Director: Lloyd Bacon
As with Going Wild, his previous comedy for First National Pictures, Sit Tight is yet another Joe E. Brown musical in which almost all of the musical numbers were cut before release due to audience exhaustion. The one significant exception makes one wonder what direction the rest of the film might have taken—in a fantasy sequence, Brown imagines Winnie Lightner dressed in a feather turban and shaking her rear. And yet if the cuts robbed audiences of a musical about professional wrestling, Sit Tight does provide the inspired casting of Brown and Lightner as co-stars—if Lightner is woefully underutilized, she is just the sort of talent to compliment Brown. Whereas Brown exceeds with mugging and reaction shots, Lightner’s great talents are as a female Lee Tracy—she’s a smack-talking motormouth, putting everyone around her in their place. Their scenes together are predictably enjoyable but frankly there are too few of them (one wishes the film scrapped a bland romantic subplot in favor of more of their interactions together). Despite her casting, Sit Tight is not particularly better or worse than the average Brown vehicle, including the reliably amusing action scene (this time making great use of Brown’s athleticism) and a few moderately enjoyable scenes in which the loudmouth gets put in his place.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
In an unusual opening scene in this Warner Brothers comedy, a lesbian writer suggests the idea of an “office wife”–that is, when a businessman’s secretary becomes an even more dependable partner than his own wife. Anne Murdock (Dorothy Mackaill) is convinced she isn’t such a sap (she’s replacing a secretary who was hopelessly in love with her boss), but it’s not long before she finds out that she’s not the gold digger she thought she could be and she begins to fall for her publisher employer, Larry Fellowes (Lewis Stone). Mackaill has had a bit of resurgence in recent years thanks to the rediscovery of William A. Wellman’s pre-Code masterpiece Safe in Hell, but The Office Wife doesn’t see her at her best. For one, she’s paired with the woefully miscast Stone, who lacks the sex appeal that a Warren William might have brought to the part. Furthermore, she’s too genuine and sensitive a performer to even play at the suggestion of being a simple gold digger, and unfortunately for her she was cast alongside a sexy, brazen newcomer named Joan Blondell. In one of her first film roles, Blondell shines in what would be a protypical part for her in the early 1930s–she delivers sassy one-liners in various states of undress, stealing the show with her immodest, shameless energy.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
6 Day Bike Rider involves the sort of redemptive narrative arc that Harold Lloyd might have starred in. Joe E. Brown is introduced as a near-sighted wet blanket who doesn’t manage to compliment his supreme lack of talent with anything resembling sensitivity or heart. To impress his girlfriend (Colleen Doyle), who has been stolen from him by a married trick cyclist (Gordon Westcott), he enters the titular race and wins her back. Brown’s mugging and eagerness-to-please made him a huge charmer for rural audiences, and he often excelled at playing lovable smart alecks. But his smug, thoroughly unpleasant hero in 6 Day Bike Rider is so thoroughly detestable that watching him redeem himself isn’t quite as cathartic as it might have been in a different comedian’s hands (the aforementioned Lloyd would have brought an amiability that Brown lacks). Director Lloyd Bacon nicely handles the suspense during the racing sequence using every prop imaginable. There’s a particularly inspired gag using chloroform, as well as a particularly creative way of getting a coffee fix mid-race.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Comedies in the early-1930s were often of the variety that would lead to the eventual enforcement of the Production Code. Sexuality was a major focus, with innuendo-laced dialogue being delivered by carefree sophisticates. It’s no surprise, then, that Joe E. Brown was able to carve a name for himself as a major box office draw by appealing to small town movie goers. His corn-fed, “aw, shucks” type of appeal was decidedly family friendly. Fireman, Save My Child is a prime example of his stardom. Brown plays a genius inventor, renowned pitcher, and local hero. Even when he’s threatened to be compromised by a gold digger, he naively navigates the distraction and doesn’t become fully swayed… or even aware that he’s been duped! In the midst of a Depression, it must have been heartening for audiences to see a film in which a good-natured, small town man can get by just on the strength of his determination and kindness. Today, the film doesn’t have much of a bite to it–it’s not merely the absence of the expected pre-Code shenanigans, but by the fact that Brown plays such a superhero that there’s never a sense of urgency or danger, even when fires are blazing and a baseball game gets too close for comfort in the ninth inning. Brown’s performance isn’t as comedic as some of his others, but he does get to show off his talents as a baseball player–when Warner Brothers first signed Brown, it was stipulated in his contract that he was guaranteed a personal baseball team!
