Mark Sandrich | The Talk of Hollywood / 1929

how to offend almost everyone

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nat Carr, Mark Sandrich, and Darby Aaronson (screenplay), Mark Sandrich (director) The Talk of Hollywood / 1929

 

I truly doubt Hollywood wanted to talk much about this abhorrent 1929 movie after it was first released, or if they did talk about it surely it must have been with the same whispers and gossip to which the film distributors respond to the film within this movie, produced by its central character J. Pierpont Ginsburg (Nat Carr) who plays a Jewish film producer whose Yiddish idioms torture the English language, commenting to journalists, for example, that “talking pictures are in their infantry.”

      Soon after, director Mark Sandrich would feature a similar character in a series of shorts with names like Two Gun Ginsberg (1929), Gunboat Ginsberg (1930) and General Ginsberg (1930), so obviously this Jewish stereotyped figured became somewhat popular. Sandrich was born Mark Rex Goldstein. And at least the film producer of The Talk of Hollywood is fairly likeable, speaking of his dead wife with great love and encouraging his protective daughter (Hope Sutherland) to marry his traditionally handsome young lawyer (Sherling Oliver). In short, actor Carr portrays a fairly likeable human being to cover Sandwich’s crude comic Jewish “type.”

      The rest of this cinema-satire’s characters are stereotypes, however, mostly just to be mocked. They include a very swishy, obviously gay, leading man, Reginald Whitlock (Gilbert Marbe) about whom Ginsburg wonders, after only a few words leave the actor’s mouth—“Mr. Ginsberg I think audiences always love for the leading man and villain to have a horrible quarrel (almost rhyming the two last words)”—does he play the leading man or the lady?, soon after reminding his director “this is a drama, not a fairytale.”

       A moment before, after spotting a woman with lovely legs, Ginsburg responds that she has a lovely face and asks her to read her lines; when the girl stutters, he tells her that he’ll write her a dancing part, thus combining his male chauvinism with an attack on a common speech defect.

       A few moments later Ginsburg asks his black actor to repeat his totally racist script, which involves a cotton-picking worker returning home to ask about all his little “pickinninies.” And that’s only the beginning of his mockery of Italians, French, and any other possible immigrant type.

       The film itself appears to be a mishmash of melodrama, musical dance numbers, and black pastoral with a few love scenes in which the gay leading man courts the artificially French leading woman, the latter gaining Ginsburg’s approval through her flirtation despite the costs of her sleeping in beyond 3:00 p.m. each day and her lavish costumes.

       As if the stereotypes weren’t enough the script reads itself like a melodrama (“Oh daddy, how can I possibly leave you?” whines his daughter after she announces she’s been asked to marry her boyfriend, his lawyer, John Applegate) spiced up with a few one-liners, all performed as if the film had been stretched out to delay each response for at least three to four beats. At times you even wonder whether or not the second character will ever reply to the first. And the between scene blackouts seem to suggest that the film might have come to an end before the projector cranks back into action.

       Fortunately, Ginsburg’s first foray into the talkies suffers some of the same mishaps as portrayed in Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s Singing in the Rain (1952); in this case a drunken projection operator mixes ups the soundtrack so that the black racist lines are spoken by the leading man as he makes love to the leading lady, the black man rails on to his child about her betrayal, the rings of a doorbell turns into knocks, and as the hero lifts his gun to the villain’s heart, the gay actor Whitlock proclaims his undying love: “O adorable one, my beautiful angel, I’d love you on and on, on my honor, on my life, on my soul!”

      Most of the potential distributors leave the private showing in awe and shock, proclaiming how torturous it was to have to sit through the movie; but one sees it as a comedy in the manner of Woody Allen’s 1966 creation What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in which Allen takes a horribly awful Asian film and dubs it with standard Hollywood detective film jargon. The producer buys the rights and saves Ginsburg’s studio from going bust.

       I re-watched Allen’s film recently, and I might have warned that imaginative distributor that it’s still not all that funny and while watching it one still feels a bit as if one were laid out on the rack with the director yelling “stretch” to fill out the empty space between its reels.

      What is even more startling about this turkey of a film is that it was made by Sandrich, who soon after directed the major Fred Astaire films, The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1935), Follow the Fleet (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937) and by the time of his early death (he died of a heart attack at age 44) was President of the Director’s Guild and one of Hollywood’s most respected directors.

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).