Clyde Bruckman and Harold Lloyd | Movie Crazy / 1932

trouble

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vincent Lawrence, Ernie Bushmiller, and Harold Lloyd (screenplay, based on a story of Agnes Christine Johnston, John Grey, and Felix Adler), Clyde Bruckman and Harold Lloyd (directors) Movie Crazy / 1932

 

Many of the thousands of Harold Lloyd admirers, draw the line at his talking picture performances. And it is true that in a movie such as his 1932 film Movie Crazy some of the sight gags that might have seemed hilarious in silent films lose their significance in the talkies. His kind of clumsy fussing with various objects such as a telephone, a folding automobile top, or simple hat seem static in the white noise of a sound film and in their silences, steal the movie’s rhythm. Lloyd’s high, sweet, soft-spoken voice, moreover, seems as intrusive as if Keaton and Chaplin might suddenly spout Polonius’s speech from Hamlet. With regard to these three comic performers Nora Desmond was absolutely right: they had “faces” which you simply couldn’t forget, and everything else was beside the point—the fact of which this movie, by its close, seems to confirm. Lloyd’s lost, nerdy innocence was all in his face, not in his war against the world’s solid objects which always seem to come alive in his encounter with them.

 

     Yet, overall, Movie Crazy is a rather funny and charming film, much better than the commentators have generally rated it. It is over-long, and the sappy romance—in which the Hollywood neophyte Lloyd (aka Trouble) engages with the two aspects of Mary Sears (Constance Cummings) as a smoldering Mexican temptress and the lovely blonde who is taken aback by the honesty of the “trouble” her suitor creates in the world around him—might have been cut in half despite the fact that it is Cummings who steers this film into its most successful comic moments.

     The long scenes where the would-be up-and-coming actor attends a formal dinner dressed mistakenly in a magician’s coat replete with endless strings of cloth, birds, eggs, a rabbit, a sprinkling corsage, and a cage of mice is accidentally set up by Sears’s unintended invitation; and the final fighting match with the villain of the piece, Vance (Kenneth Thomson), employs all the tricks of cinematic melodrama as Lloyd and Vance fight it out through a long take, the two jumping and falling from various heights, crashing crates, boxes, tables, chairs, and anything else they can get their hands on over one another’s heads, even continuing their battling while hanging upside down and, soon after, nearly drowning in a rising flood.

      This last scene—enacted to save what Lloyd believes is the endangered heroine—almost matches the kind of split-second timing of Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. to become a tour de force which turns the planned romantic melodrama into pure comedy, and which is what leads producer Wesley Kitterman (Robert McWade) to realize, just by observing Lloyd’s endlessly perplexed face, that the young actor is a true genius with whom must immediately sign a contract. So does Movie Crazy end most joyfully.

      It is all that goes on in-between that creates the film’s problems. In a sense, you might read Lloyd and Clyde Bruckman’s* film as a study in the age-old struggle between order and chaos, between the pretend social propriety of Hollywood and its roiling perverted underbelly which unintentionally Lloyd releases wherever he treads. If “Trouble” is beloved by nearly all who encounter him, it is the ham actor Vance and the director (Sydney Jarvis) of the silly melodrama in which Vance and Mary star and those like them who stand in Lloyd’s way to success—which, in this film, is the same as everyone’s “American Dream.”

 

    From the very first moment that the totally innocent Lloyd lands via train in Los Angeles—the total landscape of which in this film and other early movieland films is designated as “Hollywood”—he topples people, newsstands, cameras, and anything else he approaches to the ground. Everything that might previously have been functioning is immediately stopped. Clothes are wettened, ripped, torn, and stripped from bodies. Hairdos and hats become undone and broken. What was clean and shiny is muddied and sullied.

      Although actor Mary Sears describes him as “Trouble,” he might better be represented a force out of the apocalypse of John, the New Testament Book of Revelations.

     Cummings as Mary keeps him near her, if for no other reason, because of his uncanny ability to reveal the worse in the men she meets, particularly Vance. Protecting her just through his reflective innocence, with her new acquaintance’s help she perceives her current lover, Vance as a drunken slob and even herself as not quite as beautiful and alluring as she pretends, remarkably revealed simply through Lloyd’s parroting back Mary’s own comments to the man in an objective voice.

