STAND-IN (1937)

Inexplicably overlooked behind-the-scenes-of-MovieLand satire gets more right about the biz than most serious Hollywood backstagers.  (THE LAST TYCOON, anyone?)  Independently made by Walter Wanger, which may have helped, director Tay Garnett brings bona fides to the subject going back to his silent comedy beginnings, offering a nutty/anything goes verisimilitude to the usual studio denizen clichés: the talent-free diva (Maria Shelton), bribable gate guards, foreign ‘genius’ director Alan Mowbray, fatuous publicity man Jack Carson, C Henry Gordon’s studio flipping market manipulator, talented but tippling producer Humphrey Bogart, former child-star reduced to stand-in status Joan Blondell, and a studioful of recalcitrant union toughs,  Stepping into this mix is Wall Street bean counter supreme Leslie Howard, a film naïf determined to stop a liquidation sale and personally turn the studio around.  Remarkably, the story pretty much hangs together, the gags neither pushed nor stupid, with a touch of charm & well-informed affection for the industry showing thru the surface.  The Capracorn finale is unfortunate, but not fatal (blame magazine serial author Clarence Budington Kelland of MR. DEEDS GOES TO TOWN/’36; easy to see the same blueprint in use here), and only hurts because the ‘right’ finish is staring you in the face: Howard loses the studio, but has fallen in love . . . with moviemaking, and starts a new company with Bogart & Blondell as first hires.  (Yikes!  Development notes!!)

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  Leslie Howard’s rep not what it once was.  And largely because of roles he really didn’t want to play: his middle-aged Romeo of 1936; GWTW's Ashley Wilkes.  (He took the latter so he could produce INTERMEZZO/’39.)  But just look at the great three-in-a-row comedies that see STAND-IN book-ended by IT’S LOVE I’M AFTER/’37 (with Bette Davis they’re a bickering acting couple) and his fine Henry Higgins against Wendy Hiller’s legendary Eliza Doolittle in PYGMALION/’38.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/11/its-love-im-after-1937.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2016/09/pygmalion-1938.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  In the film, ‘producer’ Bogart always has his Scottish terrier in his arms or by his side.  A specific reference?  Perhaps to this film’s producer Walter Wanger?