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Although she’s largely forgotten today (perhaps due to her early retirement in 1934), Winnie Lightner was a significant asset for Warner Brothers in the pre-Code era. A vaudeville veteran, Lightner found success playing gold digger roles and had a voice that worked well in musicals. In Gold Dust Gertie, she’s paired with fellow vaudeville entertainers Olsen and Johnson (remembered for Hellzapoppin’), who were distinguished by the particular brand of mayhem that they brought to their routines. Some of their absurd humor is present here–there’s an amusing scene in which they try to hide Lightner in a myriad of unsuccessful ways–but the act grows thin quickly, with Olsen’s idiotic laughs becoming increasingly grating. Energetic as the performances are, everyone seems a bit desperate for laughs that come few and far between. Claude Gillingwater, who specialized in playing grumpy, conservative men, finds the most success of the lot in playing Lightner’s latest target.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Charlotte Greenwood was a well respected entertainer on Broadway but she hardly seemed like a bankable candidate for movie stardom. She’s not unattractive–she sort of looks like a cross between Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Blondell–but the clumsy way that she moves her lanky, six foot frame is far from the expected grace of a typical screen starlet. But it’s precisely that type of loose, free energy that makes her a perfect embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age. So Long Letty was her first talkie and, like her performance, it’s the rare film from the first year of sound that has a certain energy in the filmmaking. Although the camera remains mostly static, director Lloyd Bacon utilizes cuts relatively often and to good effect. Sometimes it is a simple change of scale, but most often the cuts are used to “pair” up two of the actors–a nice touch for a film about a wife swap (when the husbands are talking about the wives, for example, Bacon will alternate between medium closeups of the two wives and then the two husbands). The ceaseless score similarly keeps the pace moving, as does the endlessly witty dialogue (adapted from Oliver Morosco’s play) that is theatrical in its repetition and rhyming schemes without being distracting.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
A miscast pair of leading actors holds back an otherwise charming comedy from director Lloyd Bacon, a solid if unremarkable hand for Warner Brothers for many years. Dennis Morgan is affable enough when he’s not going for silly–on the occasions that he does, one admires his commitment but is very aware of how deeply strained he is, looking self-conscious in his desire to produce laughs. Nonetheless, he fares better than Merle Oberon, whom Hollywood had the poor idea to cast in a screwball roles even after it had become clear that she succeeded most in melodramas. In the breakout year of her career, third-billed Rita Hayworth (on loan from Columbia) steals the show as the woman who is willing to play along with Morgan’s game to win back his wife. The role is little more than a plot device, but Hayworth’s dignified performance sets her apart from characters in similar remarriage comedies as a fiercely independent, intelligent woman who becomes more than just a pawn of a game played between sparring lovers. Ever-reliable Ralph Bellamy also shines as Oberon’s new man, however because it’s Bellamy audiences already know he hasn’t got a chance at the girl (although at least he’s a slightly more aggressive dope than usual).
Director: Lloyd Bacon
While Lloyd Bacon worked in virtually every genre, his light-hearted comedies and musicals (most notably 42nd Street) have eclipsed in reputation the more serious-minded films that were made under his direction. Miss Pinkerton, then, comes as a surprise – it is an eccentric creaky old house horror thriller, shot using odd angles that establish even the innocent as utterly grotesque and terrifying. The picture was adapted from a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart, who is credited with inventing the “Had-I-But-Known” narrative strategy in mysteries (in which the principal character unknowingly prolongs the case due to a series of wrong assumptions), and has been dubbed the American Agatha Christie. It is not surprising, then, that it feels like a prototype of the genre – shadowy figures creep through hallways, secret pacts are revealed, and, most specifically, every character appears to have a clear motivation to kill. As the titular character, a nurse who is enlisted by a detective to assist in his investigation, Joan Blondell is predictably sassy, although the script too often reduces her to helpless damsel. Star George Brent, on the other hand, is an utter bore – there is nothing dynamic to either his physicality or vocal range, rendering his character as robotic and embarrassingly uncharismatic. Blondell has a great line at the end of the picture in which, commenting on Brent’s incompetence as a detective, she breaks the fourth wall and observes, “come to think of it, you’ve arrested practically everyone in this cast except me!” The visual elements, clearly inspired by Universal’s monster movies (Blondell even name-checks Frankenstein), save the production and make for a suitably atmospheric and tense ride. In the most arresting image, cinematographer Barney McGill predates Psycho by chasing a falling victim down a set of stairs.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1932, lloyd bacon, the famous ferguson case
Director: Lloyd Bacon
The early 1930s were a gruelingly productive period for star Joan Blondell. In contract with Warner Brothers, she made a total of 38 pictures between 1930 and 1934, establishing her as one of the most prolific starlets of the pre-Code era. One of the ten pictures that she made in 1932 was The Famous Ferguson Case, a largely forgotten but nonetheless entertaining crucifixion of yellow journalism. Bruce Foster plays a small town reporter who aspires to make it to the big city. When he breaks the story of the murder of a local banker, reporters from New York flock to his turf to cover the case. Kenneth Thomson, as the most dastardly of the reporters, does little in the way of writing, but instead spreads gossip and creates false leads that wrongfully persecute the wife of the deceased. As much as the film bastardizes this type of sensationalist journalism, its thematic concern was simplified for mass audience consumption – stick out of other people’s business. Blondell, who shot the picture concurrently with Howard Hawks’ racing drama The Crowd Roars, is the best part of the production, a world-weary young reporter who has been eaten up by big city living. The script’s frequent soliloquies often ring false, but Blondell’s plea to a small-town girl to not be seduced by Thomson’s promises is particularly effective.
Director: Lloyd Bacon
Audiences had already become exhausted with musicals in the early days of sound after a number of pictures imitating MGM’s 1929 success The Broadway Melody overwhelmed the market. Then, at the peak of the Depression in 1933, Warner Brothers would reinvigorate the genre with 42nd Street, a film most famous for introducing audiences to Busby Berkeley’s geometrical, highly sexualized dance numbers. Ruby Keeler, with a natural, likable beauty, plays the ingenue chorus girl who gets promoted to star when the leading actress of a musical becomes injured only days before the premiere. As one of the most lasting of backstage films, the picture aided in the typifying of the characters that have come to be expected in the genre – the weary director, the fading star and her young competition, the sleazy moneyman, etc. While Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (for whom this picture was a major step towards stardom) would advance the musical in years to come with more consistent and memorable numbers incorporated throughout the narrative, 42nd Street has a sass and eroticism that is distinctly pre-Code, with a number of obvious allusions to the chorus girls sleeping with producers, not to mention Berkeley’s iconic camera track that leads the audience through dozens of bare legs. Keeler was not a particularly great actress, and as a dancer was frankly a little clumsy, but nonetheless she looked much different than the typical Hollywood woman, possessing a palpable naivete that the more seasoned screen veterans couldn’t pull off.
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