Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Monday, June 29, 2009

HOLLYWOOD CAVALCADE (1939)

20th/FOX honcho Darryl Zanuck invested more than the usual effort on this luxe TechniColor production about some fictional Hollywood pioneers. The old studio buildings are lovingly brought to life; a scene from Warners' Talkie breakthru, THE JAZZ SINGER/’27, is recreated with uncanny accuracy; a faux Mack Sennett one-reel comedy successfully mimics the old style, and even gets a few laughs. Well, why not? Zanuck got his start @ Warners in the silent days and worked his way thru the Talkie revolution*; he hired the 1939 Al Jolson to recreate the Al Jolson of 1927; and that film-within-a-film comedy short was directed not by the film’s megger Irving Cummings, but by silent-comedy short specialist Mal St. Clair. What Zanuck didn’t do was take the trouble to work up a framing story that wasn’t a hackneyed blob of soft-soap & hooey. Don Ameche makes a most unconvincing artistic film director and Alice Faye, without a song to sing, is more good sport than slapstick comedienne. Thankfully, the first half of the film features Buster Keaton in his best outing after years of Hollywood purgatory. A lot of misinformation on the silent era (and on Keaton) can be traced to this film, but it certainly helped the great man gain career traction & visibility. And check the outtakes on this DVD to see Buster break out in a big toothy grin when a stunt goes awry.

*Hollywood lore says that Zanuck was the man who fired Rin-Tin-Tin when The Talkies began because, ' . . . as you know, the dog doesn't talk.'

READ ALL ABOUT IT: Scott Eyman's THE SPEED OF SOUND: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution gets just about everything right that so many film histories get wrong. (Though, oddly, it skips over Alice Guy-Blache's early sound shorts made in France two decades before 'The Talkies.')

No comments: