'Flirting in the Park' is a weak start

Flirting in the Park (1933)
Starring: June Brewster, Carol Tevis, Grady Sutton, Eddie Nugent, Brooks Benedict, and Donald Haines
Director: George Stevens
Rating: Three of Ten Stars

Two office ladies (Brewster and Tevis) spend a Saturday afternoon trying to one-up each other while on dates in the park.

"Flirting in the Park" was the first in a string of short films starring June Brewster, Carol Tevis, and Grady Sutton, all of which have been collected on a two-volume DVD series titled "Blondes and Redheads." When I first started watching and reviewing these films, I wondered why the Alpha Video releases didn't present them in order, but instead led off with films from the later period of the series.
Now that I've watched "Flirting in the Park", I understand why.

While "Flirting in the Park" starts out with some nice workplace comedy, not to mention a look into office life nearly a century ago, the viewing experience quickly sours. It's great to dislike the villainous manager who sexually harasses June (played by June Brewster) and then forces her to work Saturday afternoon when the rest of the staff gets to leave early, but it's not great when the characters we're supposed to like turn out to be petty, mean, and shallower than parts of the lake they go boating on. If this had been the first film in the series I'd seen, I don't know if I'd bothered with any others, until the day where my pile of unwatched DVDs was almsot empty. (A day that will likely never come because I have YEARS of backlog to go through.)

Much can be forgiven for characters who are funny, and that's the biggest problem here: There's very little that's funny in this film, even in the office where the film was at its most amusing. The only character here who has any charm to it is the one portrayed by Carol Tevis. She's socially awkward, but wants to be a guy magnet like her friend June... or at least be SEEN as such by June (even after June steals back the date that Carol stole from her early in the film). Carol also has the only really funny bit during the later part of the movie, a gag revolving around her showing June how good she is at flirting. (I don't want to give anymore details, because I don't want to ruin the only truly good part of this film.)

It's a shame that this otherwise good cast is stuck playing such unpleasant, unlikable characters. This goes double for June Brewster, and, despite my distaste for the character she was playing, I found myself thinking it was a shame she was more more successful in her career. (After struggling along in mostly  minor and supporting roles from between 1932 and 1938, she gave up on acting and married a vice cop turned gaming mogul... who went onto become a founding figure of modern day Las Vegas. The parts she played in this film series may well be the biggest she ever had.)

Waiting for the fireworks to begin!

If you're going set off your own fireworks, or go to a show put on by an organization, I hope there's better safety practices than Piper Laurie is instituting for her Night of Boom and Celebration.

Mae-be Fourth of July Cos-Playing?

Mae West is cos-playing the Statue of Liberty on this Independence Day!

(This picture originally appeared in the July issue of Vanity Fair in 1938, pretty much exactly eighty years ago!)

Happy Fourth of July!

We hope all our American visitors have great Independence Day, even if you might not be able to celebrate it with some gender-reversing cos-play like Olga San Juan, Noel Niell and Nancy Porter did!

Left behind by time: 'Julius Sizzer'

Julius Sizzer (1931)
Starring: Benny Rubin, Gwen Lee, Maurice Black, Matthew Betz, and Lena Malena
Director: Edward Ludwig
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Immigrant twin bothers (Rubin, in a dual role)--one innocent and naive, the other a notorious gangster-- are targeted for assassination by a rival gang.

So this is what films like "Hot Shots" and "The Naked Gun" will look like to viewers in 2068 when the contemporary pop cultural references the jokes are based around have all but faded from collective memory.

"Julius Sizzer" is a parody of gangster movies that derives its humor from puns, sight gags, recent immigrants to the United States mangling English and Yiddish, a smattering of literary and Shakespeare references, and an assumption that the viewer is familiar with "Little Caesar", which was a popular novel and hit movie from the day. For those who aren't familiar with the main target of spoofing here, this short film comes across as a mildly amusing bit of absurdist humor that uses old-time gangsters as a framework.

Whether you're familiar with "Little Caesar" or not, "Julius Sizzer" is fast-paced enough, and has enough gags that it'll keep you entertained throughout its 18-minute run-time. The title character and his weapon of choice are particularly amusing both times they come into play. Every actor gives a fine performance--and you can feel that Rubin and Lee are having fun as they butcher the English language in their scenes together.

