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 4th,
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).
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