Reviews

Herbie J Pilato is an excellent interviewer and he knows how to let his guests tell their stories without interrupting -- an increasingly rare skill among talk show hosts. This show is a great behind-the-scenes look at classic television programs, and the interview segments are augmented with very interesting and rare film clips and photographs. I'm eager to see more episodes in the future, as this is a valuable and entertaining contribution to television history.

This one feels as though the script was written for another show. For much of the movie, Dennis Dugan and Bruce Kirby seem to be more on the case than Columbo, possibly indicating that this was a trial for a potential new series starring them. Columbo's usual mannerisms are not on display (he's frequently in a rather foul mood, and the "just one more thing" device is not here). The pace is awful, dragging in the middle of the film for a long and uninteresting description of different boats. The ending is like a typical Agatha Christie-type of whodunit, with all of the potential murderers gathered together in a room; this may be a change of pace for a "Columbo" episode but it just feels like a tired cliché. About the only thing this one has going for it is the bright personality of Wilfrid Hyde-White, and one scene with Dugan, Falk, Kirby and Robert Vaughn all crowded together in Columbo's tiny car. This is a real misstep in what is usually an outstanding series of made-for-TV movies. One could lay the blame at the feet of director Patrick McGoohan, but since he went on to pilot three more Columbo films in the '90s one gets the impression that Falk enjoyed working with him.

This is a very well-crafted short, but I've always been mystified as to why anyone, much less Stan Laurel, would consider this to be the first true Laurel & Hardy film. The first film they appeared in was a comedy starring Laurel with Hardy in support, "The Lucky Dog" from 1921. The second film they made together at the Hal Roach studio, "Duck Soup" (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers film of the same name, nor the Edgar Kennedy short), actually has humor more typical of their mature work.

If you can get past the unusual characterizations in "Philip" (Stan is a kilted, woman-crazy Scot and Hardy is his American uncle, fearful of being embarrassed lest someone find out he's related to this eccentric young man), the film offers some solid laughs. It's beautifully paced and edited; do try to see this in a theater with an audience, where it really comes to life.

The credited director is Clyde Bruckman, known best as a gag writer for Buster Keaton (and later Harold Lloyd, and still later, The Three Stooges). He only made 20 films as a director, but they include Keaton's "The General," Laurel & Hardy's "The Battle of the Century," Harold Lloyd's "Movie Crazy" and W.C. Fields' "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," each of these titles being among the best films their respective stars ever made. Producer Hal Roach was particularly fond of "Putting Pants on Philip," incidentally.

Granted, "Have Rocket, Will Travel" isn't the Stooges' best work--it's not even their best feature with Joe DeRita (I'd vote for either "Around the World in a Daze" or "The Outlaws Is Coming"). Nevertheless, it's pleasant and has some good moments. Strangely, it's just about the only Stooge film that's not on DVD as of December 2010. I have the VHS release, which looks fine, so decent source material exists and I wouldn't think there would be a rights issue. Maybe Columbia-TriStar is withholding it so that we'll buy it in a box set of the complete Stooges Columbia features (and buy all of the other features, which are on DVD, all over again!). Certainly, now that they've done a spectacular job with all of the shorts in chronological multi- disc volumes, a box set of the other Columbia Stooges films would be a logical release. Anyway, I hope this makes it to DVD soon.

It's not the first Oliver Hardy "tie-twiddle" that's supposed to be in this film, it's the first "camera-look," and even that's not quite true. In 1954, Oliver Hardy gave an interview to John McCabe in which he recounted what he remembered as the first of his long-suffering gazes into the camera. The scene he recalled--being hit in the face by buckets of water immediately after opening a door, and then staring into the camera in disgust--is in this film, although Hardy mistakenly remembered it as being in "Why Girls Love Sailors." He doesn't actually stare into the camera after being hit with the water so much as glance a few times at us. What's interesting is that Stan Laurel is playing directly to the camera throughout this entire film, both in long shots and close ups. With their next film, "Do Detectives Think?," the process is more like what it would be in their mature films, with only Ollie breaking the fourth wall and looking directly into the camera.

The credited director of this film was Hal Yates, although he actually only directed one day's worth of retakes (April 18, 1927). I know this to be a fact as I am the author of "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies" and spent years doing research on the team, locating the precise shooting dates for most of their films. The actual director for most of the filming (April 4 through 14) was Hal Roach. The reason that Fred Guiol is credited as the director on the available DVD is because the producer of that disc created new main titles (they were missing on the available print, which was from a foreign source) and substituted a director credit title from "With Love and Hisses."

This is quite an excellent film, with fine support from Anita Garvin and Viola Richard. The production values are surprisingly elaborate, which isn't really apparent in the battered print that's currently available on DVD.

This is a gem of a comedy--very much like a Lubitsch bedroom farce, only with a brisker running time, a lower budget, and some of that early '30s Warners snappiness added in.

