Harry Beaumont | When's Your Birthday? / 1937

unfavorable signs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Clork, H. W. Hanemann, and Richard Macaulay (screenplay, based on the play by John Frederick Ballard), Harvey Gates, Malcolm Stuart Boylan, and Samuel M. Pyke (writers), Robert Clampett (animation), Harry Beaumont (director) When's Your Birthday? / 1937

 

When’s Your Birthday? is a cinema vehicle built around Joe E. Brown, and the actor does his best to fill out its ragged plot peregrinations. In its rather astonishing tour of high-class soirees straight down to the world of carney barkers, gamblers, boxers, and fortune-telling astrologists one might almost describe this work as a cultural anatomy without a coherent anatomist.

     Brown simply opens his mouth and spits out the lines created by the teams of writers behind this concoction, doing the best he can. And, in fact, he and his dog Zodiac (Corky) are what keep any energy this film has from falling into the void of narrative stasis.

      For to describe the film’s plot would be an exercise in absurdity. Even in the first few scenes, upon discovering that Dustin Willoughby (Brown)—about to marry would-be high society debutante, Diane Basscombe (Suzanne Kaaren)—is seriously studying astrology and paying the bills of his “education” through the purse of losing boxing matches, one wants to wave all logic aside and move on to a more promising movie.

     When upon being literally defenestrated, along with Zodiac, by ma and paw Basscombe (Maude Eburne and Edgar Kennedy) Willoughby goes to work as a waiter in a nightclub, only to attract the attentions of dog-racing gambler James J. Regan (Minor Watson) who is interested in Willoughby’s astrological analyses and sends his henchman on a chase to find him. We realize, gradually, that this film could only have been created by a committee who each wrote a sequence without knowing what the others had written. Of course, the only way our hero might escape them (Regan’s henchman, although it might have been the script writers) is to dress up in drag as a cigarette girl—how otherwise would it have reached these pages?

         And when he finds himself back on the streets with Zodiac, he naturally applies for the job of a fortuneteller working for carney barker, Larry Burke (Fred Keating), where Willoughby falls in love with Burke’s typist and girl Friday, Jerry Grant (Marian Marsh). So, you see what I mean: it’s better not to continue with the plot.

         Let’s just say that he meets up with the Basscombes once more at a charity ball, loses his lover Jerry, and is forced to re-enter the ring as a boxer named The Salvador Slayer where he knocks out the Middleweight Campion—all because there’s a full moon over Taurus. He finally loses Diane Basscombe and wins back his love, Jerry Grant. The end.

         And I didn’t even mention the animated battle of several astrological figures at the very start of this film, penned originally in color by Robert Clampett, one of the creators of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and other major cartoon figures as one of legendary animators of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

         It’s interesting to note that the creative genius of those Gemini twins and the careful balance of Libra have utterly no roles in this wrought-up mess.

 

Los Angeles, June 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).