Stuart Erwin

(On Cable TV, September 2020) I am an avowed sucker for movies about movies. I will record nearly everything that has to do with movies about Hollywood, and that goes double for older films showing us older depictions of Tinseltown in its glory days. In other words, I had to see Make Me a Star, a satirical film in which a young man (in an unusual gender shift from the usual young woman) goes to Hollywood with big dreams. Unfortunately for him and unfortunately for us, the lead character is a dim-witted clerk whose ambitions greatly outstrip his talent—and he doesn’t learn much over the course of the film. Inexplicably taken under the wing of a star (Joan Blondell, the best thing about the film), he’s tricked into being unintentionally hilarious by comedy film producers who make him think that he’s starring in a serious drama. It would be a nice story if we actually cared about the main character, but Stuart Erwin has a detestable screen presence playing a dumb character without much to redeem for it. Cloying, naïve and barely tolerable, his protagonist is a very weak anchor for the film and it becomes even worse when they turn his pitiable character into a romantic hero. (A 1947 remake, Merton of the Movies, is sitting on my DVR right now—I’m hoping that it will do justice to the story.) I did, to be fair, like the look at early-1930s western filmmaking, inside the studio and among the superstars of the day through plenty of cameos. There’s also a provocative comparison here in having the lead being a man—it substantially changes the equation regarding gender-specific exploitation. But much of Make Me a Star itself is just grating beyond its strengths.