The Boob (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 24) I saw a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that unwittingly had something in common: they were both surprisingly mediocre (or, in one case, even worse than that) efforts by directors with major reputations. The first was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” movie called The Boob, a not-particularly-funny comedy made at MGM in 1925 but not released until a year later. It was directed by William A. Wellman and was such a total flop that MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer fired him after its release – whereupon he decamped to Paramount and made the first Academy Award winner for Best Production, Wings, in 1927. Then Wellman moved on to Warner Bros. and directed James Cagney in his star-making role in The Public Enemy (1931) and made a minor masterpiece, Safe in Hell, a precursor to film noir and a great movie in which, given a script with two African-American characters speaking in Hollywood’s stupid excuse for “Negro dialect,” he overruled the writers and told the actors, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to speak their lines in normal English. I was thinking of this because “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself, criticized The Boob for its stereotypical Black character, “Hamm,” a boy played by an actor unidentified on imdb.com – though actually the Black boy is smarter than just about any of the white people in the movie and his dog, “Benzene,” is smarter than any of the humans!

The writing credits on The Boob are typically convoluted for a late silent: George Scarborough and Annette Westbay get credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited!); Kenneth B. Clarke for “scenario” and Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell for writing the intertitles. The Boob lists four principal cast members: Gertrude Olmstead, George K. Arthur, Joan Crawford and Charles Murray, in that order – but the two men get a lot more screen time than the two women. Plot-wise it’s the old chestnut about the country hayseed, Peter Good (George K. Arthur), whose girlfriend Amy (Gertrude Olmstead) has dumped him for a city slicker, Harry Benson (Antonio D’Algy – and given the overall creepiness of his character, it’s entirely appropriate that he be played by an actor named after a slimy underwater plant), who turns out to be a bootlegger. Benson is there to supply a new roadhouse called “The Booklovers’ Club” which, in one of the few genuinely witty touches in the script, dispenses alcoholic potables out of fake books with titles tweaked to reflect their real contents. Benson takes Amy to “The Booklovers’ Club” and promises to marry her the next day, much to the discomfiture of his gang, who understandably don’t want a woman – especially an innocent country girl who at best will be a fifth wheel on their operation and at worst might blow the whistle on them – tagging along. In case you’re wondering where the young Joan Crawford fits in (The Boob was her 11th movie and it’s pretty obvious that MGM didn’t yet know what to do with her; she’d had bit roles in great movies like Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and the 1926 Ben-Hur and she’d just come back from a loanout to First National for Harry Langdon’s first starring feature, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp), she plays a Prohibition enforcement agent named Jane who’s part of a crew of feds staking out The Booklovers’ Club and trying to bust Benson and his gang.

Though Charles Murray, as “Cactus Jim,” is billed fourth, he actually gets more screen time than any of the principals; he’s shown repeatedly breaking the glass flask containing his bootleg booze (one wonders why it never occurred to him to buy one of the metal flasks my husband Charles and I have seen in many other movies set during Prohibition and often made while it was still in effect), and as I once said about rustic comedian Bob Burns’s role in the 1937 Jack Benny vehicle Artists and Models, it’s unclear just why the people at the studio thought a film that was already a comedy (at least, as Dwight MacDonald put it, in thought and intent) needed a comic-relief character, and such a stupid, oppressive and unfunny one at that. The low point in Murray’s performance comes when the bootleggers dump a cache of illegal liquor to avoid getting caught with it, and Murray thinks he’s in hog heaven and picks up as much of the booze as he can grab. He ends up looking like a porcupine with bottlenecks sticking out of him at every conceivable hiding place, and ultimately he drinks his whole stash in one night, with predictable results. (The Black kid and the dog come upon him and try as best they can to sober him up.) The gimmick is that Peter Good thinks he can win Amy back by becoming a free-lance detective and busting Harry Benson’s bootlegging ring, and to ready him for this task Cactus Jim outfits him in a preposterous outfit of pseudo-Western dude-ranch decorations that, when Amy sees him, she actually compares to Tom Mix’s costumes.

The Boob actually has two quite good special-effects sequences, a movie-within-the-movie illustrating Cactus Jim’s boasts of his prowess as an Indian fighter and a remarkable dream in which Peter is driving Benson’s white car and it takes off and flies, with various other characters falling out of it as it travels through the skies. It ends about the way you’d expect it to, with Peter busting the bootleggers and earning a $2,000 reward and the promise of a federal enforcement job whenever he wants it, and while I was hoping he’d take the job and end up with Joan Crawford at the end, he returns to Amy and his dull hayseed existence after the other members of Benson’s gang inform him, to absolutely no one’s surprise, that Benson can’t marry Amy because he’s already married. It was ironic that Crawford made this movie right after working with Harry Langdon because, with my habit of mentally recasting classic-era movies with other actors who were around at the time, I’d been thinking of Langdon as the right actor to play Peter. With Langdon’s peculiar talent of bringing his baby-ish character and his adult reality into comedically effective contrasts, he could have made Peter sympathetic and even lovable in ways that totally eluded George K. Arthur.