Jack Benny

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) Now this is a curio on several levels. Keep in mind that The Hollywood Revue of 1929 was made at a time when sound cinema was just getting started: It was still considered a novelty, and it’s fair to say that Hollywood didn’t quite know what to do with it exactly. A natural idea was to transpose a Broadway revue on-screen: let’s just have the stars walk in, do a bit of music, dance or comedy, record everything and string them along in a plotless experience. Why not? Such a thing would be strikingly inappropriate for the theatrical experience today now that televised variety shows and streaming options can bring the best of the world to our screens at any time, but back in 1929 it wasn’t just a good idea—the result was seriously considered for the first Academy Awards. Of course, there’s quite a cliff from concept to execution: what survives of The Hollywood Revue of 1929 ninety years later is very rough on a technical level: the top of the image seems cut off, the special effects are laughable, the muddy image is of low quality, low contrast and poor sound quality. The dance choreography has little of the polish that we’d see from Busby Berkeley even a few years later. But that it has survived at all is amazing—many movies of that time never made it to this day. It’s quite an experience to see what were, at the time, the studio’s biggest stars—while we still remember Joan Crawford, Buster Keaton (very funny in a small part), and the Laurel and Hardy duo, many of the other people on-screen have faded away in obscurity, known only to early-cinema aficionados. There are a few highlights: Jack Benny’s emceeing routines have their moments. There are a few funny comic routines (including one featuring Lon Chaney). Of the good musical numbers, one number featuring Queen’s Guards dancers is rather good. There’s an early version of “Singin’ in the Rain” (later quoted in the That’s Entertainment! series). Perhaps more strikingly, three very primitive colour sequences mark, I think, the first use of colour I’ve seen in a Hollywood film and it does add an extra dimension in the film. There’s something to be said about the value of such a document travelling through the ages, now available for endless digital copies. In many ways, The Hollywood Revue of 1929 is a primitive form of time travel—what if you were sitting in the middle of the front row at the time’s hottest theatrical entertainment show?

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

Hollywood Canteen (1944)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2019) Here’s what you need to know about Hollywood Canteen: During WW2, Hollywood celebrities got together and paid for a club in Los Angeles exclusively reserved for servicemen on leave where they could get free drinks and meals. Adding to the appeal, glamorous movie stars donated their time by actually bartending and waitressing for patrons of the place. This is all true—although accounts of the place usually underplay the considerable Pro-Hollywood publicity value in this arrangement. Further adding to the mystique is this film, not a great one but a fascinating time capsule of propagandist wish fulfillment that shows WW2 soldiers enjoying a few days in Los Angeles and spending time at the Hollywood Canteen where they get a chance to rub shoulders with movie stars. (Lost to twenty-first century audiences is the idea that when this film was shown to servicemen overseas, they could have been these guys.)  The film itself, once past the bare-bones setup, is a series of performances by Hollywood then-stars at the Canteen, effectively turning the film is a series of variety show sketches while the film’s protagonists kiss Hollywood starlets, empty sandwich trays or watch the acts with mouth agape. If some scenes make you somewhat queasy at the way the actresses are offered to soldiers for kisses, then you do have a good grasp at the hierarchy of values presented here, elevating the fighting soldier on a special pedestal. Hollywood Canteen remains both a wartime propaganda film, and a revue of who was who in Hollywood at the time—some of them featured in the movie, others referenced through dialogue. Many of the jokes are obscure now that the stars are gone—Jack Benny gets a laugh from the characters just by showing up, for instance, leaving twenty-first century audiences puzzled for a few moments. It’s fun to see some Hollywood stars in a far more relaxed environment, though—especially Bette Davis in a more comic role. The Canteen acts as a pretext, as the characters have adventures around town, our protagonist gets to romance a movie star and we tour the Warner Bros studios of the time. It’s actually quite a fun movie even with the propaganda material … but it works far better as a reminder of a bygone era.

To Be or Not To Be (1942)

To Be or Not To Be (1942)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(Youtube Streaming, November 2018) The famed “Lubitsch touch” referred to director Ernst Lubitsch’s ability to … well, no one can quite agree about the exact definition of the Lubitsch touch, but there is something in his movies that separate them from other films of the period. So it is that To Be or Not To Be remains striking even today for the sheer number of spinning plates that Lubitsch is able to keep in the air without having them all crash to the ground. Consider that it’s a comedy set during the earliest days of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw. Consider that it mixes anti-Nazi critique with a portrayal of egomaniac theatrical actors dealing with mortal suspense and perceptions of infidelity. It’s a wonder that the film hold together at all, let alone that it manages to be hilarious and thrilling at once. Jack Benny is excellent as an actor whose ego nearly derails resistance plans, while Carole Lombard is the other half of the couple at the centre of the story. The treatment of Nazis really isn’t sympathetic, and there’s a vertiginous quality to the film when you consider that it was shot and released in the middle of World War II, as these things were still very much going on and liberation was just a distant goal. The opening sequence is terrific, which leads to a rather less interesting first act in which the pieces of the plot are slowly put together. The dialogue is slyly funny (it may take you a while to catch a joke given the dry delivery) and occasionally mordant: I almost gasped at “What he did to Shakespeare we are doing now to Poland.”—the film gets away with a lot considering that it’s a post-Code production. To Be or Not To Be does get its rhythm back in the second half as complications pile on, the danger becomes more immediate and we see the characters thinking fast on their feet in order to get out of ever-more complex situations, sometimes caused by their own doings. There’s a very appropriate Mel Brooksian quality to Jack Benny considering that Brooks would take over the role in the 1983 remake. Audacious even today, To Be or Not To Be has survived exceptionally well and remains just as funny as it ever was.