POLITICS (1931)

Second and best of the three jerry-rigged comic/dramatic vehicles built for the great Marie Dressler and the not-so-great Polly Moran.  (REDUCING/’31 and PROSPERITY/’32 the other two.)  Best because it’s the most serious; Dressler’s better comic instincts fed off of serious, even tragic issues.  It’s a LYSISTRATA variation, here with small town ladies withholding all wifely services until reform candidate Dressler is voted in as Mayor.  Specifically, to close the illegal Speak Easy/private liquor club where a gangland shooting has just killed a local girl who was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Dressler daughter Karen Morley was there too, secretly meeting her fiancé who was ‘winged’ in the incident and is now hiding in the Dressler attic.  Yikes!  (Dressler a widow who rents rooms to Moran and stuttering husband Roscoe Ates.)  If word got out, Dressler’s run as Clean-Up candidate would be fatally compromised.  Exactly what local booze lord John Miljan is hoping for.*  Very uneven stuff under Charles Reisner’s hit-or-miss direction*, plus a BlackFace gag from a soot-filled chimney to cringe your way past.  But it hardly matters when Dressler is on form, as she very much is here.  What she does is so far removed from what we now consider acting, it can take a bit to find your way to her.  Pulling faces, physically maulng her own flesh (there’s a lot of it!), yet impossible to put up resistance.  She’ll eventually find your empathetic weak spot and pounce.  Along the way, adding an extra comic ‘take.’  (Usually some grotesque second or third look.  Topped by two or three scenes of utter seriousness, where she’ll be grounded & still as a pedestal (not a statue, a pedestal).  Watch her in discussion with her daughter once the romance comes out in the open.  At times, you wonder: ‘What the hell is she doing . . . and who else could possibly get away with it?’  With anyone else, it’d be just an actor’s trick.  Except with Dressler, it’s no trick at all, but a slice of the truth . . . served not with a smile, but as an upside-down frown.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  The other two Dressler/Moran pics: REDUCING/’31; PROSPERITY/’32.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2024/06/reducing-1931.html    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/09/prosperity-1932.html   

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  The political rumor-mongering Miljan plans against Dressler hardly different than the underhanded campaigning M-G-M production head Irving Thalberg used for real to stop Upton Sinclair & the EPIC Party (End Poverty In California) during the 1934 California Gubernatorial race.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *If you ever needed hard evidence that Buster Keaton was fully responsible for directing his silent classics regardless of what the billing says, note this film’s Charles Reisner is ‘listed’ as co-director with Keaton on STEAMBOAT BILL, JR./’28.