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).

Roy Del Ruth | The Desert Song / 1929

send in the clowns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harvey Gates (screenplay, based on the musical by Otto A. Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, nad Frank Mandel with music by Sigmund Romberg), Roy Del Ruth (director) The Desert Song / 1929

 

The film version of successful Broadway musical The Desert Song, with a book by Otto A. Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Sigmund Romberg, might have been the first talkie musical if the Warner Brothers executives hadn’t sat on the finished film for five months, allowing MGM’s Broadway Melody that distinction and helping it to win the Best Picture Oscar of 1929.

      I can’t believe, however, that this crazy concoction of a Moroccan landscape in which the Riffs are at war with the French and the choruses of Muslim soldiers back up the highly romantic ballads such as “Love’s Dear Yearning,” “The Desert Song,” and “Let Love Go” might have won any such award despite its great popularity at the time. 

      The singing by John Boles, playing the hero The Red Shadow, and Carlotta King as Margot is more of the turn-of-the-century than the Harlem jazz and other new musical crazes of the 1920s. If the “IT” girl is referenced, she hasn’t yet squirreled her way into this work. Although Myrna Loy is a sketch as the evil Arab native Azuri and Johnny Arthur is often funny as the whining news reporter Benny Kidd, most of the secondary figures clearly haven’t apparently yet visited an acting class. And the whole story, despite the pedigree of its authors, is a mess of genres and literary cliches.

       Imagine an early version of Lawrence of Arabia stolen from the newspaper headlines of a decade earlier, and then throw in the horror genre favorite of the dual personality like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, only this time the two figures represented by one man are a bit more like Superman and Clark Kent or the 1920 version of Zorro who was secretly, Don Diego Vega, the son Don Alejandro de la Vega, the richest landowner in California. If Kent is a kind of stumbling nerd and Don Diego a cowardly fop by day, then you’ll have no problem recognizing General Bierbeau’s son Pierre who is a sleepy, stumbling innocent who by night puts on a mask and red cloak and roams the desert laying waste with Riff followers to the French who treat natives like they were slaves.

        And, of course, since we are in the desert where this romantic hero roams, the writers couldn’t help but toss in a bit of Rudolph Valentino’s Sheik, who added to the stew of other stock figures The Red Shadow represents—particularly given the utter bore of the hard-working Captain Fontaine (John Miljan) who Margot is supposed to marry—makes it all clear why the woman finds the nightly desert roamer irresistible.

     It is Pierre who truly is in love with Margot, and it was her disregard for him that led him to join the French military contingent in Morocco. But when he realized how badly the native Arabs were being treated, he dared to argue with the former General and was beaten and hounded out of the military. His only solution was to create his own alternative army and to work against the very force that he once represented. Now his father has been sent to Morocco to destroy the man who he cannot imagine is his own son.

         Margot likes the awkward and dreamy Pierre, but sees him as more like a “sister” she declares, someone to whom she can tell all her secrets, instead of a potential lover. Besides she has already convinced herself that she’d be better off with the Arab villain than her own kind.

         In a sense, accordingly the play has already established the one face of the film’s hero as a “sissie,” while we soon discover that his other half, although far more masculine and capable of expressing heterosexual love, is equally a romantic, interested more in romancing a woman than in the modern methods of expressing love. As he sings of himself:

 

                                                  All my love is gentle

                                                  My appeal is mental.

 

       When he finally is convinced that she actually does desire to be symbolically “raped”—carried off on a horse through the desert—he kidnaps her not as she might imagine, riding a horse through the dark night, but in his own father’s fortress and takes her away not to some isolated tent, but to the desert palace, filled with a harem of Spanish women, owned by his friend Sid El Kar (Roberto E. Guzmán) where he treats her more like a Westerner might, as a woman who must make up her own mind, than as his Arab associates argue that all women should be treated—as a slave to be killed if she doesn’t live up to your expectations.

        We know from the first two marching songs “Riff Song” and French Marching Song” that these two will eventually march into one another’s arms and sing out their love until the final frame flickers black, the only element of intrigue being how Clark Kent will be able to reveal that he’s really Zorro without destroying his father’s career and bringing down the French military’s wrath. It just doesn’t look good if the General’s son turns out to be the warrior bandit that you’ve been trotted to out kill. But otherwise, the romance between Margot Bonvalet and The Red Shadow (aka Pierre and Marge) is basically a yawn-inspiring series of events.