My only major complaint with the film is that every character in the story gets a resolution but the treacherous gun moll, Cleo (played by Gwen Lee). After setting the films climax in motion, she just drops out of the story. Additionally, the scene where the innocent Sizzer brother is rousted by police detectives hoping to catch the wicked Sizzer brother goes on for just a little too long... but it's the only one that commits this error, so it's just a minor issue over all.

If you like the classic Abrahams-Zucker films referenced above, I think you'll enjoy "Julius Sizzer." When rating this film, I wavered between a Six and Seven rating. I ultimately settled on the lowest Seven, because, although flawed and out of its time, I found the film very entertaining.

'Ticklish Business' is a snappy early talkie

Ticklish Business (1929)
Starring: Monte Collins, Vernon Dent, Addie McPhail, Phyllis Crane, and William Irving
Director: Stephen Roberts
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

The psychotically jealous wife (Crane? McPhail?) of a would-be professional songwriter (Collins) would rather squash his career before it starts than risk him being around sexy chorus girls. Even if she has to kill him and the buddy (Dent) who's always encouraging him.

Phyllis Crane played the psycho wife in "Ticklish Business". Or did she?

"Ticklish Business" is a nearly forgotten film that was in the first wave of pictures made with sound in mind from start to finish. In it's ca. 20-minute running-time, it's got two songs, a musical number, a gag involving a piano, and lots of snappy dialogue. It also features remarkably naturalistic performances. I'm used to films from this period featuring a combination of the exaggerated physical acting of a silent picture and overly stilted, stagy delivery of the spoken lines, but with the exception of a couple reaction shots, neither is present here. In fact, the performances here would have been right at home in a sit-com from the 1970s or 1980s.

I think the only weak spot of "Ticklish Business" is that every attempt it tries at physical humor falls completely flat. While the physical routines weren't good to begin with, I suspect I may have viewed them in an even dimmer light, because during them, Collins and Dent reminded me of Laurel & Hardy, and they come up short by comparison.

"Ticklish Business" is one of six comedy short films found on the "Ultra-Rare Pre-Code Comedies Vol. 4" DVD from Alpha Video. Sadly, while it has a near crystal-clear soundtrack, the film from which the DVD transfer was made was degraded and blurry to the point where most faces of the actors are impossible to make out. This is why I am unsure of who played the jealous wife and who played the flapper chorus girl who rouses her wrath; they're both brunettes and their facial features are mostly blurred in the film. (I went looking online for a better copy of the film to view, but was unable to locate one. It appears that Alpha Video may well have made this film widely available for the first time in several decades.)

Picture Perfect Wednesday: It's June!

For this final June Picture Perfect Wednesday, here's a June who did things backwards: June Knight.

June Knight was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed California Girl, born in Los Angeles in 1913. She was a sickly child, and dance and gymnastics were used in her treatment and to help build her strength. It worked, and by the age of 19, she was in New York City at the start of a success Broadway career as a singer and dancer.

Numerous acting coaches and talent agents believed that June had both the poise and beauty to be a movie star. She appeared in a dozen movies during the 1930s, but she never found the part that made a lasting impression on movie-goers. She continued to seek roles in films through the late 1940s, but not cast in anything past 1939.

Born on the West Coast, at the heart of movie industry during the 1930s and 1940s, Knight was successful in East Coast theater, basically doing things backwards from other actors and actresses who migrated westward after treading the boards.

June Knight passed away on June 10, 1987.

Musical Monday: The Chauffeur & Duran Duran

"The Chauffeur" is a song off Duran Duran's second album, "Rio." As far as I know, it never climbed any charts, but it is nonetheless a song that's reportedly near and dear to Simon LeBon's heart. It's also a song with a weird video. It's a moody bit of black-and-white film work that has just enough boobage and sexuality to earn itself an R-rating (if such things were applied to music videos).



Yes, Ian Emes directed an extremely interesting and engaging music video. But what does it mean? Your guess is as good as mine. Feel free to offer some in the comments section to this most!

The gang's here, but should you be?

The Gang's All Here (1941)
Starring: Frankie Darro, Mantan Moreland, Marcia Mae Jones, Jackie Moran, Keye Luke, and Laurence Criner
Director: Jean Yarbrough
Rating: Five of Ten Stars

An unemployed truck driver, Frankie (Darro), and his friend Jeff (Moreland) take a job with a company who's deliveries are being targeted by hijackers. Luckily for them, Frankie is too stubborn to become a victim.

