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Huddle, starring Ramon Novarro as an Italian immigrant who somehow gets a paid entrance to Yale, is dreadful. Novarro didn't want to play the role, for good reasons.
33 at the time, Novarro was too old for the role. The movie is too long. The collegiate singing is annoying and frequent. We're to believe Novarro becomes a football star (he had to learn how to play football for the role); the ending, wherein he wins the game during a bout of appendicitis, is ludicrous.
Ralph Graves plays a reverent and clean and thus wholly unbelievable football coach. Una Merkel plays a colleague's girlfriend, but her talents are wasted; I don't think she has more than five lines in the film. Madge Evans does plays a good love interest.
Audiences of the time didn't think much of the film, either. It lost $28,000 and was one of several miscalculations on MGM's part during this time period that devalued Novarro's box office worth.
Huddle has been released on Warner Bros. Archive DVD-R.
Although Ramon Novarro first sang on film in The Pagan (1929), Devil-May-Care, made the same year, is his first all-talking picture. He passes this crucial test with ease (many other Hollywood stars were not so lucky). His accent may be out of place in a Napoleonic-era film (the same was true of his co-stars, especially blues and jazz singer Marion Harris), but his voice and singing are splendid.
Devil-May-Care is very much in the swashbuckler mode and, in fact, is somewhat similar to MGM's earlier Bardelys the Magnificent (1926). Novarro plays a Napoleon loyalist who, while escaping from Royalist forces attempting to execute him, falls for a stubborn Royalist daughter, Dorothy Jordan. Compared to other early sound films, Sidney Franklin's direction is remarkably smooth and accomplished. It doesn't seem as stagebound as most other 1929 films and only suffers from a few of the odd editing choices one sees in MGM films of this period. It even features a completely superfluous Technicolor ballet sequence.
That the film is so technically accomplished is made more remarkable when you take into account this was one of the first Hollywood musicals (the songs by Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey range from okay to annoying). It's a missed opportunity that Marion Harris didn't sing in the film.
Ramon Novarro is fine in the film, ensuring more years of work at MGM. His mischevious pursuit (some might call it stalking) of Dorothy Jordan can seem a little creepy, though, perhaps depending on what mood you're in when you watch it. John Miljan's also in this film. But, you knew that.
Devil-May-Care has been shown on Turner Classic Movies.
Ramon Novarro plays another exotic lover in Jacques Feyder's Son of India. Through an arresting series of events, he becomes a ragged pauper, then a rich prince in Bombay. American tourist Madge Evans soon enters the picture and the movie becomes a tragic tale of love fighting against racial boundaries and prejudices. (Would the love story be transpiring if Novarro wasn't rich? I doubt it.)
Son of India features some impressive sets and action scenes; how often do you get to see Novarro buried alive in the same film as a rampaging elephant? The entire film held my interest, even when the romance became increasingly saccharine. Unlike many of her films, Madge Evans gets a more demanding role in this one.
Son of India is packed with the usual MGM character actors, including Marjorie Rambeau as a snobbish aunt, Conrad Nagel as Madge's sister, and C. Aubrey Smith and John Miljan in smaller roles. Ann Dvorak's even on the screen for a minute or two as a seductive dancer.
The movie ends far too quickly (not helped, when watching on Turner Classic Movies, by their loud and abrasive promo following). I'm surprised they didn't cut Novarro off in mid-sentence!
This was Feyder's last American film. Later in the '30s, in France, his movies laid the groundwork for the Poetic Realism film movement. His artistry was vivid, though, even in his American films.
Son of India isn't available on DVD.
Laughing Boy, based on the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Oliver La Farge, could have been a good film. The story - of a Navajo, Ramon Novarro, who marries a fellow Navajo educated by whites and torn between two cultures - is a fascinating one and it's unique in its complete sympathy with the Navajo; there's not a good white person portrayed in the film.
Sadly, though, Laughing Boy is a mess. Ramon Novarro is seriously miscast in the lead role. With his Prince Valiant-like haircut and too much makeup, he looks ridiculous. Also ridiculous are the anachronistic songs he's made to sing (or lip-synch), which made me wonder if Jeanette MacDonald was going to glide onstage and join in. Fellow Mexican actor Lupe Vélez fares somewhat better as Laughing Boy's prostituting wife, but exotic doesn't equal authentic.
The movie, directed by W.S. Van Dyke, was partly shot on location with real Native Americans (some of the location footage may be left over from Universal's earlier attempt to film the novel). When mixed with particularly bad rear-projection scenes, cheap looking sets and MGM actors dressed like Navajo, the result is worse than jarring. It's absurd and takes you right out of the picture.
Laughing Boy's fate worsened when the Hays Office demanded cuts which almost make the film nonsensible. Due to fear of controversy, MGM didn't promote the film and it lost money - continuing a pattern for Novarro's films which culminated in MGM not renewing his contract in 1935. Laughing Boy was Novarro's least favorite film of the ones he appeared in. Andre Soares, in his book on Novarro, Beyond Paradise, reports that novelist Oliver La Farge splashed a drink in the face of the screenwriter of Laughing Boy after the release of the film; the ultimate commentary on the film.
Laughing Boy is not available on DVD, but has been broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
Though produced by Metro, not Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Rex Ingram's Scaramouche, starring the upcoming Ramon Novarro, was released by MGM during their first year in business. Like Ingram's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, also rereleased by MGM, Scaramouche is an epic film, with huge, sixty-acre lot sets, seemingly hundreds of extras and immaculate, astonishing set design.
Scaramouche, though, is a much better film than The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's a rousing, swashbuckling spectacle that's free of most of the mawkish tendencies of many later MGM epic films (Mare Nostrum, I'm looking at you).
Set during the time leading to the French Revolution, Scaramouche is based on Rafael Sabatini's enormously successful novel released only two years earlier. Though straining credulity (Novarro is an outcast aristocrat and a law student and a playwright and actor and a master swordsman and a leader of the revolution), the screenplay and directing are smooth and captivating, the actors entertaining and the choreographed scenes full of life.
Alice Terry is Novarro's love interest and Lewis Stone, who so wonderfully played cads during this period in his acting career, plays one you especially love to hate here.
Scaramouche is filled with half-shadowed knick-knacks, ornate costumes, kids playing games and other extraneous manifestations of life. I can describe it no better than historian Kevin Brownlow: Scaramouche is "primarily a work of art in the 18th-century tradition. The period has been so beautifully evoked that it seems inconceivable that the picture belongs to this century. It looks as though the combined efforts of several 18th century painters, sculptors, scenic designers, costumiers and architects have reached a climax of rococo glory on celluloid."
The compimentary and full-bodied orchestral score (commissioned, I think, by Turner Classic Movies) used for the Warner Archives DVD-R I watched is by Jeffrey Mark Silverman. While it may not have any memorable themes, neither does it detract from the film as so many composed or hodge-podged scores for silent films do.
The same print is shown from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and can also be ordered from Warner Archives here: http://www.wbshop.com/product/scaramouche+1923+1000179701.do
Daybreak lost $100,000 for MGM, and it’s not hard to see why. The film unsuccessfully straddles the line between Stroheim-ish decadence and slick, feel-good, romantic MGM gloss. Attempting to appeal to both sensibilities, it’s successful in neither.
Based on a book by Austrian novelist Arthur Schnitzler (whose work was also the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut), Daybreak features a cad as the protagonist, Ramon Novarro (playing a William Haines-type character, only not funny), an Austrian lieutenant who pursues shy, sweet Helen Chandler, then insults her when he makes clear he wants her only as a mistress. The most logical thing happens next (logical if you’re in tune with the vibes of early ‘30s movies): within seconds, the insulted sweet music teacher casts Ramon out of her life, flees to the arms of the sneering, sweating, debaucherous Jean Hersholt, who earlier tried to rape her (Jean Hersholt!), and becomes, overnight, an angry, cynical, gambling, seen-it-all woman of the world.
Of course.
What bizarre aspect of the American psyche made this theme so popular in the early ‘30s? Even sweet Norma Shearer went this route (in The Divorcee), but the queen of spurned-and-fornicating ex-lovers was Greta Garbo. Her surreal turn as Susan Lenox (in Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise) has to be the quintessential portrayal of this sort of archetype, as she literally sleeps her way around the world in revenge, Clark Gable spurning her at every far-fetched meeting (of course, they really love only each other).
Anyway, MGM filmed two endings to Daybreak, one faithful to the novel (Ramon commits honorable suicide, being unable to pay back money lost trying to win Helen back in a game of Baccarat!), and the other a happy reuniting of the two lovers. They used the latter.
Novarro reportedly attempted to buy this film off MGM and shelve it. To make matters worse, the director Jacques Feyder, who didn’t speak English well, was sick during much of the shooting. The end result is a film of inconsistent tone, unable to please either the women’s audience, who wanted to see Ramon in a likeable role, or those fans of Lubitsch and von Stroheim who like their decadence unprettified.
Daybreak is not available on VHS or DVD, but has been broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
More of an historical curiosity than an entertaining night at the movies, The Hollywood Revue of 1929 is a quickly filmed (four weeks of long, non-union hours, according to Bessie Love) collection of vaudeville skits and musical numbers designed to present MGM's stars in glorious sound.
Even for the initiated, The Hollywood Revue can be tedious going. A third of the film seems comprised of uninspired musical numbers. The sequences are introduced by Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel; sometimes they're funny, more often not. The editing is awkward bordering on inept, and the camera (no surprise for 1929) is mostly static.
Some of the highlights: a bizarre dance chorus sequence rendered nearly psychedelic with its use of negative photography; a short Laurel and Hardy sequence; Buster Keaton parodying the lascivious dance by Beth Laemmle which preceded him; and Cliff Edwards ("Ukelele Ike"),who enlivens nearly every scene he's in with his visionary version of scat singing.
The world of performers used here is almost too long to list; nearly all of MGM's stars are present except for Greta Garbo, Ramon Navarro, and Lon Chaney (represented by the song "Lon Chaney Will Get You If You Don't Watch Out").
In short, The Hollywood Revue is a very mixed bag, sometimes charming (Marie Dressler, Bessie Love), sometimes boring (Marie Davies' military march), and sometimes inciting one to smash one's television set (Charles King's "Your Mother and Mine").
Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture of 1929. The Hollywood Revue has been released on Warner Archives DVD-R.
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