I want to talk you into seeing this. It is an amazing artifact of the evolution of cinema.
Movies have gone through at least two periods where the equilibrium was punctuated. One was early in the game where various possibilities for the basic form shot it out. Out of that came the notion that movies would be the daughter of stage plays with grander sweep.
Then the development of talkies threw everything into the blender again and there was a grand, grand competition of notions, resulting more or less in what we have today. This one film is the best illustration of the battleground.
You may not be able to find it, so I'll have to describe it a bit.
It is a murder mystery. In fact we see the murder at the very beginning, then flash back 48 hours and see all the various suspects, and there are many. Extremely complicated motives for the murder are developed among this crowd. This thread ends with the detective and all the suspects in one room. He starts the standard process of going around the room and telling each suspect how and why they did the deed. And then this is cut short, abruptly. It is such an apt thing, too because each of the pieces of this movie step on the others, a conflict within.
It is also a "show within a show" of the Judy and Mickey variety. The setup is that this ocean liner is experimenting with having a huge stage show. Some of the people we follow are performers in the show. Benny is the producer of the show, which incidentally has a radio twist. One of the variants of the movie show-within was a movie-radio show. (The very best example of this is "Phantom Empire of the next year.)
So here you have Benny literally broadcasting a radio show from the ship. He tells us at the beginning of the broadcast that it will be a radio version of "Grand Hotel." And then the ship's cast acts out a parody, a rather funny one. But it won't be lost on the movie audience that it has been folded into the ship's audience -- that's because the whole movie is roughly cast against the model of "Grand Hotel."
"Grand Hotel" in a way was its own solution to many competing stories and also many different forms of cinema duking it out. Here that is both expanded and referenced: many of the characters are conning the suckers. A bracelet is stolen. One con man cons another. Women have bad affairs.
And then there's the regular "show within," the stage show. A good quarter of the movie is us watching production numbers. One of these is a huge Busby Berkeley-inspired bit with very, very impressive overhead "blossom" effects. The best I've seen. This particular number is strange. It features a painter in devil costume who uses his brush as a magic wand (and sometimes sends the dancers through a painting) to change costumes, or sets. Or to make some of them disappear.
What's odd about this is that the effects require camera trickery, so we switch back and forth from being a movie audience and the ship's audience. the stage literally shifts back and forth.
Wait! That's not all. Woven through the whole thing is a romantic comedy, what would be seen as comedic in those days in this context. Our handsome rogue-thief turns good as he falls in love with the star of the show. She herself is spoiled goods, the ex-moll of the gangster/conster/blackmailer who is murdered.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
Movies have gone through at least two periods where the equilibrium was punctuated. One was early in the game where various possibilities for the basic form shot it out. Out of that came the notion that movies would be the daughter of stage plays with grander sweep.
Then the development of talkies threw everything into the blender again and there was a grand, grand competition of notions, resulting more or less in what we have today. This one film is the best illustration of the battleground.
You may not be able to find it, so I'll have to describe it a bit.
It is a murder mystery. In fact we see the murder at the very beginning, then flash back 48 hours and see all the various suspects, and there are many. Extremely complicated motives for the murder are developed among this crowd. This thread ends with the detective and all the suspects in one room. He starts the standard process of going around the room and telling each suspect how and why they did the deed. And then this is cut short, abruptly. It is such an apt thing, too because each of the pieces of this movie step on the others, a conflict within.
It is also a "show within a show" of the Judy and Mickey variety. The setup is that this ocean liner is experimenting with having a huge stage show. Some of the people we follow are performers in the show. Benny is the producer of the show, which incidentally has a radio twist. One of the variants of the movie show-within was a movie-radio show. (The very best example of this is "Phantom Empire of the next year.)
So here you have Benny literally broadcasting a radio show from the ship. He tells us at the beginning of the broadcast that it will be a radio version of "Grand Hotel." And then the ship's cast acts out a parody, a rather funny one. But it won't be lost on the movie audience that it has been folded into the ship's audience -- that's because the whole movie is roughly cast against the model of "Grand Hotel."
"Grand Hotel" in a way was its own solution to many competing stories and also many different forms of cinema duking it out. Here that is both expanded and referenced: many of the characters are conning the suckers. A bracelet is stolen. One con man cons another. Women have bad affairs.
And then there's the regular "show within," the stage show. A good quarter of the movie is us watching production numbers. One of these is a huge Busby Berkeley-inspired bit with very, very impressive overhead "blossom" effects. The best I've seen. This particular number is strange. It features a painter in devil costume who uses his brush as a magic wand (and sometimes sends the dancers through a painting) to change costumes, or sets. Or to make some of them disappear.
What's odd about this is that the effects require camera trickery, so we switch back and forth from being a movie audience and the ship's audience. the stage literally shifts back and forth.
Wait! That's not all. Woven through the whole thing is a romantic comedy, what would be seen as comedic in those days in this context. Our handsome rogue-thief turns good as he falls in love with the star of the show. She herself is spoiled goods, the ex-moll of the gangster/conster/blackmailer who is murdered.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.