Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

Hollywood and Vine: You've seen the intersection, now see the movie!

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie), Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty), Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick), Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild), Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor"), Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950), Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met. Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero. Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy. The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle." Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it. By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that. Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak. Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-



P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.

Mill Creek comedy classics #7: "Affairs of Cappy Ricks" (1937)

Walter Brennan in Affairs of Cappy Ricks: Who's up for a threesome? No takers?

The flick: Affairs of Cappy Ricks (Republic, 1937) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.9

Director: Ralph Staub (Country Gentlemen)

Actors of note: Walter Brennan (Rio Bravo, Sergeant York, TV's The Real McCoys, three-time Oscar winner), Mary Brian (Brown of Harvard, The Front Page), Lyle Talbot (Plan 9 from Outer Space, Glen or Glenda?), Frank Shields (tennis pro and grandfather of Brooke Shields)

The gist of it: Cantankerous business mogul Cappy Ricks (Brennan) returns to San Francisco after a long sea voyage, only to find his house and his business have changed drastically for the worse in his absence. One of his daughters, Ellen, is unhappily married to Matt, the wimpy, sad-sack son of his late partner, and the son's unbearable, domineering mother, Mrs. Peasley, has moved into and redecorated the Ricks homestead. Worse yet, his other daughter Frankie (Brian) is engaged to the useless Waldo Bottomly, Jr. (Shields), the son of Cappy's business rival, pompous Waldo Bottomly, Sr., whose company manufactures modern "push-button" gadgets which Cappy despises. Aided by his crony -- and Frankie's ex-boyfriend -- Bill Peck (Talbot), Cappy launches an incredible plan to regain control of his life. He gathers Ellen, Matt, Mrs. Peasley, and Frankie on his boat, takes them way out into the ocean ("300 miles off the sea lanes"), and then arranges for them all, Cappy and Bill included, to be marooned on a deserted island so that they'll learn to be self-sufficient and not modernized, sissified "land lubbers." It should be noted that this was the fifth of six movies about Cappy Ricks (each time he was played by a different actor), a once-popular character whose origins go back to a series of short stories written by Peter B. Kyne. The movie just assumes we know who he is and who the other characters are. For newbies like me, though it gets very confusing very quickly until a news broadcast late in the film sorts a lot of it out. If you want to read a whole book about Cappy's adventures for free, you can do so right here.

Walter Brennan skinny and not-so-skinny.

My take: Was Walter Brennan ever young, or was he born 60 years old? Cappy Ricks was released the year after Come and Get It earned him the first of his three Oscars. He was only 42 when he made this flick, but he appears much, much older. Apparently, he lost most of his teeth in an accident in '32 and played codgers and coots forever after. It worked for him, obviously, as he enjoyed decades of success in television and film. This film was a low-budget quickie, just another paycheck and a few days of filming for Walter. His character here, both a captain of industry and an actual sea captain, seemed to me to be a bully, a cheat, a liar, and a Luddite. If the movie had thought of him that way, Affairs of Cappy Ricks would be somewhat more successful. But the movie considers him a hero, I think, a Quixote of the Sea, fighting valiantly against modern times and all these newfangled gadgets and ideas of ours. We're supposed to be rooting for him, and I spent the whole movie waiting for someone to sock him in the jaw, which is what he deserves. His plan is not only insane and illegal but cruel and controlling. I am not much of a fan of traveling, because it generally requires one to be confined to a rather limited space for long amounts of time. If I'd been on that boat of his for weeks on end, I'd have probably jumped overboard. It's also unfair that most of the other characters are so silly and shrill, because it stacks the deck in Cappy's favor. Just because they're wrong doesn't make him right. More problematic is the film's nasty misogynist streak. One persistent theme is that women need macho men to yell at them, boss them around, and overtake them physically. "You have no choice" isn't a line that should be used in a romantic way, but it is here. Anyway, this thing is strictly routine as far as production values and direction. It's obviously a vehicle for Brennan, who's a little scrawnier than I'm used to seeing him, but there are a couple of mildly interesting people in the cast. I'm probably one of the few people in the world who get excited when Lyle Talbot's name appears in the opening credits of a movie. A bland, somewhat stocky supporting actor, Talbot somehow became part of Ed Wood's repertory company in the 1950s. Stuffy, spoiled Mrs. Peasley should be a fun character, but the actress who plays her, Georgia Caine, is no Margaret Dumont, aka Hollywood's daffy dowager par excellence. Meanwhile, though, Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans might just be interested to know that one of the smaller roles in the film, a sailor on Waldo Bottomly's ship, is played by the same guy who was the suck-up salesman Jimmy in the short industrial film Hired! (Jam Handy Productions, 1940).

Poopdeck Pappy, Popeye's dad.

Is it funny: Sorry, but I'm going to have to say no. Affairs of Cappy Ricks broke a streak for me in that it was the first film in the collection which didn't make me laugh out loud even once. Your appreciation for this flick will largely depend on your level of enjoyment of Walter Brennan in the title role. Me, I found him tiresome after a few minutes -- nowhere near as funny as The Simpsons' Captain McAllister. Some of the things which bother Cappy are so mild that I had no idea why he was making such a big deal of them. He comes home to find the place now has a few small knickknacks on the shelves and some modest paintings on the wall, and he rants about all the "trick decorations." The movie backs him up all the way on this, but I didn't see the problem. The script has a few clever but not quite funny lines, as when Mrs. Peasley complains that she's tired of eating "fish and eggs and eggs and fish," and Ellen, her daughter-in law, reminds her: "You used to like caviar. That's eggs and fish in one!" As a lifelong Popeye fan, I suppose I should mention that Cappy Ricks reminded me a bit of Popeye's irascible father, the somewhat similarly-named Poopdeck Pappy, but E.C. Segar had the good sense to portray Pappy as a scoundrel and not a role model.

My grade: C+ (with regrets)



P.S. No negative Negro stereotypes here, but Mrs. Peasley does make some ill-advised comments about "cannibals."