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How can I concentrate?
Who knew that the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933) was not actually the weirdest of the brief crop of Ruritanian political comedies that flourished for some reason in pre-Code Hollywood?
Seriously, almost nothing I say about Million Dollar Legs (1932) is going to help. It was effectively commissioned by Paramount as a tie-in with the 1932 Summer Olympics, but the not yet Academy Award-winning brothers Herman J. and Joseph L. Mankiewicz forewent the expected sports clichés and rose past the occasion with a genially relentless gallimaufry of gags suggesting that one or more writers consumed the complete works of Tristan Tzara plus chaser and then spent the weekend with a typewriter at the Y; the resulting plot is attenuated to the point of vestigiality, but if the characters don't mind it, why should you? Ruritania this time around is the Balkan-ish backwater of Klopstokia ("Chief Exports . . . Goats and Nuts. Chief Imports . . . Goats and Nuts. Chief Inhabitants . . . Goats and Nuts") where all the men are named George, all the women are named Angela, and all the children, if the younger brother of the heroine is any guide, are Western-obsessed little hellions prone to shooting strangers in the ass. Everyone drinks a lot of goat's milk. With preposterous topicality, Klopstokian politics are the natural endpoint of the strongman craze then sweeping the globe: their health-nut President (W.C. Fields, delightfully against type) got his office by arm-wrestling for it and now faces a perpetual challenge in kind from his ambitious Secretary of the Treasury (Hugh Herbert, schemingly against type) and the rest of his treacherous cabinet (Billy Gilbert, Irving Bacon et alii veterans of Keystone) who recite their oaths of allegiance with their fingers crossed behind their backs. Meanwhile the streets are full of black-clad spies, the economy's in the red for $8 million, it's a bit of a crisis, really. Enter American Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie, the original world's oldest freshman), a bright-eyed brush salesman whose eccentric boss has always dreamed of endowing a record-breaking Olympic team. If Klopstokian strength and orneriness can clean up in Los Angeles, the solvency problem is, er, solved—so long as the cabinet, overrunning the welfare of their country in their zeal to discredit the President, don't blow the works with their nefarious counterplot. Got it? All right, now forget it. Like I said, the characters do.
The glory of this movie is how cheerfully it strings together as many jokes of whatever register of comedy it can get to stick to the wall, like the romance between Tweeny and his particular Angela (Susan Fleming, future bride of Harpo Marx and straight-faced zany in her own right). They fall in love at first sight with brisk and literal absurdity, exchanging non sequiturs like vows: "What are you selling?"–"Yes."–"I love you, too." Half a dozen dewy-eyed repetitions of the phrase later, Angela offers that she knows "another way of saying that." Tweeny blinks: "In public?" Thereafter a running joke pertains to his successful performance of the Klopstokian national love song, both because his mastery of its tongue-twister lyrics "in the old Klopstokian language that we used to speak before we learned English" will constitute proof of love and because it shares a tune with the title theme of Paramount's One Hour with You (1932), last rendered in these parts by Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald; as a bonus, he keeps getting interrupted and having to start over. I feel my life has been materially improved by hearing Oakie soulfully croon, repeatedly, "Woof bloogle gik, mow gik bloogle woof." I have definitely benefited from seeing Fields juggle Indian clubs, punch out windows instead of opening them, and bench-press his long-suffering major-domo (Andy Clyde, spry). The clean-living embodiment of the cut direct, the President announces his entrance into a cabinet meeting with the fanfare of his own one-man band and does fantastic vaudeville comedy with his top hat, which he insists on retaining even through his Olympic event, but he's on the right side of a Depression-era audience, fretting over his country's debts ("We've got the zeroes. What's bothering me is the eight") and denouncing his government's indifference ("The country's starving and you with gold in your teeth!"). The script calls pre-Code attention to his habit of addressing Tweeny as "Sweetheart" and then he keeps on unembarrassedly doing it. I'm not sure we ever find out who cross-eyed Ben Turpin is actually spying for, or why a hydraulic palm tree marks the spot of the villains' hideout, but I don't care about that any more than I care why a nightmare fuel goat costume is the presidential courier's incognito of choice. There's a lopsided fairy-tale quality to the accumulation of characters—between the wiry little major-domo who can outrun speedboats, the goatskin-clad high jumper who bounces effortlessly between decks of a steamship, and the blusterous ruler who throws thousand-pound weights around like pillows when he loses his temper, not to mention marriage with the President's daughter awaiting our hero if he leads Klopstokia to corporate-sponsored glory and a broken neck if he fails, the story feels at times like The Fool of the World and His Flying Olympic Team. The government-by-wrestling also puts me in mind a little of Gilbert and Sullivan.
