Thursday, March 28, 2024

Westward the Women

A movie that's part of the old Turner library that formed the backbone of the TCM programming back in the day, one that I'd seen show up on the schedule a bunch of times but never got around to watching, was Westward the Women. The last time it showed up on TCM, I made a point of putting it on the DVR so that I could finally watch it and do a review on it.

The movie opens with a title card telling us that it's California, 1851. So, it's just after statehood, but much of what's between California and Missouri is terribly undeveloped such that getting across the country is difficult. As such, a lot more men have moved west than women, and in a place like Whitman's Valley, there's a bunch of unmarried men and no unmarried women. Mr. Whitman (John McIntire) meets Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor), who recently guided another party across the plains and Rockies to San Diego. Whitman discusses the area's problems, and eventually decides that perhaps Buck should go back east for and arrange another crossing party, but this one with unmarried women who can then marry the men in Whitman's Valley.

Three months later, Whitman and Buck have made their way to Chicago, where they set about recruiting women for the trip. Buck expects that fully one-third of the women are likely to die since the trip is so difficult and who knows how experienced these women are. Some of the women seem like they're more than tough enough for the journey, such as Patience Hawley (Hope Emerson). On the other hand, a couple of showgirls, Fifi (Denise Darcel) and Laurie (Julie Bishop) show up in their good clothes. Whitman and Buck both think that's going to be a problem, but the two are so earnest that they find themselves some plain clothes and convince the two men to take them along.

After assembling a large group of women, Buck begins to tell them just how hard the journey is going to be, telling the women they're more than welcome to leave at this point, although of course none of them do. Thankfully a couple of them know how to handle horses, so they'll be able to teach the other women how to lead the horses and mules that are going to be handling the wagons and their packs. One other catch, however, is that Buck doesn't want the women fraternizing with his men, since that's bound to lead to conflicts if either multiple women like the same man or multiple men like the same woman.

Eventually, they set off on the voyage west. At least the first part isn't that difficult, as they head up the Missouri River to Independence, which is about as far west as they can get in Missouri without being too far north of where they need to go in California. That part they can do by boat. Once they get to Independence, they have several days to start training for all the hard work they're going to have to do, before finally setting out overland to California.

Unsurprisingly, the journey is as difficult as you can imagine, with pretty much everything you can think of as fitting into a movie about pioneering west showing up. Will everyone get to California? Will a third of the women die as Buck tells them at the beginning? Well, I won't tell you who lives and who dies; as with any good disaster movie from the 70s part of what makes it interesting is that it's not obvious who will be around in the final reel.

Westward the Women was made at MGM, where Robert Taylor was a contract player, and to be honest, westerns are the sort of genre I wouldn't expect MGM to be all that good at. But thanks to a very good script (conceived some years earlier by Frank Capra of all people) and excellent direction (unsurprising considering it's William Wellman), the movie turns out very well. And for an MGM movie it's surprisingly harsh at times.

The only bad thing is that Westward the Women was released in 1951, and in black and white. I think it would have benefited somewhat from color, but would have looked even better had it been made after the introduction of widescreen. Indeed, I'm thinking of a similar movie from much earlier, The Big Trail, which was actually released in an experimental wide-screen practice and covers many of the same themes. In any case, Westward the Women is definitely worth watching.

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Abandoned

There's often some dispute over what counts as a noir when you're on the edges of the genre. Some movies have decided noirish elements even if I think they're not quite noir. But I can see why other people might group them in with noir. Such is the case with one of Eddie Muller's Noir Alley choices from several months back, the 1949 crime/suspense movie Abandoned.

After some narration that would have been right at home in The Naked City a year earlier, we're introduced to one of the main characters. Paula Considine (Gale Storm) walks into a police station in Los Angeles looking for the Bureau of Missing Persons. She's arrived in the big city from a small town in Pennsylvania, after having gotten a letter from her big sister. Since then, radio silence from big sister. The man at the desk is about to finish up his shift for the night, so he suggests Paula fill out the form overnight and come back in the morning.

Meanwhile, a fairly nosy man shows up at the desk and starts chatting up Paula. That man is Mark Sitko (Dennis O'Keefe), a reporter for the Mirror. Sitko may have been looking for information on somebody else, but he knows a good story when he hears it, and having heard Paula's story, he suspects a good one here. Eventually they go to the morgue and, looking through the book of unidentified dead people there, Paula recognizes her sister's photo. The sister was found in a car in the garage of a building under construction, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, in what to the coroner seems like an obvious suicide. Except that Paula knows her sister didn't know how to drive, which to her suggests it's not a suicide.

