Movie Monday - The Milky Way

Sorry for the muddy pics. The print wasn't in the best shape, but I cleaned up the screen caps as well as I could.

In the 20's, Harold Lloyd was the biggest thing going. His films outgrossed both Chaplin's and Keaton's. He didn't have Chaplin's artistic sensibility, nor Keaton's pure physical skills, but he was a solid, prolific filmmaker, and his regular guy persona was more appealing than both of them put together.

Unfortunately, the one thing he had in common with Chaplin and Keaton is that his career didn't survive for long after the introduction of talkies. Which is too bad, because last week's "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" and this week's film are okay. Both feature clever scripts, funny gags, and Lloyd's trademark appeal. They ultimately fall a little flat compared to the best comedies of the time, but they compare well to, say, the Three Stooges' pictures, whose iconic status is a little mystifying.

In "The Milky Way" from 1936, Harold Lloyd plays mild-mannered milkman, Burleigh Sullivan. The script is pretty good, based on a Broadway play, so the plot structure is more solid than most movie comedies of the time, and there's lots of clever wordplay. Lloyd makes an appealing leading man, and the scenes where he gets to play physical comedy work well, but his timing isn't so sharp when it comes to dialogue as his castmates.

The plot: Burleigh's sister, Mae, works as a hat check girl, where she catches the eyes of a couple of drunks.


Mae is played by Helen Mack, well known to fans of Famous Monsters of Filmland as Hilda from "Son of Kong." The two drunks are Speed McFarland (William Gargan) and his friend Spider, played by Lionel Stander (who also had a small but memorable role in last week's Lloyd film).

The two drunks accost Mae outside the club when milquetoast milkman Burleigh comes to the rescue.


There's a brief fight, and somehow Burleigh stays on his feet while Speed is knocked out, which causes quite a sensation. You see, Speed is the middleweight champion of the world.

The next day, Burleigh visits Speed and his manager, Gabby Sloan (Adolphe Menjou) to set things straight. Burleigh explains how his highly developed ducking skills enabled him to dodge Spider's punches with ease, which led to Spider knocking out Speed. The demonstration ends with Speed being knocked out a second time, just before a horde of reporters rushes in, making Burleigh an overnight celebrity.

So Gabby, desperate to rescue the reputation and income stream of the former champ, convinces Burleigh to be a fighter. Burleigh takes the job because he needs the money for his sick horse, Agnes.


Oh yeah, and in the process of calling a doctor for Agnes, Burleigh ends up in the boudoir of lovely and wholesome Polly, a manicurist with whom he falls in love.


Gabby's plan is to have Burleigh win a series of set-ups, paying fighters to lay down for Burleigh so as to get him a title fight with Speed, where Speed will knock Burleigh out and rescue his reputation. There are a couple of problems with the plan. Number one is that Burleigh is not a natural fighter.


Number two is that Speed falls in love with Mae and refuses to fight his brother-in-law. When Gabby suggests that Speed delay the marriage until after the fight, Speed declares "We can't, I mean, we don't wanna." Burleigh's sister got busy!

But success has gone to Burleigh's head, which leads to a schism with Polly, a conflict with Mae (who convinces Speed that her brother needs to be punched out), and a brawl with a society matron.


Okay, actually not that last one. In fact, Burleigh's teaching Mrs. Winthrop Lemoyne how to duck, in a pretty good scene that gets referenced a couple of times later in the film, as when Mrs. Lemoyne ducks a swing by the announcer as she takes the ring before the big fight.


As I said earlier, though the movie ultimately falls flat, it really shines in spots and makes me want to look up some more of Lloyd's talkies. I also want to look up "The Kid From Brooklyn," the remake from 1946 starring Danny Kaye.

Oh yeah, a couple of things that really struck me. Besides having Lionel Stander in common, there are a couple of scenes in "The Milky Way" that call to mind "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock." In one scene, Burleigh terrorizes a hotel lobby with a pet lion on a leash.


And in another, Burleigh busts out with a Diddlebock yell.


So yeah, the first couple of classic comedies were pretty pleasant surprises. But they're not all gems. Not by a long shot.

As you'll see next week.

Movie Monday - The Sin of Harold Diddlebock

So my mom, not having any idea what to get me for Christmas, gave me a little money (which I ended up spending mostly on bills), but then, just after Christmas, she also handed me a bag with some vintage public-domain comedies on DVD. And at first I wasn't that interested, but then, on the first one I looked at, there was a title I recognized: "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock," a movie I had never seen, but had watched at least two or three times.