     Send in the clowns, this time the secondary cast consisting of Benny Kidd the newspaper reporter who insists he came to the desert for his health but has actually been sent into this silly musical to save the day along with his secretary, Susan (Louise Fazenda), Benny’s protector and would-be lover—that is, if she can convert from being what film critic Richard Barrios describes him as: “Small of frame and beady eyed [Benny], Arthur often [seems] less of a person than a prissy rabbit nearing a breakdown.” In short, Arthur plays his character as an out-and-out Hollywood pansy, with a voice, Barrios observes, “so whiny that it probably caused early speaker systems to hum and buzz incessantly.”

     Since he is a major character, instead of simply a type who appears for no reason other than to establish that such sissies exist, by film’s end the writers and director have marry off Benny as well, even if his final surrender to Susan makes absolutely no sense. By 1935, when the Hays Code began to be strictly enforced the 1929 version of the film cut was no longer able to shown due to Arthur’s character and other sexual innuendos. A “cleaned-up” version was finally re-released in 1943, and another version was issued a decade later, but I can’t imagine how uninteresting those two films must have been.  

      Arthur’s Benny provides the major reason to watch this relic. In his very first scene, after falling off his horse into the bottom of a giant sand dune where the Riffs capture him, Red Shadow’s lieutenants debate what to do with their discovery. The scuzziest of the two argues that he’s a spy and they should kill him, the other strapping Arab simply trying to get him to speak up and identify himself. Benny’s answer as he dusts himself off: “How’s everything, big boy?”

 

                  First Riff: He’s a spy—let’s kill him!

                  Benny: Stop! Don’t do that! Do you want everybody to hate you?

                               Don’t be so effeminate! Where do you think you are,

                               in Chicago? .........

                  Second Riff: What are you doing in Morocco?

                  Benny: Nothing. Make me an offer.

                  Second Riff: Search him.

                  (The first Riff moves his hand into Benny’s back pocket. Benny

                  flinches and jumps.)

                  Benny: Ohhhhh, don’t do that—I’m funny that way!

 

    Before long he’s got them both involved in a long telling of his life story, playing off the better- looking one against the other by declaiming, every time he makes an illusion to an attractive man or woman or a sexual pun to the first “You wouldn’t know what I mean,” before turning to the other and hinting, “You would” or “You might.” Of Pierre, for example, he notes to the first, “You wouldn’t like him,” and to the second, “You might,” and again turning to the first Riff, “No, you wouldn’t.” A rather ironic series of comedic lines, since as The Red Shadow’s trusted friends, they both very much love him, and know his secret. The Red Shadow himself finally intervenes, eventually returning to the French fortress with Benny in tow.

       Despite the fact that Benny, having now actually seen The Red Shadow, has something to report, he soon determines to leave Morocco having evidently received a bill he cannot pay.

        Susan, startled by seeing him packing up and ready to go, results in his insistence that he has to go away on a trip. Susan cries out in terror, “You’re not leaving without me?” “Well now, that’s one of the big features of the trip,” Benny replies. “What about our engagement?” “Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s off. There are times when a man would be cruel if he were kind. And this is one of those times.”

        Too bad the story writers keep having to wheel in the two Pierres, Margot, and Fontaine, who the General wants her to wed. Fortunately, when Billy is offstage, director Roy Del Ruth interrupts the regular goings on with the real spy of his film Azuri, who discovering The Red Shadow’s  identity, gradually arranges to punish both Captain Fontaine for rejecting her over Margot and the General for trying to throw her out of the French quarters. She arranges for The Red Shadow/Pierre to be rejected by the French for having kidnapped Margot and the Arabs for involving them in the kidnapping of a Western woman. Meanwhile, she and her native girlfriends perform a kind of conventionalized version of a belly dance, as Loy lights up the screen with her sultry anger whenever the script gives her an opportunity.

          When Azuri finally leads the General to The Red Shadow at Sid El Kar’s palace, he challenges the young dashing hero to a duel in which obviously the son cannot engage. No matter which of them wins the battle, a father or his son will die. The refusal, however, to enter into such a challenge in the Riff world represents a cowardice so unforgiveable that he who refuses is sentenced to be sent off into the desert without food or water, with only a broken sword to fight for survival.