Menjou is a great farceur, playing the husband who cheats but is aghast that his wife would consider doing the same. Horton is--well, Horton: the unique dithery fussbudget he always played. Mary Astor shows her gift for comedy here (almost a decade before "The Palm Beach Story") and Genevieve Tobin is a delight. So, too, is young Patricia Ellis--only 18 at the time of the filming but showing great poise. Robert Grieg, also a favorite of Preston Sturges' and known to Marx Brothers fans for his prominent role in "Animal Crackers," steals many a scene as the all-knowing butler. But the film is *really* stolen by Guy Kibbee as the justice of the peace, who only shows up in the last ten minutes but essentially walks off with the whole movie.

Thank goodness for Turner Classic Movies, and for its programmers who run obscure films like this which are so delightful. This film may be from 1934, but it hasn't dated a bit; its wry look at the craziness of love is still relevant.

"Toyland Premiere" was recently issued on DVD in "The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Classic Cartoon Collection," a three disc set from Universal. It's technically an Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit cartoon, although he doesn't get much of the footage. In a very crisp, clean two-strip Technicolor print (red and turquoise dominate the color schemes), we see how Santa Claus's helpers make him a new suit after the first one has been eaten by moths; then Santa leads a big parade to a big-city department store, where a lot of Hollywood celebs at a banquet help him demonstrate this year's line-up of toys. Among the luminaries are Lupe Velez and Johnny Weissmuller, Shirley Temple, Eddie Cantor (in black-face!), the Frankenstein monster, Bing Crosby, and Laurel and Hardy. Stan and Ollie run afoul of the monster when Ollie wants too much of a large cake. There's not much in the way of story or gags here, but the movie-star caricatures and the bouncy musical score (featuring a trio of girl singers) make this a very enjoyable cartoon.

"County Hospital" is a perfectly fine L&H short until the final sequence. I always enjoyed the scenes where Stan roams the hospital halls looking for his buddy (trying to figure out what a "solarium" is) and accidentally wanders into the maternity ward; he's mightily relieved when he finds out he's on the wrong floor! I also very much enjoy Ollie's scenes with doctor Billy Gilbert and silly Englishman William Austin. The film is also enlivened by the nurses, played by Estelle Etterre (who laughs hysterically when she finds that Stan has accidentally injected himself with a sedative) and May Wallace (who joins in the laughter and says, "He'll sleep for a month!" -- so much for medical ethics).

Personally, I always liked the scene where Dr. Gilbert is flung out the window of Ollie's room on the top floor--it adds a little action to a film where the longest scene is a single take of Stan trying to eat a hard-boiled egg. Also, the gag with the egg dropping into an unseen container by Ollie's bed and making a metallic clunk is NOT a mistake--the joke is that we think at first the egg has dropped into a chamber pot (ask your grandparents what that is), but as Stan brings it up into view we're relieved to see it's only a pitcher. The same gag happens in the team's earlier short "Helpmates," where Stan drops an alarm clock into an unseen container under his bed.

As for the final sequence with the back projection, it's not so much the quality of the film running behind the boys as a problem of sluggish editing. If the shots had been much shorter--and if we'd had a few more cutaways outdoors than just the one of the car skidding on a wet road--the sequence might have worked. Roy Seawright, who did the special effects scenes at Roach's, was a good friend of mine and his crew generally did top-notch work-- check out the split-screen scenes in "Our Relations" and "Brats," the animated bubbles in "Swiss Miss," and all of the effects work in Hal Roach's feature "Topper."

"Hollywood Hotel" is a fast-moving, exuberant, wonderfully entertaining musical comedy from Warners which is sadly overlooked. It should be remembered if only for providing the official theme song of Tinseltown -- "Hooray for Hollywood." The score by Richard Whiting and Johnny Mercer has a number of other gems, however, including the charming "I'm Like a Fish Out of Water," and "Silhouetted in the Moonlight." The best musical number is "Let That Be a Lesson to You," in which Dick Powell and company detail the misadventures of people who found themselves "behind the eight-ball," a fate which literally befalls slow-burning Edgar Kennedy at the number's end. The picture celebrates Hollywood glamour and punctures it all at once, as it gets a lot of comic mileage out of pompous and ego-maniacal actors and duplicitous studio executives. The cast includes a gaggle of great character comedians--Allyn Joslyn as a crafty press agent, Ted Healy as Dick Powell's would-be manager, Fritz Feld as an excitable restaurant patron, Glenda Farrell as Mona Marshall's sarcastic Gal Friday, Edgar Kennedy as a put-upon drive-in manager, Mabel Todd as Mona's goofy sister, and Hugh Herbert as her even goofier dad. The "racist" element mentioned in another review here is a ten-second bit where Herbert appears in black-face during a pseudo-"Gone With the Wind" sequence. It's in questionable taste, but it shouldn't prevent you from seeing the other delights in this film, notably the Benny Goodman Quartet (including Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton!) in what I believe is the only footage available on this incredible jazz combo. The "Dark Eyes" sequence goes on a bit too long and comes in too late, but otherwise "Hollywood Hotel" is a gem, well worth your time and certainly a film which should be considered for DVD release.