If there ever was a film that lacks focus, it's "The Gang's All Here". The story (which involves brutal hijackings and murder in the service of a plot that puts what could have been a sympathetic character squarely in the corner with the purely evil villains) is one that belongs in a thriller or crime drama, not a film populated by comedians laughing it up.

Speaking of the comedians, there is very little humor here that modern viewers will find funny, as it's mostly based around negative racial stereotypes about black people. I believe this to be a near-certainty, because, unlike other films featuring Mantan Moreland and Frankie Darro, the racist humor isn't turned on its head and made subversive by the fact that Moreland's characters have tended to be the smartest in the films... and if Darro (or anyone else really) paid attention to him, things would never get as bad they do. However, in "The Gang's All Here", Moreland and the other black character that appears in the film--his evil counterpart that's working for the bad guys (played by Laurence Criner)--are just as slow-witted and lazy as the characters around them assume they are. Even the relationship between Darro and Moreland's characters feels off in this one, with Moreland never rising above anything but subservience to Darro.

It doesn't help the film that Darro's character is something of a dimwit himself who is easily provoked by insults or tricked with flattery due to a severe case of Short Man Syndrome. Between Moreland and Darro's characters, we have a pair of dullards as the heroes.. comedic stereotypes who have somehow wandered into the spots where a tough guy and a comic relief sidekick should have been. Interestingly, though, the total inappropriateness of Darro and Moreland's characters for the story they're in ends up elevating an otherwise very minor character to role of the story's ultimate hero: an unassuming Chinese man (played by Keye Luke) who appears to be just hanging around to learn the trucking business. Like a couple other characters, he has secrets that come out in the course of the film, Unlike the two black characters, while Luke's character is partly played for laughs, and partly presented as being smarter than Darro and Moreland combined, he is never presented as a negative stereotype... and this also helps him fill the vacuum left by the absence of a hero.

For all its flaws, however, "The Gang's All Here" still delivers a tightly plotted and swiftly paced thriller (however accidental it may be), which is not the case for many Monogram productions that set out to be thrilling and instead ended up boring. If you can see past the racist humor, and if you've liked Darro, Moreland, and/or Luke in other films, I think you might find this one worth you time. (Not as worth-your-time as "Up in the Air", "On the Spot", or even "You're Out of Luck", but I don't think it will disappoint.)

It's an after-school killing with 'Murder on the Blackboard'

Murder on the Blackboard (1934)
Starring: Edna May Oliver, James Gleason, Gertrude Michael, Frederick Voeding, Bruce Cabot, Tully Marshall, Regis Toomey, and Barbara Fritchie
Director: George Archainbaud
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Murder hits close to home when one of Miss Withers' colleagues (Fritchie) is bludgeoned to death in the school where she teaches. As she and her friend, Inspector Oscar Piper (Gleason) investigate, they learn that many of the school's faculty and staff had reason to commit the carefully planned murder.

"Murder on the Blackboard" is a fast-paced, bare-bones mystery film full of witty dialogue that wastes no time in getting going; operates with a minimum of characters--just enough to obfuscate the identity of the murderer but no so many to make the film feel overcrowded--and locations; and not a moment wasted with filler material or even subplots. (Well, there are a couple kinda-sorta subplots that tie directly into the solution of the mystery, but they are more accurately "stub-plots" they are so minor and barely developed.)

There was one big drawback to the economic nature of how this film was executed and that is that we didn't get any of the quieter moments that showed the mutual romantic attraction developing between Hildegarde and Oscar. I thought that was one of the more appealing aspects of the first film in the series, because it was unusual to see characters like these get to be anything but the gruff cop and frumpy old maid sleuth. All that's left in this film is a sense that they grudgingly respect each others intellect, despite their constant bickering. Also missing from this film is the chance for Oscar to show that he's actually a good cop and a solid detective... it's almost entirely Hildegarde's show and she solves the mystery all on her own.

Speaking of solving the mystery... I also found the "key clue" to be more than just a little far fetched. I can't really comment beyond that without spoiling the mystery, but I can't even imagine the notion that it was a clue occurring to anyone, let alone using it to zero in on the killer's identity... except in a case where the writer told the character to have the idea in the first place.

"Murder on the Blackboard," despite not being as good as "The Penguin Pool Murder", is entertaining  and well worth the roughly 70 minutes it will take you to watch it.