulding", while "I've Had my Moments", rips off the melody from "Dinner at Eight". You know Rodgers & Hart didn't knock themselves out writing the title theme, although the proto-rap song they gave Durante, "Reincarnation", is just bizarre enough to be amusing. Or vice-versa.

As for Hollywood Party's other creators, only two of its screenwriters are listed in the credits, which features none of the eight directors (nine, if you include Walt Disney) who cycled through it. You can tell what the studio itself thought of the movie by holding the world premiere over 2,000 miles away in Atlanta. 

While Hollywood Party isn't the utter disaster history has made it out to be, it makes sense that the biggest names in the movie, Mickey Mouse and Laurel & Hardy, had to be loaned to M-G-M for their appearances. Otherwise, there really wouldn't have been much of a party at all. 

                                                            ****************

 A year before Hollywood Party, Jimmy Durante, Jack Pearl, and Ted Healy & The Three Stooges appeared in another misguided M-G-M comedy, Meet the Baron, which you can read about here.

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "MYRT AND MARGE" (1933)

As with M-G-M'S Meet the Baron, Universal's Myrt and Marge makes the mistake of believing that radio success automatically insures a hit movie. While the former's lead character Baron Munchausen is endlessly annoying, the vaudevillians Myrt & Marge (in real life, the mother/daughter duo of Myrtle Vail and Donna Demoral) have all the screen presence of a wet sidewalk. 

Perhaps that's why they're surrounded by experienced character actors Eddie Foy, Jr., Thomas Jackson, and Trixie Friganza (whose very name would soon become a shorthand reference for washed-up entertainers).

Thomas Jackson stares down Trixie, Myrt, Marge,
and Eddie in a round of "Who's The Most
Forgotten Actor".

There's nothing particularly original about Myrt and Marge' story. A struggling theatrical troupe tries bringing their revue to New York, while dealing with their horny investor who wants to make it with the ingenue. You think he's in this for his health?

The score won't make you forget 42nd Street or any of the great Warner Bros.' musicals of the time, seeing that Myrt & Marge has two mediocre songs repeated ad nauseum. As for the choreography, well, Eddie Foy, Jr. has some nice eccentric tap steps. And I suppose the who-the-hell-are-they Colonette Ballet are OK, even if there's nothing remotely ballet about them. 

Now this is entertainment.

So what's the point of watching Myrt and Marge? The same thing that makes Meet the Baron a must-see for certain movie fans: co-stars Three Stooges (credited as Howard, Fine & Howard) with their mentor Ted Healy. 

And unlike their occasional appearances in features, here Ted and the Stooges are a fully integrated part of Myrt and Marge's story. In fact, they're first seen roughly 30 seconds into the movie, and keep turning up every few minutes. You'd almost think someone at Universal knew this picture needed some genuine laughs.

And for Stooge aficionados, those laughs come fast and furious. Similar to Meet the Baron, their material is so much better and precisely Stoogesque than what surrounds them that they and Healy must have written it themselves. More than any of their pre-Columbia features, Myrt and Marge presents "the boys" the way their fans like them, complete with the familiar sound effects for slaps, smacks and pokes, along with the guttural "Oh!" accompanying their pratfalls.

Many Stoogephiles look upon Ted Healy as they do rabies, but to me he's not only funny, but is David Letterman-like in his dry delivery and can-you-believe-this style, only funnier. Yes, I said it: Ted Healy is funnier than David Letterman. 

If nothing else, Healy haters should appreciate how Moe later adapted Healy's bossy persona, right down to grumbling "Recede!" when his cohorts get out of line. Curly even got his "woo-woo-woo!" from Ted. Give the guy some credit. 

The inimitable gusto of Bonnie Bonnell.

Joining Ted and the Stooges is the inexplicable Bonnie Bonnell, who at the time was part of their stage act (and, offstage, Healy's bed). Bonnell's style is difficult to describe in words other than "confounding", "bizarre", and "dumbfounding". Her voice manages to be both flat and too on-the-nose, with a delivery that suggests Frances Farmer's notorious post-lobotomy appearance on This is Your Life. As for her jokes, here's a sample exchange:

MOE: Hey, how old are you?

BONNIE: Well, the last time I was home, I hopped on my mother's knee and said, "Daddy, how old am I?"

TED: You hopped on your mother's knee and said, "Daddy, how old am I?"

BONNIE: Sure.

MOE: Oh, you call your mother "Daddy".

BONNIE: Soitenly!

TED: You know, this may be a personal question but what do you call your Daddy?

BONNIE: Oh, we don't call him, he has an alarm clock!

