Mill Creek comedy classics #32: "Money Means Nothing" (1934)

Try telling that to a landlord or a loan shark. See how far it gets you.

The flick: Money Means Nothing (Monogram Pictures, 1934) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.4

Director: Christy Cabanne (The Mummy's Hand; uncredited fill-in director on Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ [1925 version]; known for being prolific rather than talented; directed Life of Villa and The Life of General Villa, both featuring the real-life Pancho Villa)

Ford as "Phroso"

Actors of note: Wallace Ford (Harvey; Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt and Spellbound; was "Phroso the Clown" in Tod Browning's Freaks), Gloria Shea (The Last Days of Pompeii; B-movie star from 1929-1936), Edgar Kennedy (Peck's Bad Boy with the Circus), Viven Oakland (Mutiny on the Bounty; worked with Laurel & Hardy in Way Out West and A Chump at Oxford), Eddie Tamblyn (Follow the Fleet; father of Russ Tamblyn and grandfather of Amber Tamblyn, who's married to David Cross), Betty Blythe (The Postman Always Rings Twice, My Fair Lady), Tenen Holtz (Nothing Sacred), Richard Tucker (first official member of the Screen Actors Guild; appeared in Wings, the first-ever Best Picture winner and The Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie), Ann Brody (Three on a Match), Douglas Fowley (Singin' in the Rain, The Thin Man, TV credits ranging from Gunsmoke to CHiPs, a great deal more), Maidel Turner (It Happened One Night, The Raven)

The hero, heroine, and comic foil.

The gist of it: Against the wishes of her snooty family, rich party girl Julie (Shea) marries working stiff Kenny (Ford), an employee at an auto parts warehouse whose trucks have been getting hijacked an awful lot lately. Julie and Kenny move into a little Brooklyn apartment, where they are constantly being annoyed by their intrusive, overbearing neighbors, the Greens (Kennedy and Turner). Mr. Green happens to be Kenny's boss, so the couple is obliged to be nice to him. One night, Julie's wealthy relatives show up for her birthday, and the Greens invite themselves over for dinner, only to be offended by the way the rich folks treat them. In retaliation, Mr. Green fires innocent Kenny and tells the police he thinks Kenny is the one who's been tipping off the hijackers. His professional reputation ruined, Kenny cannot find employment, and soon the newlyweds are nearly destitute and must pawn their few possessions for food and rent. It's at this dark time when Julie discovers she's pregnant, but she still turns down an offer from her sister (Oakland) to rejoin the family and go to Europe. Kenny takes a job with an ex-coworker, Red Miller (Fowley), who turns out to be the real ringleader of the truck hijackers.

My take: Oh, goddammit. Another truck hijacking movie, Mill Creek? Wasn't The Gang's All Here enough? Money Means Nothing was made by cheapskate Monogram Pictures, so it probably always looked and sounded pretty crummy, but time has been particularly cruel to this thoroughly mediocre film, making the viewing experience even less pleasurable. The DVD version was clearly made from a clumsy VHS transfer, which in turn was mastered from a scratchy, badly faded print. The picture is so faint at times that the actors almost become invisible. But even if this film were given a meticulous, frame-by-frame restoration, it still wouldn't be any good. Apart from one pretty neat tracking shot (all but ruined by the DVD transfer), Christy Cabanne's direction is very flat-footed and unimaginative. Some poor dubbing adds to the film's technical woes. The script, which was "suggested" by a stage play, is very contrived and takes an unwelcome turn into melodrama about halfway through before morphing into a half-assed thriller. The leads are merely adequate. There is no reason to believe that Gloria Shea's vivacious character would fall instantly in love with an uninspiring dullard like Wallace Ford's tire salesman, simply because he makes a few limp wisecracks on the night of their first meeting. In all honesty, the rich girl is making a huge mistake by marrying this man and forsaking the family fortune, and the movie miscalculates badly by turning her into a noble martyr when she started the film as a fun-loving free spirit. In short, this film is a chore to watch. Perhaps the best thing I can say about this movie is that at least the hero and heroine share a double bed. A lot of the married couples in these movies have had separate twin beds... and even separate bedrooms!

The Greens are especially bad neighbors.

Is it funny: Nope. To be fair, Money Means Nothing stops being a comedy for a long, long stretch in the middle of the film and gets all weepy and depressing. Even at its best, though, it never rates any higher than "kind of cute." My favorite scene occurs early on when Julie's brother-in-law (Tucker) discovers that the young lady has spent hundreds of dollars on auto accessories and that one of the family's cars now has about half a dozen horns and all sorts of other unnecessary gizmos. (Further useless car parts are stockpiled in the garage.) The Greens should be a source of comedy in the film, but the nature of their revenge against Julie and Kenny makes them altogether too unpleasant to be amusing. The movie's best comic asset, beloved hothead Edgar Kennedy, is somewhat squandered here. If I could travel back in time and rewrite the script for this film -- and, believe me, that would be my top priority under such circumstances -- I'd completely ditch the truck hijacking angle along with any hint of melodrama and just turn Money Means Nothing into a comedy of manners. If there's any fun to be had here, it's from watching the young lovers deal with their tacky, talkative neighbors. My take on this material would emphasize that element of the script, seasoned with a bit of "culture clash"/snobs versus slobs humor. Even then, Money Means Nothing would probably still only rate a B+, but it would at least be more entertaining than the existing version.