Then, on the way out of the morgue, Mark is smart enough to realize that Paula is being tailed by a figure in the shadows. Mark comes up with a plan to get the man out of the shadows, and when that happens he recognizes the man as Kerric (Raymond Burr), a private investigator. He claims that he was working for Paula's father to try to find Paula's sister; once Paula left Pennsylvania her dad wanted Kerric to find her too. But of course all of this is several years before the premiere of Perry Mason on TV, so the presence of Raymond Burr in the cast likely means a bad guy.

Meanwhile, it's been revealed to us that the letter Paula received from her sister is on the letterhead of a hospital, and that the sister was pregnant and there to give birth. Mark thinks that there's something fishy going on, and that the sister may have gotten involved with what is not a reputable adoption agency. So they take the case to the district attorney (Jeff Chandler), who informs them that he's swamped, so they're going to have to do some investigating themselves.

As for Kerric, he goes to visit a Mrs. Donner (Marjorie Rambeau), and it's revealed that she's the woman involved with running the illegal adoption ring, paying the expenses of the unwed mothers and then selling off the babies to parents who can't wait to adopt through the normal channels. All of this is within the first 20 minutes or so of the movie, so there's not much mystery here. Instead, as Alfred Hitchcock would argue, it's suspense in that we know who the bad guys are and what they're doing, but will the reporter and sister be able to find out and get out of danger?

Abandoned was the sort of movie something between a B-movie and a programmer that Hollywood produced in the years after World War II; I've argued that MGM's equivalent tended to be the sort of films that paid for the Freed Unit to make all those musicals. This one, however, was made at Universal; that combined with definitely not being a prestige picture and not having the biggest stars goes a long way to explaining why it's not very well known today.

There are some obvious noir elements in the photography and the heavies that make it easy to understand why Eddie Muller would program it for Noir Alley. The fact that I consider it more of a crime/suspense movie than a noir doesn't mean I didn't like it, however. It's quite well done for a movie on a budget, with a fairly effective story and good characterizations, especially from Rambeau.

Abandoned is available on DVD from Universal's MOD scheme, and is definitely worth a watch.

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Black Belt Jones

Some time back, TCM ran the blaxploitation movie Black Belt Jones. It's one of the blaxpoitation films I have to admit I had never even herd of, let alone seen, before TCM showed it, so I decided to record it. As is always the case, having recently watched it, I can now do the review on it.

The movie starts off with a James Bond film-style pre-credits sequence of a meeting at a winery. One guy is about to give two other guys a large sum of money for some pictures in what is apparently a form of blackmail. The guys who have the pictures, however, double-cross the blackmail victim by garrotting him! And then, during the credits, a black martial arts expert who is of course the titular "Black Belt" Jones (Jim Kelly) takes on an entire gang of what must be the most stupid criminals on film, the members of the gang trying to take down Jones one at a time.

Jones then meets with what seem to be federal law enforcement types, who inform him that three of their men were killed by the people involved with the winery, who are apparently involved with the Mob and have connections with some very highly politically-connected people. The people think Jones is the only one who can take them down, while he understandably doesn't want to be the fourth dead guy.

Jones, being an expert at karate, is friends with the guy who runs the local inner-city dojo/community center, Pop Byrd (Scatman Crothers). Pop is involved with all of this because he borrowed a fair amount of money from a guy named Pinky to be able to open up that dojo. What he didn't know is that Pinky had obtained that money from the Mob. All of this is relevant because the dojo is the last property in a district where the "respectable" city fathers want to build something but apparently can't use eminent domain to buy the dojo. The Mob wants to buy the dojo before the folks building the new place can get it, in order to be able to sell it at an exorbitant price to the buyer who really needs it.

Pinky tries to take down the dojo, but since they know martial arts they're able to stop him the first time. So he tries something more like persuasion, but accidentally kills Pop in the process. In any case, Pop doesn't actually own the dojo; that's his estranged daughter Sydney (Gloria Hendry). Jones finds Sydney, and teams up with her to help take down the Mob and Pinky.

Or at least, that's what the plot is supposed to be. Unfortunately, Black Belt Jones doesn't quite work, in part because the story is a bit hard to follow, but more because the fight scenes strain credulity too much. I mentioned that the criminals in the opening credits are incredibly stupid, but the later fight scenes also have people trying to take down Jones who are so dumb you wonder how they got this far. Just hire a sniper or something to get Jones.