What Million Dollar Legs really makes me think of, however, is Mel Brooks. The cabinet's secret weapon is the film's, too: Lyda Roberti as "Mata Machree—The Woman No Man Can Resist." (It says so on her door, right above "Not Responsible for Men Left More Than Thirty Days.") Apparently conceived as a goof on Greta Garbo's Mata Hari (1931), the character registers now as a primal Lili von Shtupp, a super-seductress-for-hire with a cloud of Dietrich-platinum hair and an outrageously exotic accent that undoubtedly owes something to the actress' background as part of a Russian-Polish circus family fetched up in Shanghai but even more to her gifts as a comedienne; her fractured syntax ("Isn't somebody been going to say something?") is pure Tom Lehrer Lobachevsky. Introduced with her own diegetic snake-charmer theme, a personal spotlight operator, and a solemn butler who suddenly whips out a megaphone and barks, "Line up, suckers!" she elevates the movie from silliness to delirium with the simultaneously stupid and sizzling "It's Terrific (When I Get Hot)," lyrics contributed off the record by Lorenz Hart. "It's terrific when I get mean / I'm just a woman made of gelatin / I have a torso like a tambourine / Oy oy oy, when I get hot!" Her hips are basically doing their own specialty number throughout. The cabinet secretaries are stupefied; when she leans pensively on the base of Rodin's Thinker, he gives up philosophy. At last she permits the Secretary of the Treasury to kiss her hand; his face assumes a beatific expression as all the buttons fly off his waistcoat. Brooks once claimed that his movies rose below vulgarity and I don't know how better to describe the final showdown, which after all the macho measuring between the President and his chief rival turns Olympic weightlifting into a ludicrously extended literalization of getting it up. Though her efforts with the athletes of Klopstokia go for naught mostly thanks to Angela, who despite her delicate deadpan possesses her fair share of the national physique—and temper—Mata Machree sticks around the Games to support the Secretary of the Treasury in his independent bid to beat the President, "inspiring" him to raise a weight far above his class with the kind of dance you usually have to pay the carnival talker an extra dime to see. It's pretty sinuous stuff, but for the next round she calls in her musicians. With the final shimmy, the Secretary heaves the weight to regulation height and then topples backward onto the turf. "I hope he doesn't lift the other one," he pants, lying half under the equally collapsed Mata Machree. "I've done about all I can do." Breathing just as heavily, the vamp agrees, "Me too. I been done all I can do—in public." I wish she'd had a long career instead of a short life.
If you do not find this movie as funny as I do, at least it doesn't last longer than 59 minutes; with that runtime it may have been cut down, but honestly, with this plot how could you tell? It is as pure a piece of nonsense as I have seen from its era and if it is probably too narrative for Dada, it's too exploded for anything else. In addition to the sequences mentioned above, I am especially fond of the payoff of the Los Angeles Special as well as the line "Sorry, Madame is only resisted from two to four in the afternoon." I saw the film at the microcinema of the Somerville Theatre courtesy of Channel Zero, which screened The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) to follow and at least one other Fields short which I did not see because![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch and I had to catch one of the ever more elusive buses of the MBTA; the title, for the record, makes the most sense referring to the sprinting major-domo, not either of the female leads. The opening credits play over a little cartoon of the Klopstokian national goat causing adorable havoc. I really have to track down Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (1933) now. This anarchy brought to you by my competitive backers at Patreon.
