Jay Carr, as J. Pierpont Ginsburg, the movie mogul, is about to undertake his first talking picture. His butler asks him about the screenwriter. "Oh, da SCREENwriter! He's a BRILLIANT writer! Every week he writes for more money!" When he inquires after an actress who missed her call, he's told that she's still sleeping even though it's afternoon. But don't forget, she's a star. "A STAR -- maybe dat's why she only comes out at night."
If you don't find this funny, this may not be your kind of movie. I enjoyed some of it. Gentle parodies of ethnic folkways, like speech, shouldn't be confined within the borders of the ethnic group being parodied; they should be shared with the world, if they're any good. Why is it so difficult to come by a showing of "Abie's Irish Rose"? And whatever happened to "Amos and Andy"? Hey? Well, I'm glad I've got that off my chest. I feel better now. The Xanax helps.
But all seriousness aside, if you don't find those gags amusing, you might not want to watch this film because there are more of them, a lot more, and some are better than others. A gay character is the male lead, and Ginsburg asks, "Are you da leading man or da leading lady? Remember, dis ain't no fairy tale." Withal, this is a clumsily made story along the lines of "Singin' in the Rain" but not nearly so funny or entertaining. Carr is the central figure and it's tempting to think that he came to Hollywood directly from vaudeville because his Yiddish accent sounds like it, rather like Chico Marx's Italian accent. But Carr is too slow to have been in vaudeville where so much depended on pace. He pauses too long between utterances. And he projects an air of fatuous self satisfaction that doesn't quite fit the part. The technology of the time was primitive but that can't account for the poor acting on the part of Carr and just about everyone else in the cast.
On the plus side, everyone tries hard, and from what we can see of the legs of the girls in a chorus line that anticipates Busby Berkely's terpsichorean kaleidoscopes, they have pretty legs.
If you don't find this funny, this may not be your kind of movie. I enjoyed some of it. Gentle parodies of ethnic folkways, like speech, shouldn't be confined within the borders of the ethnic group being parodied; they should be shared with the world, if they're any good. Why is it so difficult to come by a showing of "Abie's Irish Rose"? And whatever happened to "Amos and Andy"? Hey? Well, I'm glad I've got that off my chest. I feel better now. The Xanax helps.
But all seriousness aside, if you don't find those gags amusing, you might not want to watch this film because there are more of them, a lot more, and some are better than others. A gay character is the male lead, and Ginsburg asks, "Are you da leading man or da leading lady? Remember, dis ain't no fairy tale." Withal, this is a clumsily made story along the lines of "Singin' in the Rain" but not nearly so funny or entertaining. Carr is the central figure and it's tempting to think that he came to Hollywood directly from vaudeville because his Yiddish accent sounds like it, rather like Chico Marx's Italian accent. But Carr is too slow to have been in vaudeville where so much depended on pace. He pauses too long between utterances. And he projects an air of fatuous self satisfaction that doesn't quite fit the part. The technology of the time was primitive but that can't account for the poor acting on the part of Carr and just about everyone else in the cast.
On the plus side, everyone tries hard, and from what we can see of the legs of the girls in a chorus line that anticipates Busby Berkely's terpsichorean kaleidoscopes, they have pretty legs.