It also doesn't help that the acting is lousy. I'm sorry to say that Jim Kelly is one of the weakest stars I've seen in any of the blaxploitation films, at least those that got a release from a serious studio and not the more independent stuff. Still, because it's a blaxploitation movie and a martial arts movie, there are a lot of people who have elevated Black Belt Jones to the status of a cult film. So it's definitely worth watching once so you can judge for yourself.

Monday, March 25, 2024

Our Old Car

One of the shorts that showed up in the end of the time slot for one of the movies I recently watched was one of the shorts in the John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series: Our Old Car.

There's not a whole lot here, in many ways even less than in other entries in the series. John grew up with his family in one of the houses on the MGM back lot starting at the turn of the 20th century. Dad (Arthur Space) bought a series of cars, starting with a 1900-modely roadster that frightened his wife (Jacqueline White), she not having been close to a car before. As the decades go by, the family gets better and better cars, notably a Stanley Steamer, with John narrating how the technical specs on each car are better than the previous one.

But it's not all better cars. John grew up and went off to college, getting the sort of stereotypical jalopy that you'd see the young ones owning in movies of the era. The orther people who show up on their street also go through car ownership, and families grow and change. The short was released in June of 1946, so there's mention of one of the families being Gold Star parents, having lost a son in World War II.

This is in my opinion not the best of the Passing Parade shorts by any means although it's not exactly bad. But I mention it for a couple of reasons. One is that I've looked, and haven't been able to find that the Passing Parade shorts have ever gotten a DVD release the way some of the others have.

The other thing worth mentioning is the appearance of Jacqueline White as Mrs. Nesbitt. She's best remembered for her final film, The Narrow Margin, and is as of my writing this still alive. Sources differ on her age; some say she was born in November 1924 which would make her 99; others say 1922 which would put her at 101.

TCM Star of the Month March 2024: Debbie Reynolds

Debbie Reynolds and Harve Presnell in The Unsinkable Molly Brown (March 29, 8:00 PM)

With TCM running 31 Days of Oscar from February 9 through March 10, that made the "new" month's programming be a bit different. I mentioned a couple of weeks back that the spotlight on working women was five weeknights in prime time over one week, rather than one night a week for the month. And so it is for the Star of the Month. That Star of the Month is Debbie Reynolds, and her movies will be featuring every night this week in prime time, kicking off tonight at 8:00 PM with Singin' in the Rain.

Debbie Reynolds (r.) with Bette Davis in The Catered Affair (March 26, 8:00 PM)

I actually don't have all that many pictures of Reynolds saved. On the other hand, I've got several of her films on my DVR, although most of them I've already done blog posts on in the past year. The one exception is How the West Was Won (March 30, 4:30 AM), so that one will be getting a post of its own later in the week.

Sunday, March 24, 2024

I hadn't seen it, but in some ways I had

Another movie that looked like it was interesting but had a synopsis that sounded like I might have seen it before was Boxcar Bertha. As it turned out, it was new to mee, but there were good reasons why it seemed familiar.

That familiarity started with the American International logo, and opening credits that inform us this is based on characters from interviews an author did with one Bertha Thompson. Now, Bertha Thompson was a wholly fictional character, although the movie is adapted from a book published in the 1930s. But all of this made me think of some other American International pictures like Bloody Mama and even more so Big Bad Mama.

Bertha, who eventually gets the nickname Boxcar, is played by Barbara Hershey. As the movie opens, she's not yet Boxcar, instead living with her father who is a crop duster some where in the south during the Depression. The rich farmer he's working far isn't satisfied, so Dad has to go up again and do some more risky work, which results in his crashing and leaving Bertha an orphan.

Bertha takes to the hobo life, and in one of the rail camps she meets Big Bill (David Carradine). He's a sort of union organizer, but it's one of those communist-type unions -- or at least the authorities would have you believe so. Because of this, Big Bill is always on the run, and Bertha joins him. The two run into a couple more men. First is Rake (Barry Primus), a card sharp who is able to fleece rich men in card games; there's also Von (Bernie Casey), who worked for Bertha's father.

The team's crime wave, and the fact that Big Bill is a union organizer, has the head of the railroad, Sartoris (John Carradine) worried. So he keeps sending his Pinkerton-like armed goons after the gang, eventually getting them when they try to hold up his train. This results in the killing of Rake, while Von and Bill get sent to prison. Bertha escaped, however, but she doesn't have anywhere to go when she can't find the cash that they had taken when the team robbed banks.

