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A balm for the Depression, the title, Twain's "one really effective weapon" seconded by Gregory La Cava. The boarding house is sketched in a deft intro: The camera pans left from the ingénue (Dorothy Lee) on a surreptitious phone call and dollies in through a doorway to find Mom (Edna May Oliver) giving her the side-eye at the dinner table, then continues panning in time with the boarders' chatter until reaching Dad (Hugh Herbert) at the other side. The landlady is imperious even on the edge of bankruptcy, her "chronic loafer" husband has a knack for spending their savings on questionable schemes. (His daydreaming way is shared with Russell Gleason as their daughter's aspiring-inventor beau, who's asked about his latest gizmo and announces "an answering machine for wisecracks.") Among the tenants is the starving artist (George Davis) with a stack of bovine canvases, and the flossy grifter (Robert Emmett Keane) with an erratic oil well to unload. "Don't blame me if you turn out to be a millionaire." It would be La Cava, wouldn't it, who puts perennial supporting clowns Oliver and Herbert front and center and remains equally alert to the tickle of a zinger and the sting of a slap. Borrow an acquaintance's car and get nearly kidnapped by hoodlums, fluctuating fortunes are funny and sad like that. The gusher blooms and withers, in between there's a fine sprinkling of glee at a posh soiree, with the nouveau-riche couple sipping spiked punch and playing golf with oranges and getting a room of swells hopping to "Pop Goes the Weasel." The punchline is "ein Nachspiel schenkt, worin es ungefähr so zugeht, wie es im Leben—leider—nicht zuzugehen pflegt," as Murnau would say. With John Harron, Charles Sellon, Maude Fealy, Louise Mackintosh, Lita Chevret, Rochelle Hudson, and Ivan Lebedeff. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |