skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
Whistling in the Dark is a dated little trifle. Don't let me scare you off from it, though; it can be fun if you're in the mood.
Based on a play which ran 265 performances between 1932 and 1933, the comedy/drama about two elopers who end up trapped in a mansion and forced to think up the perfect murder for a group of mobsters can be tedious. It's stage-bound and director Elliot Nugent's directing is static and blah.
The cast is good, though, headed by Una Merkel (playing her typical ditzy role) and Ernest Treux, who also played the lead onstage. His under-played, self-effacing humor reminded me of the comedic performances of Roland Young (especially in Topper). (Claire Trever played the Una Merkel role onstage)
The lead mobster is played by Edward Arnold, reprising his stage role. Also in the cast is John Miljan, who seemed to be in every other MGM film of the time and Nat Pendleton, who excelled in playing goofy, dense gangsters.
The film does have some racy, pre-code humor. Other than the pleasure you'll have in watching some talented performers, though, there's not a lot to recommend in Whistling in the Dark.
The story was remade in 1941 with Red Skelton, in a movie so successful that two sequels were made.
A bit of trivia: Ernest Truex was the lifeless body of Harry in Hitchcock's the Trouble With Harry. If you have to be dead onscreen, that's the way to do it.
Whistling in the Dark isn't available on DVD, but has been shown on Turner Classic Movies.
Sophisticated, witty, fast, fun - MGM's 1931 film of Noel Coward's Private Lives altered the dialogue and scenes for American audiences, but still made a film true to the spirit of Coward's work.
As the previously married (and fighting) and destined to be reunited (and fighting) protagonists, Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery make the best of their roles. Shearer clearly was having fun with such a juicy character, requiring a menagerie of emotions, body language, and quick, caustic, overlapping dialogue.
Montgomery's a fine performer (and would later, with more serious roles, become an even better one), so I don't consider it damning with faint praise to say that his abilities were probably not then on a par with Coward's dialogue. One can't imagine Montgomery ferreting out the delicious barbs and droll, cutting witticisms that Coward undoubtedly performed in the stage role he wrote for himself. Montgomery's not all bad in the part, though; it was MGM, in 1931, so there he was.
Reginald Denny and Una Merkel are also fine in roles that don't require as much.
Private Lives is recommended as an enjoyable, adult, afternoon romp.
Private Lives has been released as a Warner Bros. Archives DVD.
Posts