As a result, Bertha is found by the owner of a brothel, leaving Bertha to pine over Bill. At least until she runs into Von again by chance, and he knows what happened to Bill. The two may or may not be able to live happily ever after....

It's easy to see why I was wondering whether or not I had seen the movie before. Producer Roger Corman made stuff on a budget with the aim of getting a lot of product out there. And with other Depression era gangster movies having been made at American International, as well as the release a few years earlier of Bonnie and Clyde, Boxcar Bertha has a decidedly derivative feel to it.

Indeed, when the film's director, a young Martin Scorsese, showed it to his mentor John Cassavetes, Cassavetes was scathing over the movie's perceived unoriginality, exhorting Scorsese to be more original. That's a bit unfair to the movie, however. Despite being very much a genre picture on a budget, it's not a bad little movie at all. While Scorsese would go on to much bigger and better things, Boxcar Bertha isn't anything to be ashamed of, and definitely worth a watch.

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Titanic (1937)

A couple of months back, TCM aired another new-to-me movie from the 1930s that sounded interesting, so I recorded it: History Is Made at Night. It's got another airing on TCM coming up, tomorrow (March 24) at 8:00 AM, so as always with upcoming movies, I made a point of watching it in order to be able to do a post on it.

Irene Vail (Jean Arthur) is married to Bruce (Colin Clive), owner of luxury liners and yachts, but it's an unhappy marriage as she's not up on deck with him as the movie begins. In fact, she's just written him a letter telling him that she's going to try to obtain a divorce, and that she wishes she'd never met him. With that in mind, she heads off to Paris for the mandatory separation, while he's left to lick his wounds.

Well, not quite. Bruce is insanely jealous, and convinced that the only reason Irene would leave him is because there's another man in the picture. And if his employees insist that there isn't, well, he's going to create one. With that in mind, he has detectives find out where Irene is, and then sends his chauffeur there to create a situation where it looks like Irene has been having an assignation with the chauffeur, thereby destroying Irene's chance of getting a favorable divorce.

But the surprise meeting doesn't go as planned. Irene unsurprisingly resists, and another man not related to her hears it. That man, Paul Dumond (Charles Boyer) is a maître d' at a fancy restaurant in Paris. He barges in, pretending to be a jewel thief to try to save Irene. He and the chauffeur get in a scuffle before Bruce comes in, Paul pretending to take some jewels to make the lie more convincing to Bruce.

The chauffeur was only knocked out in the scuffle but Bruce kills him, telling the police that it was Irene's new lover who did it. Meanwhile, Paul has taken Irene to his restaurant for a meal, and the two fall in love. So when Irene shows back up at her hotel, she finds the chauffeur dead and that Bruce has made it appear that Paul is the guilty party in a way that nobody will be able to convince the authorities otherwise. Bruce uses this to blackmail Irene into going back to New York with him.

Eventually, Paul discovers Irene's real identity, that she's married to a wealthy man in New York, and heads across the Atlantic with his head chef Cesare (Leo Carrillo) to try to find Irene. He gets a job as maître d' at a fancy New York restaurant after saving it from bad business decisions, and sets out trying to do something to get Irene to discover the restaurant, since he doesn't know where in New York she is.

Unfortunately, Bruce learns that the police have found the man they're looking for, or the man they think murdered the chauffeur, even though we know it's neither Paul nor the actual killer. But Bruce is again able to use this to find Irene and blackmail her. Either she goes to Paris to save her lover, agreeing in the process to stay with Bruce, or her lover gets the guillotine. Bruce celebrates by taking her out to dinner, which just happens to be at Paul's restaurant.

So why have I titled this post "Titanic (1937)"? Bruce heads to Paris on the Hindenburg, since one of his ships is going to be trying to break the transatlantic speed record, and he wants to be in Le Havre to meet the ship. Irene takes the boat, with Paul following going with her to testify at the trial. And when Bruce finds out the truth about Irene's lover, he's perfectly willing to have his ship hit an iceberg!

History Is Made at Night is an interesting movie, although I had a problem with the severe plot hole that accompanies the climax of the movie. After the Titanic sank, rules were changed in order to make certain all transatlantic liners would have sufficient lifeboats for everybody on board. So the idea that anybody would be forced to stay on board for lack of space in the lifeboats is totally wrong. But the rest of the movie is pretty darn good, being an interesting mix of romantic drama, disaster movie, and some noirish elements even though noir wasn't really a concept back in 1937.