Which sounds like nonsense, but it goes like this: when I was a kid, in the days before cable, our local broadcast stations would air old movies on Friday and Saturday nights. And although they never aired a movie called "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock," they did air a movie titled "Mad Wednesday" a few times, which was the exact same movie with several minutes edited out. So although I had seen the movie a few times, I had never seen the whole thing under its original title.

Written and directed by Preston Sturges and released in 1947, "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" stars silent film star Harold Lloyd in his last film, along with a sparkling supporting cast. Oh, and her...


A credit like that just screams "sleeping with the director," but she actually wasn't too bad. This was her first credited role, and her last, except for a couple of appearances in documentaries about Sturges and Lloyd.

The film is mostly forgotten today, and I've got to say, the opening isn't promising.


It doesn't inspire confidence when the first moments of the film are telling you how good the star was in that other film over twenty years ago, nor when the first ten minutes of the film are actually just a rerun of the climactic sequence from that aforementioned silent film. Lloyd plays Harold Diddlebock, a waterboy who becomes an unlikely college football hero.


Then the movie shifts to a talkie with young Lloyd being offered a job by a rich sports fan. Twenty years later, that same fan, Mr. E.J. Waggleberry, fires Lloyd, who in the intervening years has stayed in the same position at the same desk, and is now a worn shabby shadow of his former self.



He reminds me of pictures of my dad when he was the same age: same glasses, same nose.

Harold cashes out his meager savings and then says goodbye to a pretty girl in his office, "the youngest Miss Otis," whom he has worshipped from afar, as he did her six older sisters who had all previously worked for the same firm over the last 18 years. The scene is clever, like the previous scenes with Waggleberry, but slow-moving. After the frenetic silent-film action, the story takes a while to build momentum again.


Harold goes out job hunting, but all seems lost until he meets a street hustler named Wormy, who takes Harold to a bar to have his first taste of demon rum. Where he meets bartender Jake (Edgar Kennedy in a memorable turn), who, upon hearing that this will be Harold's first drink, says, "You arouse the artist in me."


Wormy suggests a drink called a Texas Tornado, but Jake pooh-poohs the idea.

The Tornado's a perfectly reliable, commercial drink for conventions and hangovers and things like that, but this, this is almost, ah... Is the word 'vestal?' I mean, it oughta have organ music.

Jake mixes up a complex mixture he dubs "The Diddlebock," which inspires a rather unexpected reaction in Harold.


Suddenly transformed into an energetic confident fireball, Harold runs out to find a barber and a tailor, determined to remake himself. And in the barber shop, he encounters several other memorable characters, including a prissy tailor and a sassy manicurist (when the tailor says, "I guess they have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch you in bed," her answer is, "It's been tried.")


Harold impulsively bets a thousand bucks on a horse, through a bookie's rep played by Lionel Stander, and wins on a 15-to-1 shot, which inspires a wild party montage.

And all this time, I'm wondering why I barely remember the film and don't absolutely love it, because the script is clever and the characters are funny and the energy is building and building...

And then Harold wakes up on his couch with a headache and no memory of the last couple of days, being hectored by his sister, the Wicked Witch of the West, and all the energy goes out of the film.


It's like a doughnut, this movie, with a big hole in the middle. Halfway through, and it's almost like starting over. Harold learns that in his drunken revelry, he hired a personal chauffeur (in a horse-drawn carriage, no less) and won a circus in another horse race--a circus that's broke and full of hungry lions.


So Harold comes up with a plan to sell the circus, which involves him going door-to-door to all the banks on Wall Street with a lion on a leash, which of course goes horribly awry when he ends up on a skyscraper ledge with the lion in a scene reminiscent of his most famous silent comedy, the classic "Safety Last!"


And what ends up happening is that you end up with a movie that has a series of good scenes--the football game, Harold's scenes with Waggleberry, Harold's scenes with Miss Otis, the scene in the bar, the scene in the barber shop, the scene where Harold learns just what a nightmare his circus is going to be--but that somehow fails to gel overall. The pacing is too uneven, scenes go on too long. Most of the supporting characters are funny and interesting, but you sort of wish there weren't so darned many of them and that you had more time with the really good ones.

By the end, the film has pretty much worn out its welcome, which is too bad, because its best moments are very good, and it's not every day you see a comedy with "sin" in the title.