       The ruthless and cruel control of the region by the French, moreover, is revealed when the General sends Captain Fontaine to go in search for him and kill him, despite the fact that The Red Shadow is now defenseless. Margot begs with him to change his mind, but he refuses. Fortunately, the vain Fontaine doesn’t kill him but drags his prize back to the Fortress in order to hang him.

        There The Red Shadow finally reveals, in a private moment, his identity to his father. Utterly unbelievably, General Bierbeau, to save face, claims that he’s not sure that he could really have been his son and since no one else knows he will pretend ignorance, while recognizing that he might be able to use a man like The Red Shadow to help mend fences with his Arab subjects.

         Margot, finally admitting that she is in love with The Red Shadow joins the infidel in a song fest that assures us that the couple will soon be married; just how the “Shadow” intends on living with a wife pretending he is not the incompetent Pierre is something the movie doesn’t even try to explain. But in gay cinema several transgender men have hidden their sexuality to their Western husbands, so perhaps if he keeps on makeup and mask on for the rest of his life, he will be able to convince Margot of his legendary existence, for revealing the truth would mean the end of his father’s life as he knows it.

       Benny, who in the meantime has been sentenced to death for daring to enter Sid Al Kar’s harem, decides to wear Susan’s clothes in order to escape, she joining him on another desert adventure, where our sissy inexplicably gets the urge to kiss his secretary. And that’s all Susan needs, not even the kiss, to hear before she has them heading down the aisle to the altar. Even in 1929, before the Hays Code had been developed and enforced, no sane director could allow a queer who played a central role in his film, to survive untouched. Even if absolutely no one believes it, the pansy, by film’s end has to go by another name, like a rose. Evidently the film studios felt that US viewers simply could not survive the shock of a queer comedic hero, demanding its audiences leap across a chasm of total incredulity to believe Johnny Arthur was a heterosexual at heart. It’s what’s called a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

 

Los Angeles, October 5, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2021).

F. Richard Jones | Bulldog Drummond / 1929

drop of a spoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Howard and Wallace Smith (screenplay, adapted from a play by Herman C. McNeile), F. Richard Jones (director) Bulldog Drummond / 1929

 

Demobilized British officer Bulldog Drummond (Ronald Colman) is bored at The Conservative Club, a gathering of moribund elderly men so intent on silence that even the drop of a spoon by a waiter causes a near revolution. Interestingly, the same opening scene is repeated in the 1935 film Top Hat where Fred Astaire is equally bored while waiting in the equally silenced Thackeray Club where he is waiting to meet his best friend Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), soon after tap dancing a thundering goodbye to the club. Drummond, evidently a club regular, who wishes that someone would throw a bomb to wake things up, shocks club members by whistling his way out of The Conservative Club with his friend Algy Longworth (Claud Allister) in tow.

     Algy, in fact, plays the same role as does Horace, a constantly confused queer who has been given a script which necessitates his pretending to be a heterosexual. His real role is actually to provide a humorous gay cover to the dapper hero, in this case Colman, who like Astaire, falls in love with a troublesome woman with whom he purposely engages.

      In this case Drummond is so bored that he determines, upon Algy’s jocular suggestion, to post an advertisement in the newspaper, calling for someone seeking to bring adventure into his life. He gets several offers, most of them criminal in nature, some of them involving murder; but the best of the requests is a cry for help by a seemingly desperate woman, Phyllis Benton (Joan Bennett), who has already arranged rooms at the Green Bay Inn along the London Road so that she might explain her dilemma.

      Both Drummond’s valet Danny (Wilson Benge) who serves a role similar to Horace’s man Bates (Eric Blore) and Algy, who alas can’t quite get up the energy to play out his namesake—the aesthete Algernon Moncrieff of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—are worried that the Captain may actually take his gameplaying seriously and, the moment Drummond drives away in his Mercedes, Algy and Danny follow in his Rolls Royce, another of Drummond’s many autos’ in order to intrude upon their friend’s “insanity” before it goes too far.

      Upon discovering them in his room, Drummond suggests that if he’d wanted help he would have sent for his maiden aunt who is more of man than Algy, the script’s clear indication of just where Algy stands on the scale of sexual identity.

