A PROGRAM OF AMERICAN COMEDY FROM THE TWENTIES

Members who recall Chase's Outdoor Pajamas of a few months back will welcome this further reminder of Chase's best period. A sophisticated blending of slapstick with drawing room comedy, Dog Shy presents the popular comedian in a series of gags ranging from the gentle to the wildly lunatic. F. Richard Jones, its supervisor, is best known of course as the director of Mabel Noramand's wonderful Mickey, while McCarey (who made many fine silent Laurel & Hardy & Charlie Chase comedies following an assistant-director chore on Tod Browning's Virgin of Stamboul) continued to make remarkable progress as a comedy and light-drama director through the early thirties. He reached his zenith with the famous Going My Way, and promptly went into a rapid decline. Featured prominently, incidentally, in Dog Shy, is famous silent "heavy" Stuart Holmes.

Tremendously popular in the twenties were the groups of short "series" films, of which The Leatherpushers was one of the best and most successful. They were by no means serials, although inasmuch as a central linking theme was retained throughout, they had more cohesion and continuity than the later series features (Tarzan, the Hardy Family etc.). Each episode was quite complete in itself, and though naturally there was a good deal of action, the stress was more on light drama and comedy than on melodrama. In fact, the films were a polished throwback to What Happened to Mary?, the Edison "series" film that directly introduced the blood-and-thunder serials, without being one itself. All-in-all there were 24 Leatherpusher films, all based on the excellent stories of H.C. Witwer. Universal remade the series in 1930-31, but, compressed to ten episodes and without Reginald Denny. This particular episode, with its fast, cheerful pace (and a narrator chatting informally to the audience) and some wonderful shots of a clean and all-but-deserted Central Park, makes delightful viewing today. Quite incidentally, Norma Shearer made her debut in this series (but not, alas, in Round Two!)

Another excellent example of Universal's series films is this first episode from a group of films which were given over to Laemmle jr. by Uncle Carl for the youngster to cut his production teeth on. They also provided useful training grounds for many (subsequently) top-ranking directors such as Wesley Ruggles. Each episode, again complete in itself, started casually with light-hearted banter and collegian rivalries and worked up to a climax of astonishing speed and vitality. (A vigorous all-in scrap on the sports field in this chapter is a typical example). Today The Collegians seem wonderfully fresh and exciting after so many tired feature comedies (A Chump At Oxford) and dramas (The All-American) along similar lines. It also provides a rare and welcome glimpse of the work of director Harry Edwards, whose career remains one of the most puzzling mysteries in the history of the movies. After several years in short comedies, he made Harry Langdon's finest comedy, Tramp Tramp Tramp for First National in 1926. A masterpiece in every sense of the word, it was probably one of the five greatest comedy films of all time. Yet as soon as it was finished, Edwards reverted to making shorts for Sennett, Universal and independent distributors. George Lewis, hero of The Collegians, subsequently become a well known figure in westerns and serials, playing both heroes and heavies. In the latter category, he is still quite active.

- INTERMISSION -

ORCHIDS AND ERMINE then, must stand alone - and it does so with remarkable ease. Apart from its fast-paced and inventive humor, it has much that is both appealing and charming. In this respect, it makes particularly interesting comparison with two current "comedies," HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE and GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES which have basically parallel plot-lines. Whether they succeed as entertainment is obviously a matter of personal taste (or lack of it!) but quite certainly they substitute ugliness and vulgarity for the quiet charm of bygone comedies - and the substitution is not for the better.

Orchids delights in many ways. Nostalgic New Yorkers will love the long sequences shot in and around the Plaza Hotel, and atop a 5th Avenue bus. The film was made during Alfred Santell's peak period as a director, at a time when he was specialising in pleasingly sentimental dramas (The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, The Patent Leather Kid) and frothy comedies. Such early sound films as Polly of the Circus excepted, his later talkies (The Hairy Ape, Beyond the Blue Horizon) were generally quite uninteresting. Carey Wilson was here still on the scripting, rather than the production, side of the camera, and Mervyn LeRoy was responsible for much of the fast, racy gagging. Later of course, he became a director of such top-flight hard-boiled early talkies as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and Five Star Final. He recently left MGM, scene of his least distinguished opus, Quo Vadis, to return to Warners and - we hope - better properties. George J. Folsoy, who photographed Orchids and Ermine, is currently one of MGM's top cameraman and an Academy Award nominee for All the Brothers Were Valiant. Incidentally, not the least of the film's pleasures are the wonderfully snappy subtitles - so well written that even fast cross-talk wisecracks retain all their humor despite an occasional surfeit or titles.

But when all is said and done, and with due respect to the array of talents behind the camera, ORCHIDS AND ERMINE remains pleasing and amusing largely due to the charm and lively personality of the star, Colleen Moore. Something of a combination of Clara Bow and Betty Bronson without owing anything to either of them, she was one of the finest little stars of the silent period. (For the record she had one blue eye and one brown one – something of a rarity!) She had started out with Griffith in 1917, playing opposite Robert Harron in The Bad Boy for Fine Arts-Triangle. But it was Flaming Youth, for First National six years later that established her as the typical "flapper" heroine. Although she played one or two "Cinderella" roles (Selig's Little Orphan Annie, Christie's So Long Letty, Goldwyn's Wallflower) she continued to enjoy her greatest popularity as a roaring-twenties flapper in a whole series of films for First National that were big boxoffice from 1923 right through to the early talkies (The Perfect Flapper, Painted People, Flirting with Love, We Moderns, Ella Cinders, Naughty But Nice, Her Wild Oat, Synthetic Sin, That's a Bad Girl, Why Be Good?, Footlights and Fools and others). Yet frequently she would embark, effectively, on a sea of dramatics and the results can be seen in films like SO BIG, LILAC TIME (opposite Gary Cooper), as Hester in THE SCARLET LETTER in 1934 (directed by Robert Vignola for Darmour-Majestic) and as Spencer Tracy’s ambitious wife in the late William K. Howard's THE POWER AND THE GLORY. Incidentally, she married John McCormick in 1923 and divorced him in 1930 – a period which curiously coincides with the starring vehicles of hers that he "presented" under the F.N. banner.

Co-star JACK MULHALL was another specialist in the slick comedies of the hectic twenties – The Butter and Egg Man, Ladies' Night in a Turkish Bath, Subway Sadie etc. In the early sound period, he became a popular action star of thrillers, westerns and serials, remaining in that species more or less exclusively, though in increasingly smaller roles as the years passed by. Still seen in bits occasionally, though infrequently, one of his most interesting recent appearances was in the Fox musical You're My Everything wherin he played a champagne-drinking playboy in a sequence satirising Clara Bow.

Finally – watch for Mickey Rooney making his first film appearance as a very self-confident midget!