Seriously, almost nothing I say about Million Dollar Legs (1932) is going to help. It was effectively commissioned by Paramount as a tie-in with the 1932 Summer Olympics, but the not yet Academy Award-winning brothers Herman J. and Joseph L. Mankiewicz forewent the expected sports clichés and rose past the occasion with a genially relentless gallimaufry of gags suggesting that one or more writers consumed the complete works of Tristan Tzara plus chaser and then spent the weekend with a typewriter at the Y; the resulting plot is attenuated to the point of vestigiality, but if the characters don't mind it, why should you? Ruritania this time around is the Balkan-ish backwater of Klopstokia ("Chief Exports . . . Goats and Nuts. Chief Imports . . . Goats and Nuts. Chief Inhabitants . . . Goats and Nuts") where all the men are named George, all the women are named Angela, and all the children, if the younger brother of the heroine is any guide, are Western-obsessed little hellions prone to shooting strangers in the ass. Everyone drinks a lot of goat's milk. With preposterous topicality, Klopstokian politics are the natural endpoint of the strongman craze then sweeping the globe: their health-nut President (W.C. Fields, delightfully against type) got his office by arm-wrestling for it and now faces a perpetual challenge in kind from his ambitious Secretary of the Treasury (Hugh Herbert, schemingly against type) and the rest of his treacherous cabinet (Billy Gilbert, Irving Bacon et alii veterans of Keystone) who recite their oaths of allegiance with their fingers crossed behind their backs. Meanwhile the streets are full of black-clad spies, the economy's in the red for $8 million, it's a bit of a crisis, really. Enter American Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie, the original world's oldest freshman), a bright-eyed brush salesman whose eccentric boss has always dreamed of endowing a record-breaking Olympic team. If Klopstokian strength and orneriness can clean up in Los Angeles, the solvency problem is, er, solved—so long as the cabinet, overrunning the welfare of their country in their zeal to discredit the President, don't blow the works with their nefarious counterplot. Got it? All right, now forget it. Like I said, the characters do.
The glory of this movie is how cheerfully it strings together as many jokes of whatever register of comedy it can get to stick to the wall, like the romance between Tweeny and his particular Angela (Susan Fleming, future bride of Harpo Marx and straight-faced zany in her own right). They fall in love at first sight with brisk and literal absurdity, exchanging non sequiturs like vows: "What are you selling?"–"Yes."–"I love you, too." Half a dozen dewy-eyed repetitions of the phrase later, Angela offers that she knows "another way of saying that." Tweeny blinks: "In public?" Thereafter a running joke pertains to his successful performance of the Klopstokian national love song, both because his mastery of its tongue-twister lyrics "in the old Klopstokian language that we used to speak before we learned English" will constitute proof of love and because it shares a tune with the title theme of Paramount's One Hour with You (1932), last rendered in these parts by Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald; as a bonus, he keeps getting interrupted and having to start over. I feel my life has been materially improved by hearing Oakie soulfully croon, repeatedly, "Woof bloogle gik, mow gik bloogle woof." I have definitely benefited from seeing Fields juggle Indian clubs, punch out windows instead of opening them, and bench-press his long-suffering major-domo (Andy Clyde, spry). The clean-living embodiment of the cut direct, the President announces his entrance into a cabinet meeting with the fanfare of his own one-man band and does fantastic vaudeville comedy with his top hat, which he insists on retaining even through his Olympic event, but he's on the right side of a Depression-era audience, fretting over his country's debts ("We've got the zeroes. What's bothering me is the eight") and denouncing his government's indifference ("The country's starving and you with gold in your teeth!"). The script calls pre-Code attention to his habit of addressing Tweeny as "Sweetheart" and then he keeps on unembarrassedly doing it. I'm not sure we ever find out who cross-eyed Ben Turpin is actually spying for, or why a hydraulic palm tree marks the spot of the villains' hideout, but I don't care about that any more than I care why a nightmare fuel goat costume is the presidential courier's incognito of choice. There's a lopsided fairy-tale quality to the accumulation of characters—between the wiry little major-domo who can outrun speedboats, the goatskin-clad high jumper who bounces effortlessly between decks of a steamship, and the blusterous ruler who throws thousand-pound weights around like pillows when he loses his temper, not to mention marriage with the President's daughter awaiting our hero if he leads Klopstokia to corporate-sponsored glory and a broken neck if he fails, the story feels at times like The Fool of the World and His Flying Olympic Team. The government-by-wrestling also puts me in mind a little of Gilbert and Sullivan.