      Upon a knock on the door, Drummond quickly shuffles the two prisses off into his bedroom where Algy discovers something in the closet, “Danny, there’s a hole!” Danny responds, “A peephole,” Algy excitedly reacting, “Let’s peep!” I should add, they insist upon taking turns with no prejudice of social class, making the whole event sound like another kind of hole in the wall gay men sometimes use of peeping along with other activities.

      And indeed, the young lady, a voluptuous mystery figure just as Drummond had imagined her to be, appears to be quite mad, describing a strange hospital where who uncle, having supposedly undergone a nervous breakdown, has been taken against his will and is being held by the doctor in charge, Lakington (Lawrence Grant) and his co-conspirators, Carl Peterson (Montague Love) and Irma (Lilyan Tashman)—all this without a shred of evidence. The peeping toms Danny and Algy believe the girl herself to be an escapee of the institution, while Drummond, is intrigued by her wild story, particularly when she reveals that her uncle is none other than the wealthy American businessman John Travers (Charles Sellon).

       The rest of the story consists basically of the evil trio absconding with Phyllis, after which Drummond pays a visit to the oddly isolated hospital where he discovers that they are drugging Travers in an attempt to make him sign away his wealth.

        Drummond, gun in hand, escapes with Phyllis and her uncle, with no help by the intruding duo of Danny and Algy. And soon after, Peterson, Irma, and Dr. Lakington regain possession of Phyllis and her uncle—without realizing that Drummond is now pretending to be Travers, the real version of whom is on his way with Algy back to London. Threats are made, drugs injected, secret steel doors rolled into place; yet Drummond and Phyllis save themselves from certain sexual abuse and death. The villains pretend to arrive as the police and escape, while Drummond and Phyllis finally find a moment, despite further intrusions of Algy and Danny, to express their heterosexual feelings for one another, determining to let their foes escape in return for their marital bliss.

       Where Algy and Danny end up is undetermined, although at one point we see Algy in a seemingly homoerotic slumber with Travers in the back of the car, and we can only image that Danny has now joined him in a similar position on their voyage back into the city.

      In short, in Bulldog Drummond, everyone seems to end up quite content, having had a series of adventures in their otherwise highly regularized lives.

      Director Jones, a popular figure in Hollywood who had helped Mabel Normand in her early films and through her late drug addiction difficulties, taught Stan Laurel, so the actor claimed, everything he knew about comic timing, and boosted Douglas Fairbank’s career with The Gaucho, as well as having helmed the 1919 LGBTQ wartime comedy Yankee Doodle in Berlin. He ended his career with this film, an early talkie that was praised for the quality of its sound. In this entertaining adventure work gay and straight figures coexist seemingly without restrictions in sharing the complete storyline, while by the very next year queers would pop up more like jack-in-the-boxes for brief comic moments before the lid was shut down upon them permanently, silencing their behaviors just as did The Conservative and Thackery Clubs throughout the USA and England to their august members.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).

    

Walt Disney | El Terrible Toreador / 1929

toreador and bullfriend

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ub Iwerks, Burt Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, Les Clark, Jack King, and Ben Sharpsteen (animators), Walt Disney (director) El Terrible Toreador / 1929

 

It seems strange perhaps to include a film whose major homosexual expression is limited to a toreador and a bull, but then cartoon figures are often so anthropomorphized to become, at least momentarily, indistinguishable from human beings; moreover, as I hope my essays have already made clear, being queer in a film does not necessarily mean that it has anything do with actual sex.

      This short, animated cartoon version of Carmen begins at a bar instead of a cigar factory, and the Carmen of this variation is a waitress serving up beers to over appreciative Spanish soldiers, one of whom attempts to manhandle her and regularly provides her with tips so that she might pull out her blouse to drop the coins between her breasts. I love how dense the contributor to Wikipedia on this film was about most of the film’s events, but in this case, it’s almost funny as she or he notes: “The man gives her a coin, and she modestly puts in her shirt.” Even Walt Disney on a Sunday family picnic is sexier than this description of events!

       The toreador, however, has her heart and saves her from the clutches of the soldier. She even has a special seat in the arena so that she might bring luck to her handsome lover.

