I cracked open the latest boxed set I’d ordered from Turner Classic Movies called, howlingly inaccurately, Universal Rarities: Films of the 1930’s — inaccurately because while the four films in it are titles Universal owns, they were all originally produced by Paramount, acquired by MCA-TV in the 1950’s and later assigned to Universal when it was purchased by MCA in the 1960’s : the 1932 comedy Million Dollar Legs with Jack Oakie and W. C. Fields (billed in that order), Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties (shot during the “pre-Code” glasnost but released post-Code and blatantly butchered; there’s a jarring cut in the middle of one of Mae West’s songs that all too obviously removed a particularly racy chorus at the censors’ behest), the 1937 film Artists and Models (a Raoul Walsh-directed musical starring Richard Arlen and Jack Benny — Robert Osborne, in an introduction included with the DVD set, said it was Jack Benny’s first starring feature, but arguably that honor belongs to Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round three years earlier: Gene Raymond and Nancy Carroll were the stars of that marvelously quirky combination of musical and crime thriller but Benny was billed third and his part ran through the entire movie) and — a weird fit with the other three movies — the 1937 maritime melodrama Souls at Sea, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper. (About the only connection that film had with comedy was that in 1940 Laurel and Hardy parodied its title for their last film at Hal Roach Studios, Saps at Sea, though the plot was not a parody of Souls at Sea and the films otherwise have nothing to do with each other.) TCM also advertised all four films in the box as new to DVD, which is not true; Belle of the Nineties had a previous DVD issue in the mid-2000’s (I know because I bought it then and Charles and I watched it).
The movie we watched last night was Million Dollar Legs, a really wild comedy (the posters in 1932
announced, “It’s Insane! — It’s Joyous!,” and both adjectives were quite
correct) that managed to pull off within the limits of early-1930’s Hollywood
the same kind of relentless assault on the funnybone Monty Python did on the
BBC in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It’s set largely in a fictitious
country called “Klopstokia,” made up of all the mittel-Europan standing sets on the Paramount backlot and
introduced in a title as “Chief Exports — Goats and Nuts,” “Chief Imports —
Goats and Nuts,” “Chief Inhabitants — Goats and Nuts.” Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie)
is a super-salesman who works for the Baldwin Brush Company, whose CEO, Mr.
Baldwin (George Barbier), is in Klopstokia with Tweeny on a sales trip. Only
Tweeny takes a wrong turn with his sample case and bumps into Angela (Susan
Fleming, a quite personable and appealing actress who quit the business in 1936
to marry Harpo Marx), and the two instantly fall in love at first sight. Anxious to take the
steamer out of Klopstokia with his boss, Migg commandeers an ornate carriage he
thinks is a cab, but is in fact the official vehicle of Klopstokia’s President
(W. C. Fields) — who just happens to be Angela’s father. In fact, according to
the wild script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who got the job because his brother
Herman was the associate producer of the film — which has led to some sources
claiming that Herman actually wrote it, which he didn’t), Henry Myers and Nick
Barrows, all Klopstokian women
are named Angela and all Klopstokian men are named George (though there’s one
exception in the latter department: Angela’s pre-pubescent brother Willie,
played by child actor Dickie Moore).
What’s more, every Klopstokian is a
super-athlete — we’re supposed to believe, I think, that that’s due to their
subsisting largely on a diet of goat’s milk — and instead of elections, the
Klopstokians select their president by arm-wrestling matches. The Secretary of
the Treasury (Hugh Herbert, in a much stronger role than he usually got to play at Warners — apparently
having a part in a film with people like W. C. Fields inspired him a good deal
more than the rather dreary “woo-woo” roles he played in the Warners musicals)
is working out, determined to beat the President at arm wrestling so he can
take over, and the rest of the Klopstokian cabinet is in league with him: they
have a secret meeting place (there’s an elevator button reading “Down” next to
a tree which lowers the tree and creates the entrance to their Batcave) where
they plot their schemes, which basically involve taking advantage of
Klopstokia’s $8 million debt to dethrone W. C. Fields and take over. Migg
discovers this when he takes Angela for a walk through the woods and she
accidentally sits down on the button — this comes after Migg has been appointed
Fields’ privy councilor when, sentenced to be tortured and killed by a firing
squad as punishment for Fields’ daughter’s suitors, he instead talks them out
of killing him and into buying his company’s brushes — and Migg, whom Fields
calls “Sweetheart” (making for some pretty outrageously gender-bending gags
even by the relatively loose standards of the “pre-Code” era!) because that’s
what his daughter calls him, hits on the idea of entering a Klopstokian team in
the 1932 Olympics, which were being held in the Los Angeles Coliseum (and
Paramount released the film a few weeks before the start of the actual Olympics
to use them as promotion); once Klopstokia’s super-athletes sweep the Olympics,
Migg reasons, his boss Mr. Baldwin will shower sponsorship money on them and
Klopstokia will be able to pay off its national debt.
Only the corrupt cabinet
members (a veritable who’s-who of slapstick comedy sidekicks: Billy Gilbert,
Vernon Dent, Teddy Hart, John Sinclair, and Sam Adams) hit on a
counter-strategy: they’ll call on the internationally famous femme
fatale, “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can
Resist” (Lyda Roberti, the heavily accented blonde singer who introduced George
and Ira Gershwin’s “My Cousin from Milwaukee” in the 1933 flop musical Pardon
My English and who died tragically young at
age 29), to seduce all the Klopstokian male athletes one by one so that when
they find out she’s betrayed them all, their morale will be crushed and they’ll do wretchedly. When the
cabinet members go to visit her, there’s a nameplate outside her door reading,
“Mata Machree: The Woman No Man Can
Resist. Not Responsible for Men Left After 30 Days,” and when she
actually deigns to see them she makes a grand entrance down a long staircase to
the tune of the “Land of Hope and Glory” strain of Elgar’s Pomp and
Circumstance March No. 2. She’s quite
obviously being played as a parody of Greta Garbo — she’s even given one of
Garbo’s most famous off-screen
lines, “I t’ank I go home now” (during an argument with Louis B. Mayer over a
contract dispute in 1928, Garbo told him, “I t’ank I go home now,” and left his
office; everyone at MGM thought she simply meant she was returning to the
bungalow she was staying in in Hollywood … until the next time they heard from
her, when they found out she was in Sweden) — though she also gets to do one of
the almost incomprehensible hot-jazz vocals she was famous for, “When I Get Hot
It’s Terrific,” written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. Mata’s machinations
work — they also temporarily derail the relationship between Migg and Angela —
but Angela drags Mata into the Klopstokian locker room, she confesses to the
athletes that she never loved any of them, and this restores their morale and
they go on to win the overall medal count — thanks to a weight-lifting
performance by W. C. Fields at the end: competing against Hugh Herbert as a
free-lance entrant he seems like he’s going to be unable to lift the
1,000-pound weight until, at Angela’s urging, Migg goads him into getting
angry, whereupon he not only lifts it but hurls it far enough he wins the
shot-put medal as well.
And as if all this isn’t zany enough, there’s also a
former Klopstokian national anthem, “Woof Bloogle Jig,” which is actually the
melody Richard Whiting (Margaret Whiting’s father) wrote for the title song of
the Ernst Lubitsch-George Cukor One Hour with You, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier,
released by Paramount earlier in 1932, but with gibberish lyrics supplied by
Harry Myers; Angela explains these represent “the old Klopstokian language,
which we spoke before we all learned English.” (At last someone in Hollywood parodied the insistence in American
movies that everyone in the world
spoke English, no matter what country they were from or where the story took
place.) Million Dollar Legs is so
arbitrarily put together it makes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup seem like a model of plot coherence by comparison,
and though W. C. Fields is screamingly funny in it it does suffer from his lack of involvement with the script
(and though Fields at this point was large but without the alcoholic bloat he
acquired later, believing him as a weight-lifter so powerful he makes Arnold
Schwarzenegger look like Twiggy is a bit of a stretch even in this
anything-for-a-laugh context), even though it has some of his classic gags,
including the “hearty handclasp” and the bit in which he would put his cane
over his shoulder, then try to put his hat on, and his hat would end up on the
tip of his cane instead of his head.
Million Dollar Legs may not be the funniest movie ever made (as claimed
by one over-the-top imdb.com contributor) but it’s appealing in its own
zaniness (and it’s interesting that two of the actors in it, Jack Oakie and
Billy Gilbert, later turned up in Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler spoof The
Great Dictator) and especially for the
droll Keaton-esque performance by Andy Clyde, who seems to be the possessor of
the “million dollar legs” alluded to in the title (the working titles were “On
Your Mark” — the name Joseph L. Mankiewicz gave his original story — and
“Million Dollar Feet”) since (thanks to fast-motion photography) he’s so fast a
runner he can give the other contestants in a mile race a 200-yard head start
and still win. (The fact that the Olympics are running a mile race itself dates
this movie: in today’s Olympics all the track events are at distances measured
in metric units — actually, according to infoplease.com, the Olympics were
already running races at metric distances in 1932.) Paramount reused the title Million
Dollar Legs for a Betty Grable musical in
1932 (Grable moved from RKO to Fox to Paramount and back again to Fox, where
she finally broke through as a star when she was a last-minute replacement for
Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way)
but the two films have nothing to do with each other plot-wise. The film is directed by Eddie Cline, who would return to
Fields at Universal in 1940 and make his last three starring movies (My
Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break), who before he became a director was a Keystone
Kop (as was Hank Mann, who supposedly has an uncredited bit part as a customs
inspector), so he knew a thing or two, three or several about slapstick!
