1932
That was an ordeal.
This movie is extremely difficult to find. I seriously thought that I would never find this movie and that would be the end of my 1001 films journey. Here is what I did:
1. I checked Netflix, YouTube, eBay, Amazon, and eMule.
2. I asked my brother to...um...download an alternative version from online. He accidentally downloaded For Me and My Gal, which is a red herring.
3. I asked the film teacher at the local high school if he had ever heard of it. He hadn't, and asked if it was a Harold Lloyd in 1932! That was disappointing.
4. I begin to weekly check FMC because I read in another blog that it plays about once a year on that channel.
5. My mom, who has a Facebook and Twitter, heard about my woes. She tweeted about it and got a response. She ordered it online. I don't know how this site existed, because I thought I had really checked out the internet for this.
6. We both got so excited that we ordered three copies. We will probably end up selling them.
So I finally got to watch this movie. If anyone out there wants to see this film, I can give you the website. For the first time since I started this monumental 1001 task, I finally feel like it is actually going to happen. Anyway, onto the hard earned review.
Spencer Tracy is so young in this movie that you will be amazed (that is, if you ever actually see this movie which in all likelihood you will not). He is a cop and falls in love with a waitress who reminded me of the thief in Trouble in Paradise. This movie was filmed before Prohibition was repealed and they were pretty risque with how much drinking they showed. It was a fun movie and pretty witty at times, but it certainly wasn't worth all this trouble.
RATING: ***--
Interesting Facts:
I can't find any trivia for this film but here is a quote:
Oh, he kissed me. I am so thrilled but I will pretend to be mad.
Didn't I just tell you this movie is basically nonexistent? There are no videos!
This was a tricky one to find. I have a source who claims he can find every title on the list, but I do not want to know where he finds them. This one was worth the effort though. I quite liked it.
ReplyDeleteYou have a dealer? How did he obtain this strange power?
DeleteI downloaded it with a torrent. No trouble, but normally there are many copies to choose from and this was the only one I could find. It had Spanish subtitles which were only distracting for the first five minutes.
ReplyDeleteOn the face of it, it's a ten-a-penny rom-com, but there's something more to it than that. I hadn't realised until I started watching, but I hadn't come across an English-language, dialogue-based comedy on the list before this. I'd be very interested to know what the influences were at the time, be it theatre, vaudeville or other films. Thinking about it, the jokes were very similar in style to Groucho Marx.
There's also little bits in there like the Irish father breaking the fourth wall and the audible thoughts in their head (which the film-makers felt the need to introduce by crediting the film they stole the idea from). I lent my copy of the book to someone a month ago and haven't got it back yet so look forward to finding out more if this was important for use of techniques like this (even though it apparently bombed commercially at the time).