Overall, Bonnie seems to be aping Gracie Allen's scatterbrain persona, only without the latter's charm, timing, or winning personality. I've never been able to figure out if she's the most untalented woman to step in front of a movie camera, or the most ahead-of-her-time subversively funny. All I can tell you is once she broke up with Ted Healy, she never made another movie. 

Clarence is appalled that nobody else is as
well-dressed as him.

The only person to rival the Stooges for sheer hilarity is Ray Hedge as Clarence, the troupe's out-and-proud costumer, who makes Franklin Pangborn look like Victor Mature. 

As if realizing the days of such characters were coming to an end, Myrt and Marge's writers give Clarence as many gay jokes as they can, which he delivers in the typical singsong style of the time. Woke audiences of today wouldn't approve, but if you're hep to pre-code movies, double-entendre exchanges like the following are always fun:

CLARENCE: (helping a former investor with his overcoat) I hope you stick this lovely coat in your assets.

INVESTOR: You wouldn't wear it unless it had lace on it.

Even the Stooges get into the pre-code game during the final musical number, positioning themselves to look straight up the dancers' dresses, something they never would have gotten away with a year later.   

Vilmos Zsigmond couldn't have done it better.

The only other person connected to Myrt and Marge worth mentioning is director Al Boasberg, and that's because he's the guy who dreamed up the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. He does, however, provide one nice touch when filming the title characters in a mirror's reflection. I'm easily impressed that way.

 Myrt and Marge is a good watch on YouTube, seeing that it's only 62 minutes long and is one of those movies where the supporting actors completely overshadow the alleged stars. At least it gives Myrt and Marge themselves a chance to be briefly remembered, even while being completely ignored. 

                                                  *****************

   To read about Ted Healy and the Three Stooges in Meet the Baron, go here.                                            

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "TURN BACK THE CLOCK" (1933)

Anybody who says, "I have no regrets" is either a liar or Ivanka Trump, who made that grand pronouncement at the age of 17. (Being born to a multi-millionaire and whose future was assured when she was still an embryo -- and she had no regrets?  My hat's off to her.) Everybody plays the old "what if" game. I do it all the time. What if I hadn't started losing my hair 30 years ago? What if I had become an over-priced plumber instead of a blogger? What if I had been one of the cool kids instead of watching old movies that no one else my age had the slightest interest in?

At this point, my wife is probably wondering, What if I had thought twice about accepting a first date with my husband? And so the fantasies begin, spinning like a pinwheel, creating a new life where all is perfect, every move is charmed and each strand of hair in place. In movies, however, the fantasies turn out badly so as to make the audience feel better about themselves -- and the moviemakers better about their great lives. I can't swear Turn Back the Clock was the first "if I could do it all again" picture, but I'd have to go back in time to be sure.

Joe Gimlet, the owner of a cigar store, is visited by an old friend, Ted Wright, now a multimillionaire banker married to Joe's former girlfriend, Elvina. When Joe's wife, Mary, refuses Ted's offer to invest their $4000 savings for a

"There's no place like the past... there's no place
like the past..."

"guaranteed" $20,000 return, Joe walks out and is hit by a car. While under anesthesia, Joe gets his drunken wish to live his life over again. (The visuals for Joe's trip to dreamland would be replicated in The Wizard of Oz six years later -- minus the tornado and Toto.) If this had happened to me every time I was visited by a rich friend from the old days, I'd have my own wing at New York Presbyterian Hospital. That's why I stay home and curse the bathroom mirror.

Joe gets to return home and get nagged
by Mom all over again.

One by one, Joe's wishes come true. He marries Elvina, becomes a partner in her father's real estate business, and focuses on making money. Lots of money. Enough to give away a million dollars to veterans, which doesn't sit well with Elvina. Joe's predictions of World War I land him a job as a presidential advisor... which he loses when he starts stepping on the toes of war profiteers. (Presidential advisors have not repeated that mistake since.) But so busy has he been trying to make money that Elvina begins an affair with a banker named Holmes, with whom she secretly invests her and Joe's life savings right before the '29 Crash -- the Crash that Joe warned her was coming. Message to you ladies out there: Your husband knows best. Listen to him.

Joe, by the way, figured out that Elvina was having an affair when he found one of Holmes' shoes in their living room -- which means the guy must have walked out with one shoeless foot. Speaking strictly as a movie fan, this was a plot device, I believe, that could have used a little work.

"You dressed a little better
when we were married, but
I forgive you."

Joe finally realizes how badly he's messed up his life when he drops by his old cigar store -- now owned by Joe Wright, who's, of course, married to Mary. Joe, it seems, never really quite stopped loving Mary. And it's Mary he turns to when his banking partners, who have been ripping off the business, hang him out to dry when the Feds come calling. That's like a man, right? When the chips are down, go back to the woman that you dumped for the hot cookie. Joe wants her to run away with him to Athens (Athens?), but Mary -- who's always loved him -- refuses to leave her stogie-salesman husband. Message to the men: You're all the same, you bastards.