       Yet, she herself is part of the problem. As an actress, she lives a mirror-like world, a narcissian reality that Lloyd can’t comprehend. And she uses that fact to challenge and test his own love for what she conceives of as her “real” self, the blonde Mary Sears as opposed to the Spanish seductress in a dark wig with a silly accent who she is forced to perform as. The trouble is, of course, that Lloyd falls madly in love with both women, without being able to see the difference between the two, and with utterly no skill at separating out the real from the fake, which in this case almost causes him to lose the love of the woman for whom he’s truly fallen.

    Without any difficulty at all, however, Lloyd wreaks havoc upon that previously mentioned Hollywood party, revealing the outwardly sophisticated and well-behaved guests to be the absurdly ill-mannered, selfish beings they truly are.

     Whereas Chaplin and Keaton in particular, often laced their work with cross-dressing and queer references, Lloyd’s films have fewer of these incidents. In part, I suspect, it is that the character himself is a standard sort of “mamma’s (or even grandmother’s) boy—in Movie Crazy, for example, he leaves home and his mother’s deep love for a Hollywood career at the ripe age of 39—and perhaps out of fear that his character might truly be seen to be homosexual. In only few cases—Pinched (1917), Ask Father (1919), and For Heaven’s 

Sake (1926)—does he appear in drag or is involved in gay humor, and in those cases it is generally a part of a series of two or three other such events involving others individuals as well. In Movie Crazy, he dons a pair of women’s culottes because his own clothing is wet, and which makes perfect sense in the scene where he is completely dominated by the film’s female hero Mary when she first discovers that she loves him.

 

     In the hilarious party scene the escape of the white mice from his coat pocket (actually the coat of a magician who was hired to perform at the event), all the women run, but one terribly effeminate gentleman, in the tradition of the 1930s pansy craze, jumps upon a table and screams out endlessly as if being bitten by wolverines.

       Only such a complete sleuth of his fellow man’s evil inner beings could uncover the true nature of Vance, who is not simply the likeable drunk who Sally perceives him to be, but a highly jealous and violent man, who claims that if his girlfriend were ever to take up with another man, he would kill her.

        And it is for that very reason, when, after knocked out by the same villain, that Lloyd wakes up in the midst of the major last scene of the director’s film willing to do everything in his power to save the damsel he imagines in distress.

        Mary is presented as such a self-styled, strong figure in this film, that he need never worry about her; in a wonderful turnabout that Movie Crazy almost posits as a feminist act, it is Mary who must now worry about the “trouble” she has grown to love and willing weds herself to.

 

*Director, writer, and actor Clyde Bruckman deserves far more than a mere footnote, but he certainly needs a footnote, if nothing else, with regard to this movie. Bruckman seems to have been nearly everywhere in early Hollywood comedies, as co-author and often acting director to many of Buster Keaton’s best films, including Steamboat Bill, Jr. and The General; director and writer for Laurel and Hardy; long-time collaborator with Harold Lloyd; writer for W. C. Fields; and later gag writer for The Three Stooges and numerous other comedians. Often his name turns up with regard to the very best of their works.

       In this instance Bruckman, Lloyd’s favorite co-director, was signed up for the project, but his heavy alcoholism made him a no-show for post of the production. Nonetheless Lloyd insisted that he get full (and originally single) credit as the director.

      As the years went by Bruckman’s alcoholism became worse and he was given only grade-B movies for which to create gags, a problem often solved by his stealing his previous jokes, skits, and sometimes entire scenes for later films. In one instance, while working for The Three Stooges, he went too far, stealing an entire scene from Movie Crazy. By this time Lloyd was also a has-been, but remained determined to guard his former film rights, and sued Bruckman and won. Now penniless, his career ruined over the suit, Bruckman borrowed his friend Keaton’s pistol and shot himself in the head in a Santa Monica restaurant on January 4^th, 1955. A note he left behind noted that he had no money to pay for his burial.

     Other than the fact he seemed to have no way out of his dilemma, no one seems to know quite what led him to suicide or, more importantly, to his massive consumption of alcohol that resulted in the end of his career. Some commentators have simply assumed that he was for years in deep depression, but no one knows whether or not that is true or what might have been the cause of his depression.

      Certainly he has become, as one might expect, the topic of deep rumor and speculation. And it is no accident, I believe, that Bruckman appears as a figure in the pages of Kenneth Anger’s totally unreliable Hollywood Babylon. Given what we now know to be true about many Hollywood figures whose behavior and desires might have ended their careers, perhaps there is some element of truth behind many of Anger’s examples of “fake news.” Bruckman worked with Keaton on Seven Chances and with Lloyd on For Heaven’s Sake, and in this film,with all with cross-dressing of LGBTQ figures.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).