Boyer and Arthur make an appealing romantic couple, and Clive, who died much too young not long after this movie, is quite good as the nasty jealous husband. It's one that got a DVD release from Criterion and doesn't show up very often on TCM, so now is a good time to watch it.

Friday, March 22, 2024

I'm not the only person who thought of The Citadel

The centenary of the birth of actor Charlton Heston was last October, which is why he was named TCM's Star of the month instead of someone who might have a relationship with horror movies, October being the month of Halloween and all that. In any case, this gave me the chance to record a couple of Heston's movies that I hadn't seen before. I recently watched one of them: Bad for Each Other.

Charlton Heston plays Col. Thomas Owen, MD. He graduated from medical school before World War II, and enlisted with that war and wound up serving both through that war and the Korean War. Having been away from his home town of Coalville, PA, for quite some time, he's decided to return following news of the death of his brother. But when he returns, he finds that the locals blame his brother for what happened, since the death was in a coal mine explosion that killed people besides his brother as well. To make matters worse, the locals are perfectly willing to carry that blame over to Tom, even though he had nothing to do with what happened!

Thomas' mother (Mildred Dunnock) doesn't seem too happy that her son left to join the military all those years ago. Thomas, for his part, wanted to escape a town where, like in How Green Was My Valley, it seemed as if the only real source of work was down in the coal mines. He's only back to try to settle any debts his brother might be responsible for, or at least that's what he claims. With that in mind, he wants to see Mr. Reasonover, who owns the mine, to try to find out exactly what happened.

Before that, however, he has an encounter with the local doctor, Dr. Scobee (Rhys Williams). Scobee wants him to look at some of the X-rays from miners who are developing spots on their lungs from all that time spent down in the mines. I didn't realize it while watching, but apparently the movie was made at the time that what we now know of as black lung disease was first really being investigated; at the time they apparently thought silica dust rather than coal dust was causing the damage. Scobee also suggests that Dr. Owen is welcome to join him in his practice, since Scobee is thinking of retiring soon. The only thing is, it's not very rewarding financially.

Dr. Owen eventually finds Reasonover at a party being held at the house of his wealthy daughter, Helen Curtis (Lizabeth Scott), who is currently unmarried after having been through a series of husbands. Reasonover tells Thomas that his brother was actually embezzling money that was supposed to be used for safety equipment. At this point, however, that plotline largely fizzles out in favor of a different one, involving Thomas and Helen. One of the younger female guests at the party winds up in need of a very discreet doctor, and Dr. Owen is there, since they can't get her regular doctor, Dr. Gleeson. Dr. Gleeson is the sort of doctor who makes a ton of money by ministering to hypocondriac wealthy women who really don't have that much of a medical problem for the most part.

Helen then suggests Dr. Owen meet Dr. Gleeson, and perhaps even go into practice with Gleeson. Owen does eventually join the practice, but he hires an idealistic nurse who discovers what the practice is really about and is horrified by it. She's also horrified by the idea that Dr. Owen is falling in love with Helen. And surprisingly, Helen's father is horrified by it as well. Dr. Owen appears to be selling his soul for money. But thanks to the Production Code, something is going to happen to give him a chance to redeem himself....

I mentioned The Citadel in the title of this post. If you remember that movie, Robert Donat plays a British doctor who starts off working for coal miners, but moves to a London clinic for the wealthy only to find that it's destroying his soul. So it's not hard to understand why I'm not the only person who found himself comparing Bad for Each Other to The Citadel. Unfortunately, this is a movie where the script really lets Heston and the rest of the cast down. They try, but the resulting mess isn't really their fault.

As always, however, judge for yourself whether the movie is that bad. Thankfully, it's not overlong, so even if you don't like it it's not as if you've wasted too much of your time.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

TCM's Norman Jewison tribute

Director Norman Jewison died in January, and with 31 Days of Oscar beginning not long after Jewison's death, TCM didn't have a whole lot of time to plan a programming salute to him before the Oscar programming. So they had to delay things until later in March. That programming salute is tonight, March 21, and includes five of Jewison's films:

8:00 PM The Thomas Crown Affair
10:00 PM In the Heat of the Night
Midnight Moonstruck
2:00 AM Fiddler on the Roof
5:15 AM The Cincinnati Kid

Unlike yesterday with Ryan O'Neal, I had one of the movies in the programming salute on my DVR and not having done a review on it before. Moonstruck aired during 31 Days of Oscar, so I recorded it then, and with the Jewison salute coming up, I decided I'd watch it now so that I could do the review in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

Granted, Moonstruck is a famous enough movie that most people probably know the basic plot. Cher stars as Loretta Castorini, a bookkeeper who still lives with her family, parents Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia) and Rose (Olympia Dukakis), and Cosmo's very elderly widowed father (Feodor Chaliapin). Although, to be fair, Loretta lives with them in part because she's a widow, having married a bit later than the women in her part of the world -- Brooklyn's Italian-American community -- do and then having tragically lost her husband in an accident.

