Politics

A couple of weeks back, when the Thursday Movie Picks theme was "Female Buddy Movies", one of the movies I selected was Reducing, starring Marie Dressler and Polly Moran. The two actresses were paired together in a handful of movies, and one that TCM recently aired is Politics. Since it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, I recently sat down to watch it and do a post here.

Dressler plays Hattie Burns, a widow with an adult daughter Myrtle (Karen Morley) who is renting half her house out to her friend Ivy Higgins (Polly Moran) and Ivy's husband Peter (Roscoe Ates). Ivy in ivolved in the political campaign of mayor Tom Collins (Tom McGuire), who is running for reelection.

This being a small-to-medium sized town in the early 1930s, Prohibition is an issue, specifically the underworld that runs the bootlegging and supplies the speakeasies, a business run by Jim Curango (John Miljan). Hattie doesn't realize that Myrtle is in love with Benny Emerson (William Bakewell), who has screwed up just enough in life to have gotten himself involved with the Curango gang at a very low level.

There's a shooting at one of the speakeasies in which Benny is shot and wounded and a young woman is shot to death, with Benny being the chief suspect. So he goes to Myrtle seeking help. She, not knowing what's about to happen, decides to hide Benny in Mom's normally locked attic.

As I said, there's a mayoral campaign going on, and after the shooting, Hattie asks the mayor what he's going to do to stop it. In fact, the mayor has the tacit support of Curango, so he's not going to do anything, so when Hattie figures that out, she gets outraged, and Ivy decides to nominate Hattie for mayor on the spot, ballot access apparently not being a big issue in those days.

Hattie's campaign isn't going so well, and all the husbands are kind of disrespectful to Hattie's campaign, thinking politics should be left to the professionals (read: men). So Hattie gets the idea that all the wives should go on strike until the men agree to vote for Hattie! This leads to the predictable but gentle comedy of the men not being able to run their own homes, apparently none of them ever having been a bachelor in his younger days or having had to learn how to do basic things like cooking.

Just as Hattie's campaign looks set to succeed, Peter asks for his trunk since Ivy isn't going to share her bed with him and he's going to go to a hotel or a friend's house or something. Of course, this leads to Peter finding fugitive Benny in the attic, and the natural suspicion that Hattie might be involved which would of course be hypocrisy.

Politics is a fairly gentle comedy/light drama, which in many ways was fresh and new back in 1931 when it was released because a lot of this stuff hadn't really been done before. Watching now, some of it is definitely going to look dated, especially Ivy's behavior at the political rallies.

But as a movie, Politics works, mostly because of the performance of Dressler, who like George Arliss made even little trifles work on the sheer strength of her charisma. John Miljan also does well with his role, turning Curango into a slick villain whose appearance belies what he's up to, like a younger version of a George Macready in Gilda.

Anybody who wants a look back at a simpler time should enjoy Politics.