The Cabinet of Dr. Gimlet

In the resulting nightmarish, layer-upon-layer montage that wouldn't have looked out of place in an old Ufa psychological drama, Joe is chased by what appears to be every Tommy-gun-toting cop in New York. After escaping a firing squad, Joe runs into a cabal of cops who proceed to beat the living crap out of him... just as he awakens in his hospital room with Mary, Ted and Elvina at his side. Relieved that he's still married to Mary, he sighs, "I wouldn't change places with Ted Wright for a million dollars." Easy for the writers to say.

Much of Turn Back the Clock's success is attributable to Lee Tracy (as Joe Gimlet), the cynical, fast-talking actor previously discussed in Washington Merry-Go-Round.  Tracy, while forgotten by all but the most die-hard movie fans, is ironically probably the most representative of the early '30s acting style: snappy, sardonic, self-confident -- James Cagney without the rough edges. Somebody give this guy a film festival.
 

Not just knuckleheads.

A welcome surprise is the brief appearance by The Three Stooges as the singing trio performing at Joe and Elvina's wedding -- a rare M-G-M appearance without their mentor, Ted Healy. It's the closest they came to a "straight" part -- no comedy, just the three-part harmony Stooges fans will recognize when they would occasionally break out into "You'll Never Know Just What Tears Are," a parody of barbershop-harmony tearjerkers they wrote with Healy. Here, Moe and Larry sport early 20th-century haircuts while Curley, as usual, is tennis-ball bald.

At least one star of Turn Back the Clock, Peggy Shannon (Elvina), might have wanted to turn back the clock herself. Her entry on imdb.com is something out of Hollywood Babylon: "From 1937, her career was increasingly afflicted by alcoholism. On May 11, 1941, Shannon's second husband, Albert G. Roberts, and his friend found [her] slumped over the kitchen table dead with her head down on her arms, a cigarette in her mouth, and an empty glass in her hand. 19 days after Shannon's death, Roberts fatally shot himself right on the spot where she died."


Turn Back the Clock's cast and fascinating script (by Edgar Selwyn and Ben Hecht) are superlative, even if its basic storyline contains nothing really surprising: Man is tired of his middle-class life, wishes he could live it all again a different way, realizes he had it better before. You could reach into a box of Twilight Zone episodes and find the same thing. It's the movie's little details still ring true today: Discussions regarding high unemployment, low wages and war profiteers. Investors ripping off their clients. The lead character complaining, in the very first line of dialogue, about the President fixing the economy by "trying to get the banks out of a jam -- what about the rest of us?" If nothing else, Turn Back the Clock proves that absolutely nothing has changed in the last 80 years. Message to everybody: We're screwed.

                                                       ***************

To read about Lee Tracy's savage political exposé Washington Merry-Go-Round, click here.

No clips of the Stooges' appearance in Turn Back the Clock are online, so here's a montage of some of their performances of "You'll Never Know Just What Tears Are" throughout the years:

MOVIE OF THE DAY: "MEET THE BARON" (1933)

Heavily promoted by MGM in its day, there's only a few minutes of genuine entertainment value in Meet the Baron. Ostensibly a comedy, it's really a cautionary tale (for studios and talent alike) working on two different levels.

Cautionary tale level #1: Throughout the 20th century and beyond, show business has been littered with entertainers who succeeded in one medium or another but washed out in movies. From Fannie Brice to Frank Fay (Broadway), to Andrew Dice Clay to Howard Stern (shock comedy), they were either too hot, too cold or just plain lacking that indefinable something that makes a movie star.

Jack Pearl: From radio
superstar to obscure blog topic.

Take Jack Pearl, for instance. One of the earliest network radio comedians, Pearl was known best as his alter ego Baron Munchausen. A liar of the first order, Munchausen regaled his straight man (known only as Charlie) with outrageous tales of his travels and heroics. Whenever Charlie expressed doubt over these exploits, Munchausen would reply in his comic German accent, "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" 

Doesn't sound like much, does it? Oh, how wrong you are. "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" was the Homer Simpson "D'oh!" of its day. Everyone used it in conversation whether appropriate or not. (When I was in high school, a full four decades after Pearl's heyday, a local radio personality was still dropping it in conversation from time to time.)  Ridiculous as it seems now, that single catchphrase was enough to make Jack Pearl one of the biggest radio stars of his time. MGM came calling, no doubt thinking it was signing a box office sure thing. In a word, Oops.

Jimmy Durante looks to God to get
him off the movie.