       But the toreador’s heart, we soon realize, actually belongs to the bull ring itself wherein he and his bullfriend dance out hand-in-hand to the cheering crowds, before playing a few rounds of a boxing match and catch-me-if-you-can. When the bull knocks the Toreador onto his back, the bullfighter successfully balancing on the bull’s tail (or is it tale?) the crowd goes wild. As the applause continues the two enter into a cloud of thunderous dust which, when it clears, reveals the two playing patty-cake like two little queer boys.

     And after a few pats on the bull’s rump, our now aroused bull—aroused evidently in a manner we had not expected—immediately turns into a dancing pansy, flailing his arms and turning his hands into a flutter. The toreador quickly follows him as the two dance a pansy dance a year before the real cinematic “Panze craze” that began in 1930 and lasted until Joseph Breen of Motion Picture Production Code closed it down in late 1933 and 1934.

 

    Here the audience is most agreeable until the villainous soldier puts pepper on Carmencita’s bouquet of flowers which, when she tosses it to her lover and his bull sets them off into a sneezing fit that ends, inevitably, in violence, our formerly friendly bull fighter finally turning his former buddy literally inside out—proving, yet again, critic Vito Russo’s thesis, that all gay beings, human or animal, had to die in films made before 1990.

        Our not so eloquent Wikipedia scholar demonstrates how any and all “gay” behavior goes missing or is whitewashed away: “Then another scene opens with a bullfighting ring and the bull (strangely reminiscent of Clarabelle Cow) and the toreador walk in together. Followed by a few gags and musical performances, the toreador finishes up the scene by pulling out the bull's insides.”

        For years this episode was not released because of its graphic scene of violence; it was released finally in 2006, on Walt Disney Treasures “From the Vault” section.

 

Los Angeles, October 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

Ella Shields | I'm Not All There / 1937

pretending madness

by Douglas Messerli

 

I’m Not All There / 1937

 

The best of these films is the last from 1937, when Shields performs a narrative monologue “I’m Not All Here.” Finally, the performer suggests a strategy for her male persona, pretending a kind of madness for those around her that gives her all sorts of permissions that culture would otherwise not allow her/him. Here finally, the male impersonator escapes the female in drag, suggesting a much more covert position behind her/his impersonations. The lyrics are telling, and given they are all spoken instead of sung, hint less at the patter of the lyrics than a dialogic encounter that puts Shields squarely in the position of the great English diseuses and monologuists such as Anna Russell, Joyce Grenfell, and Ruth Draper. 

 

Chorus: I'm not all there

There's something missing

I'm not all there

So the folks declare

They call me Loo by Loo by

Nothing but a great big booby

Point and say, 'That's where you want it,

And that's just where I've got it'

I know they think I'm slow

But let them think, let them think - I don't care.

 

Sometimes I run errands for the folks up at the Grange

With a five-pound note they trust me, perhaps you think that strange

But they never fetch a policeman when I say I've lost the change

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Courting couples in the Park on any night you'll find

If you stare they break away, for love's not always blind

But they let me stand and watch them and they never seem to mind

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

 

Fellows kissing other fellows girls are in for it

Ten to one they'll be a fight and someone will get hit

But when I kiss other fellow's girls, they never mind a bit

Cos I'm not supposed to be all there.

     What these four shorts reveal is the remarkable talent of a now forgotten male impersonator who clearly got away it simply because of her charm and refusal to back down from her role-playing. As the London Times wrote, upon her death in 1952:

“With wavy auburn hair and dressed as a young man in evening dress, nervously fingering his white tie, she made a very charming and gay figure ... and though she adopted the tattered clothes and worn top hat of the traditional "broken down swell" act she did so with a difference, making of what might have been ordinary broad comedy something delicate and, in its way, almost moving.”

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).

Ella Shields | Miss Ella Shields: The Ideal of Ideals / 1930

 

a phone line to sweet adeline

by Douglas Messerli

 

Miss Ella Shields: The Ideal of Ideals / 1930

 

In 1930 the Pathetone Weekly issued another of Shields’ performances, subtitling it “The Ideal of Ideals,” although whether they meant that literally or sarcastically is not clear. Beginning the song on the phone, Shields moves from wanting a telephone line to her singing about going back to her sweet Adeline. The song is charming and forceful, but not nearly as clever as the previous short, although her voice is quite wonderful, her dance gradually turning into almost an early version of the Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” done to tap. Nothing quite so astounding, but still very memorable.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).