SPOILER ALERT
Inserts: (1974. dir: John Bynum) I remember when this came out. I was already a Richard Dreyfuss fan from American Graffitti, but of course I never saw this; this was rated X, and I was ten. Even if I had found someone willing to sneak me into a drive-in, I wouldn't have gone, since it's about porn, and porn embarrassed the crap out of me when I was a kid.
Folks will tell you the reason this was a failure was because of the X-rating, but don't be fooled. It's a failure because it's a goddamn failure. And, man, I was so looking forward to it. I'll watch or read anything right now that deals with Hollywood during that transition between silents and talkies. (I'm on the prowl for a decent book about Thomas Ince, if you have any suggestions.) I'm chomping at the bit to see The Artist, but this is the sticks, and patience is a damn virtue, right? And this, my friend, is a piece of crap.
I'd call it a bad movie based on a bad stage play, since it's written like a bad stage play and it all gets shot in one stupid room, but according to IMDB it was written specifically to be filmed, which just goes to serve as a further sad example of that ongoing moral lesson about how directors should not be allowed to shoot their own scripts unless they're Woody Allen, and not always then.
There's some decent acting: Dreyfuss has a few inspired moments, but many of his choices are already (in retrospect, granted) starting to look like practiced shtick. Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright do some shining, the latter as a good-hearted, heroin-addicted has-been, the former as an ambitious starlet. Stephen Davies looks like he's acting for the nosebleeds at the Royal Opera House, and Bob Hoskins is utterly predictable all the way through, but so is the damned script. I made a game of it. "Now he's going to find the overdosed body," I'd say out loud. "Now that'll be Clark Gable at the door." "Now he's going to turn the lights out, and it'll be a really lame and ponderous metaphor for the lights going out on the entirety of his career, the entirety of his life." The one thing that kept me hanging on, the one thing that kept me watching, was the hope that the Dreyfuss character (they call him the washed-up Boy Wonder; he doesn't have a real name anymore, get it?) would talk some more about Wally Reid, whose death obviously impacted him with some force. I was disappointed. There's one monologue early on in which he describes the moment in which he found out about the death, but Bynum pulls the camera in slowly on him while he's speaking it, and he's cleaning his fingernails as he does, and it's all too damned precious for words. Bah! Humbug, I say.
the Delicious Little Devil: (1919. dir: Robert Z Leonard) Mae Murray was a sexy clown from the silents whose relaxed carriage and lack of vanity still invites affection. She began as a dancer and enjoyed immense stardom as a comedienne at Universal and MGM in those early days, reportedly earning as much as $10,000 a week (which is almost exactly a gazillion times what I make right now, nearly a full century later, thank you very much) then ending her days in penury after a bad marriage to a wicked prince and failing to make the leap into talkies. This is an impish comedy about a nice girl who's too vivacious to keep a hat-check job but has layabout relatives to support and so goes into disguise as a scarlet lady with a scandalous past in order to secure a job at a nightclub. Directed by Murray's third husband, it keeps a jovial pace and allows her the space to win us, with her Peacock Walk dance, for instance, or her manic preparations in her dressing room, or with her facial gestures alone. (My favorite is when she lets her eyes widen and her face go slack and presses her lips together so they disappear.) Her straight man is one heavily-powdered and very young Rudolpho De Valintine, a relaxed and good-natured foil as the rich boy who loves her in spite of her sins.
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