Word: plotting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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People who like their Laurel and Hardy in small doses will find this one a little too long-winded. Five reels of even the best slapstick is more than enough. The dialogue and plot are inconsequential, and when the clowning slows up there is nothing left to the picture...
...plot enters in the person of a beauteous native girl (Maria Alba) who has run away from marriage on a nearby island. She likes Fairbanks, gets into bed with him. He extricates himself, calls her "cute." Meanwhile Fairbanks' returning friends stop at the nearby island that Maria Alba has left, hire the natives to fake a capture and the beginning of a stake-burning, to be interrupted by the friends. The natives come, find the escaped girl, carry out the stake-burning in earnest. But as Fairbanks' homemade shorts get hot, the monkey turns on the radio, the savages flee...
...engaged in a deadly combat with an illicit attraction for a third corner,--all within the predominantly maternal bosom of la Dietrich. The theme is not new, but, with such a supporting cast, might have become convincing. After the first half hour, however, the audience loses interest in the plot. There is not too much disappointment; after all it has played money to see Dietrich, and there she is, beautiful as ever, even without benefit of direction. Such an attitude may swell box office receipts, but it does not make for good art. Clearcut motivation is a prime essential...
Smiling Faces has an elaborately trite plot about a film actress (Dorothy Stone) who marries her fiance's best friend (Roy Royston) to get in the social register so that she can wed the man she loves (Charles Collins) without costing him his, inheritance. It has one good tune ("Stumbled Over You") and another with a line beginning "And soon a baby face. . . ." Like most Fred Stone shows it has few sexy jokes and those it has deal exclusively with the intermediate sex. Sample: "Since this is A Midsummer Night's Dream, you don't mind...
...outspoken. It is Grand Hotel in an obstetrical ward?the principal members of its cast are seven expectant mothers, one of them equipped with twins. The old theme of a father waiting for his child to be born is only the springboard episode for Life Begins. Before the main plot develops, the audience has heard the moans of the "labor room," seen a pregnant woman of the world (Glenda Farrell) drink whiskey from a hot water bottle, and sympathized with an unmarried mother when she says that soldiers who die on the field of battle and mothers...