The plot is what studios today would call the backstory of how the baron gained acclaim as a great explorer (hint: he lied about it). With sidekick Joe McGoo (Jimmy Durante) in tow, the Baron kicks off on the lecture circuit at the all-girl Cuddle College, where he falls in love with a housemaid (ZaSu Pitts). His ruse is eventually discovered, but love wins out in the end.

Story aside, Meet the Baron is merely one long clothesline on which Pearl hangs his feeble jokes. A scene consisting of a radio interview with the Baron and Charlie has some historical interest to showbiz mavens, being an accurate replication of Pearl's show. Sample exchange: Munchausen is explaining how he was able to fly over the North Pole even after running out of gas. (Try to hear him in your head with a vaudeville-style German dialect.)

MUNCHAUSEN: I stayed up for six months longer.
CHARLIE: Without fuel? But that's impossible, that's against the law of gravitation!
MUNCHAUSEN: I know, but this was before the law was passed.

That other comedians in their prime -- Bob Hope, Stan Laurel, Chico Marx -- would probably get a chuckle with that same bit from today's audiences proves Eddie Cantor's theory: 90% of success in show business in likability. Jack Pearl is annoying. (The extras in the background appear genuinely amused -- people were more easily entertained during the Depression.)

The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Girls try to
wash off the stench of Meet the Baron.

For cinephiles, Meet the Baron's potential riches never quite pay off. A sophisticated musical number -- featuring a tickertape parade for the Baron, the Statue of Liberty singing a verse and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Girls taking a shower together -- promises good things, but is short-lived. 

Ultimately, the problem lies with MGM itself. The studio wasn't good at doing zany like Paramount, nor did it capture the flair for musicals like Warner Brothers. It was kind of like the spoiled rich kid who tries to fit in with the popular crowd at school, but without changing his tux.

In retrospect, the most fascinating thing about Meet the Baron is that producer David O. Selznick and one of its six writers (six writers!), Herman J. Mankiewicz, would later go on to Gone with the Wind and Citizen Kane respectively. As co-star Jimmy Durante might say, "It's unexplicable, I tells ya!"

This brings us to Level 2 of our cautionary tale. While studios signed flash-in-the-pans like Jack Pearl, they often couldn't see real talent before their eyes. Humphrey Bogart bummed around Warner Brothers for almost a decade when he finally landed his first major lead in High Sierra. Bette Davis was dropped by her first studio, Universal, for lacking sex appeal. And before Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson was just another cog in Roger Corman's exploitation assembly line.

And so, too, Meet the Baron gives us a glimpse of an act that MGM briefly had under contract but not really knowing what to do with, the Three Stooges. At the time, they were still working with Ted Healey, the comedian who put the act together in vaudeville several years earlier. Billed, naturally, as Ted Healey & His Stooges, "the boys" are a welcome relief to an otherwise dreary enterprise.

Ted Healey & His Stooges, along with Edna May Oliver, welcome the Baron to
Cuddle College. If only they aimed a little closer.

Whether fishing in a flooded basement, avoiding work by playing cards or tearing up Munchausen's room, the Stooges, a year away from starting their legendary run at Columbia, have their act down cold, albeit with some nominal differences. Healey has the ringleader role that Moe would eventually play. Curley ("Jerry" in the credits) is often crosseyed and barefoot. Only Larry is fully formed, tossing out sly one-liners under his breath with consummate skill.

They're even involved, if only tangentially, in Meet the Baron's funniest line. Edna May Oliver, the Dean of the college, warns them that if they don't do as she says, they'll "feel my wrath," allowing Healey to chuckle, "Don't try to bribe the boys!" And of course it's always comforting to hear this familiar exchange:

TED: Boys, get the tools.
MOE: What tools?
TED: The tools we've been using the last ten years.
STOOGES: Ohhh, those tools!

Just why that bit, repeated throughout the Stooges' career, makes guys of my generation laugh no matter how many times we hear it, I'll leave for the experts to  analyze. Indeed, their scene in the school basement is so much funnier than anything else in Meet the Baron that I suspect Healey and "the boys" wrote it themselves.

As for Jack Pearl, he appeared in only one more movie, the messy but often amusing Hollywood Party in 1934. By then, his career was already on the downslide. Waiting in the radio wings were legends-to-be including Jack Benny and Burns & Allen -- comedians whose humor relied on recognizable human foibles rather than silly accents and stale jokes. Still convinced that his Munchausen shtick was what the people wanted, Pearl wandered in and out of radio until 1952, probably asking a new, metaphysical question: "Am I here, Sharlie?" 

****************************************

The original 1933 trailer for Meet the Baron. Leave it to the marketing geniuses to shoehorn in "Vas you dere, Sharlie?" at least three times, while omitting the funniest Stooges bits: