Laughing at Life (Mascot, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home from work about an hour earlier than usual last night (Wednesday, November 26), and as a result I showed us an odd little 1933 actioner from Mascot Pictures, later Republic: Laughing at Life, directed by Ford Beebe (who would later end up at Universal producing all three Flash Gordon serials and directing the last two, as well as directing the 1944 film The Invisible Man’s Revenge, which I consider the best Invisible Man movie made at “The New Universal” following the departure of the Laemmles and James Whale, who made the stunning 1933 original) from a script he co-wrote with Prescott Chaplin and Tom Dugan. It’s a picaresque tale of an adventurer named Dennis McHale (Victor McLaglen) who travels the world on the run from whoever he’s pissed off in his last go-round. It starts in 1913 in the U.S., in which he’s a construction engineer with a wife and young son (Buster Phelps), only he gets involved in some shady deal and is forced to flee to avoid being arrested by his best friend. He turns up in China and seems to have settled down in a stable work situation, enough so that he writes his wife a letter to invite her and their son to join him, only a gang of no-goodniks recruit him for a job smuggling stolen jewels (or something) and he tears up the letter. But the caper goes awry and he’s forced to flee again. In 1917 he’s captaining a unit in the U.S. effort in World War I, only he’s arrested and threatened with court-martial for having had his unit advance when they were supposed to retreat. They decide to give him a medal for bravery even though he’s in the hoosegow, only when they’re ready to pin it on him they find the bars of his cell broken and him gone.

He ends up in 1933 in the small (and fictional) Latin American country of Alturas, ruled by President Valenzuela (Henry B. Walthall), who’s pleading with the Alturan people to be allowed two more years in office to carry out his reforms. Unfortunately, the people of Alturas are getting restive and threatening to overthrow Valenzuela in a revolution, and the revolutionary leader is an unscrupulous bastard named Don Flavio Montenegro (Ivan Lebedeff), who hires McHale, using the name “Captain Easter,” to train his army. Don Flavio then intends to get rid of Easter as soon as he’s served his purpose, and the rest of the film is a scramble between Easter/McHale, the revolutionaries, the government, a man named Inspector Mason (William “Stage” Boyd, the real-life alcoholic, drug addict and general wastrel whose antics got the other William Boyd fired from his RKO contract for violating the morals clause; the good Boyd sued the bad Boyd and won a judgment that the bad Boyd henceforth must use “Stage,” in quotes, as a middle name; unfortunately the bad Boyd made only one more film, the serial The Lost City, before the effects of his alcoholism and drug use caught up with him and he died in 1935 at age 45) who’s out to arrest Easter/McHale on behalf of the U.S. government, along with Easter’s local girlfriend Panchita (Conchita Montenegro) and an associate named Pat Collins (Regis Toomey). For much of the movie it’s unclear whether Easter is on the side of the government or the rebels (most likely he’s on the rebel side until he learns Don Flavio has double-crossed him, whereupon he goes over to the government and rats out the rebels), and it’s also not clear whether Easter regards Pat as a protégé in his business (whatever it is) or an innocent young naïf who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

Easter resists Panchita’s attempts to get something of a romantic commitment out of him, which he does because he thinks he still has a wife back home even though we know, courtesy of a letter that’s been chasing him around the world but which he hasn’t read, that his wife back home is dead and others have had to raise their son (ya remember the son?). Pat, who has a blonde Anglo-looking local girlfriend named Alice Lawton (Ruth Hall), turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Easter’s nè McHale’s long-lost son, in what Charles joked was “a real surprise … to anyone who’s never read a book or seen a movie before.” Ultimately President Valenzuela gives Easter a safe-conduct pass but instructs his army to arrest Easter if he tries to leave Alturas (obviously El Presidente had seen Tosca sometime in his life), and rather than the ending I was expecting – a doomed romantic one in which Easter sacrifices his own life so Pat and Alice can get away – the final scene is a light-hearted escape out of Alturas in which Pat and Alice are driving out in a convertible with its top down, and Easter clambers into the car and escapes with them. I’m not sure why the film was called Laughing at Life – I stumbled on it when I was looking for a recording of the song of that title – though it does seem to sum up the attitude of Victor McLaglen’s character. One surprisingly good thing about Laughing at Life was the excellence of the process work: Ford Beebe and his special-effects crew were far ahead of most of the indies of the day (anticipating the later technical excellence of Republic’s productions, no matter how deficient they were in lesser matters like plot and cast), including the folks at Hal Roach Studios who in Laurel and Hardy films like County Hospital gave us scenes that were less funny and less thrilling than they would have been with better process work. Other than that, the main mystery was why Victor McLaglen, who’d already established himself as a major star with the 1926 Fox film What Price Glory?, had to work at an indie like Mascot just two years before The Informer re-established his career and got him an Academy Award (for an atrociously overacted performance, by the way; it’s odd, to say the least, that Ford Beebe was able to restrain him while John Ford let him loose to do beaver imitations on the scenery).