Loretta goes out to dinner with her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Johnny Cammareri (Danny Aiello). He's a decent human being and the two like each other, although Loretta isn't quite certain how much love there is. Not that she's overly worried. She married the first time for love, and look where that got her. So she'd consider marrying a second time for security, and indeed, gets Johnny to propose to her.

But there's a bit of a catch. Johnny's beloved mother lives in the old country, and word has reached Johnny that she's on her death bed. So he needs to go back to Sicily as soon as possible to see Ma before she dies. That should only be a couple of weeks maximum, and when Johnny returns, they can have the church wedding straight away.

Johnny has other difficulties. He's got a brother, Ronny (Nicolas Cage) to whom he hasn't spoken in years. This would be a good time to make amends, bury the hatchet, what have you. So while Johnny is off in Italy, would Loretta be so good as to call on Ronny and get him to come to the wedding? Ronny works at a bakery, so Loretta goes there to try to find Ronny and speak to him.

She quickly learns why Ronny hasn't spoken to his brother in five years. Ronny was engaged, but one day when Johnny came to the bakery Ronny paid more attention to him than to his work. A work accident caused him to lose his hand, and then his fiancée, so Ronny blames Johnny for both. He's bitter, and hasn't been with a woman since. This gives him a bizarre idea: would Loretta spend just one night with him at the opera, Cinderella-style?

Of course, Ronny and Loretta wind up falling in love. And it's not the only case of infidelity in the story, as there are several other subplots involving love. But what will Johnny do when he gets back from Italy?

Moonstruck is a wonderful little romantic comedy, in part because it feels to me like it has a near universal appeal. Yeah, it's set in a fairly specific community, but after all it has to be set somewhere. In fact, it feels like it could have been set anywhere, and that the situations could happen to almost anybody. Indeed, one of the subplots involves a decidedly non-Italian character, the college professor Perry (John Mahoney who was so much more than just Kelsey Grammer's TV father on Frasier) who takes his female students to the same Italian restaurant the main characters go to, only to get a glass of water thrown on him.

Not only is the script excellent, the cast all give tremendous performances. Cher and Olympia Dukakis both won Oscars, but everybody else is just as good too. Moonstruck is one of those movies that is not to be missed.

Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Nothing like the 60s Skidoo

One of the movies I was watching off my DVR was put in a time slot rather longer than the movie; long enough for TCM to program a short. This was an early talkie that was new to me, 23 Skidoo.

In the early days of talkies, Hollywood needed a lot of talking content, and didn't necessarily know what they had in their old silent stars. In addition to bringing in a lot of people from Broadway, they also brought in any number of people from vaudeville, recreating some of the old skits as one- and two-reelers. In 23 Skidoo, vaudevillean Lew Fields plays a man named Otto Ott, proprietor of a German-style summer beer garden, complete with German accent.

Poor Otto has all sorts of problems, most of them having to do with his battle axe of a wife (played by an actress I'd never heard of, Helen Goodhue, who only made a handful of shorts). She gives him all sorts of hell, but this is really just a foil for Otto to come up with a bunch of snappy retorts. "You don't deserve a wife like me", Mrs. Ott says. Otto repsponds, "I don't deserve rheumatism either, but I've got it."

As you can imagine, this is all fairly corny humor, and somewhat dated. The one-liners, however, are better than the physical comedy, which involves a guy who gets drunk and a bunch of potential new hire waiters. After Ott is done dealing with the waiters, the short ends rather abruptly, but then again it was just a one-reeler.

Hollywood, trying to feel its way to see what would work in the sound era, tried all sorts of stuff, from vaudeville comedy to various sorts of musical numbers and even dramatic stuff. When a short works, such as Burns and Allen doing their shtick in Lambchops, it's memorable even today. But when it fails like 23 Skidoo, it's no wonder stuff like this has become largely forgotten.

So while it's nice that there is in fact a filmed record of some of these performers, it doesn't mean they stand the test of time.