My grade: C-



P.S. - No negative African-American stereotypes, but there are some questionable Jewish stereotypes, the first of their kind in this set. The Silvermans (Holtz and Brody) run a pawn shop where Julie goes to pawn the fur coat she got from her family at that fateful birthday party. The film portrays the elderly couple in a (basically) positive light, which is nice, but these characters border on cartoonish in their speech and mannerisms. So this is kind of a gray area.

Mill Creek comedy classics #19: "False Pretenses" (1935)

The pretenses may be false but those gams are 100% genuine in 1935's False Pretenses.

The flick: False Pretenses (Chesterfield Motion Pictures, 1935) [buy the set]

Current IMDb rating: 5.3

Director: Charles Lamont (seven of the Abbott and Costello Meet... movies; five Ma and Pa Kettle movies)

Actors of note: Irene Ware (The Raven, Gold Diggers of 1937), Sidney Blackmer (Goodbye Love), Betty Compson (Here Comes Trouble), Edward Gargan (My Man Godfrey, Bringing Up Baby), Russell Hopton ('G' Men, Zombies on Broadway), Ernest Wood (San Quentin, International House), Lucy Beaumont (His Double Life),

The gist of it: Waitress Mary Beekman (Ware) has always dreamed of better things, but seems unlikely to escape her humble station in life. After her loutish ex-boyfriend Mike (Gargan) causes a scene at the restaurant where she works, Mary is fired and then has the bad luck of losing her last paycheck when it blows out of her purse. Chasing after it, she meets Kenneth Alden (Blackmer), a once-wealthy jet setter who has run out of money and is in debt up to his ascot. Seizing this opportunity, Mary convinces Kenneth to help her pull off a harebrained, high-risk scheme. She's pretty and refined, and he still knows a lot of rich folks, right? So all Ken has to do is introduce Mary to a bunch of his society friends, acting as if she's an old acquaintance who's been shut away in a convent for a few years. One of these rich suckers is bound to marry her, and after the vows are exchanged, Mary will give Ken a share of the profits. After some training by Miss Milgrim (Beaumont), Mary has two very likely prospects: one she likes a lot (Hopton) and one she doesn't (Wood) but who will do in a pinch. Complications arise when Clarissa (Compson), who has designs on Ken, gets suspicious of this little scheme and tries to sabotage it, enlisting the services of Mike to prove who Mary really is. Meanwhile, a few of Ken's buddies find out he has some kind of surefire investment up his sleeve, and he starts selling "shares" in Miss Mary Beekman.

Schemers: Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in The Producers.

My take: A charmingly cynical romantic comedy which plays like a cross between The Producers (1968) and My Fair Lady (1964), False Pretenses is a good example of why I've generally preferred the comedies of the 1930s to those of the 1940s. The ones from the '40s have the specter of World War II looming over them and generally have a strong underpinning of sentimentality and/or patriotism. In the '30s comedies, however, the characters are just allowed to be sneaky, shallow, and greedy without suffering any moral judgment from the filmmakers. Entertainment is the only goal of these pictures. Living up to the title of their film, the characters of False Pretenses are a cheerfully dishonest bunch. Pretty much everyone is trying to take advantage of someone else at one time or another. And they all own up to to their faults without much prompting. The most important lesson of False Pretenses is that the so-called "upper class" is just as corrupt and silly as the rest of society. Money doesn't bestow any sense of honor or virtue upon you. In recent years, of course, people like Donald Trump and Paris Hilton have been teaching us that on a regular basis, but we as a society once felt that the rich were somehow superior human beings. A clever proverb of unknown origin states that "the upper crust is a bunch of crumbs held together by dough." False Pretenses plays like a feature-length adaptation of that saying.

Is it funny: Yes, I'd say so, though I can't really remember laughing too often. I mostly smiled and chuckled quietly through this one. Ware and Blackmer are nicely congenial in the leading roles. Ware, in particular, is a cutie who has no false modesty about her assets or her talents. And why should she? As The Producers reminds us, "When you've got it, flaunt it!" Further benefiting this slight, featherweight comedy are some standouts in the supporting cast. I particularly enjoyed Herbert Clifton as Bleven (the name, you will note, is very similar to my own), a gleefully slimy manservant who affects an attitude of great sophistication but will swipe anything not nailed down, given half a chance. And I got a kick out of big, dumb Edward Gargan as an easily-confused lug who prefers speaking with his fists. When he's dissatisfied with the beer he's served, for instance, getting into a physical altercation with the polite, reasonable waiter is Gargan's first resort, his Plan A. Characters like these (and a few other assorted cads, drunks, and phonies) make False Pretenses quite enjoyable, if not exactly essential viewing.

My grade: B+



P.S - False Pretenses is delightfully stereotype-free.