What Million Dollar Legs really makes me think of, however, is Mel Brooks. The cabinet's secret weapon is the film's, too: Lyda Roberti as "Mata Machree—The Woman No Man Can Resist." (It says so on her door, right above "Not Responsible for Men Left More Than Thirty Days.") Apparently conceived as a goof on Greta Garbo's Mata Hari (1931), the character registers now as a primal Lili von Shtupp, a super-seductress-for-hire with a cloud of Dietrich-platinum hair and an outrageously exotic accent that undoubtedly owes something to the actress' background as part of a Russian-Polish circus family fetched up in Shanghai but even more to her gifts as a comedienne; her fractured syntax ("Isn't somebody been going to say something?") is pure Tom Lehrer Lobachevsky. Introduced with her own diegetic snake-charmer theme, a personal spotlight operator, and a solemn butler who suddenly whips out a megaphone and barks, "Line up, suckers!" she elevates the movie from silliness to delirium with the simultaneously stupid and sizzling "It's Terrific (When I Get Hot)," lyrics contributed off the record by Lorenz Hart. "It's terrific when I get mean / I'm just a woman made of gelatin / I have a torso like a tambourine / Oy oy oy, when I get hot!" Her hips are basically doing their own specialty number throughout. The cabinet secretaries are stupefied; when she leans pensively on the base of Rodin's Thinker, he gives up philosophy. At last she permits the Secretary of the Treasury to kiss her hand; his face assumes a beatific expression as all the buttons fly off his waistcoat. Brooks once claimed that his movies rose below vulgarity and I don't know how better to describe the final showdown, which after all the macho measuring between the President and his chief rival turns Olympic weightlifting into a ludicrously extended literalization of getting it up. Though her efforts with the athletes of Klopstokia go for naught mostly thanks to Angela, who despite her delicate deadpan possesses her fair share of the national physique—and temper—Mata Machree sticks around the Games to support the Secretary of the Treasury in his independent bid to beat the President, "inspiring" him to raise a weight far above his class with the kind of dance you usually have to pay the carnival talker an extra dime to see. It's pretty sinuous stuff, but for the next round she calls in her musicians. With the final shimmy, the Secretary heaves the weight to regulation height and then topples backward onto the turf. "I hope he doesn't lift the other one," he pants, lying half under the equally collapsed Mata Machree. "I've done about all I can do." Breathing just as heavily, the vamp agrees, "Me too. I been done all I can do—in public." I wish she'd had a long career instead of a short life.
If you do not find this movie as funny as I do, at least it doesn't last longer than 59 minutes; with that runtime it may have been cut down, but honestly, with this plot how could you tell? It is as pure a piece of nonsense as I have seen from its era and if it is probably too narrative for Dada, it's too exploded for anything else. In addition to the sequences mentioned above, I am especially fond of the payoff of the Los Angeles Special as well as the line "Sorry, Madame is only resisted from two to four in the afternoon." I saw the film at the microcinema of the Somerville Theatre courtesy of Channel Zero, which screened The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933) to follow and at least one other Fields short which I did not see because
spatch and I had to catch one of the ever more elusive buses of the MBTA; the title, for the record, makes the most sense referring to the sprinting major-domo, not either of the female leads. The opening credits play over a little cartoon of the Klopstokian national goat causing adorable havoc. I really have to track down Wheeler and Woolsey's Diplomaniacs (1933) now. This anarchy brought to you by my competitive backers at Patreon.
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It exists on legitimate DVD (see comments above) and I wish you a swift and successful quest! My life as a recommender of movies would be so much easier with video stores.