Caesar's Wife

Somerset Maugham was an exceedingly prolific writer. Or at least it seems that way; maybe it's more that his works are the sort of things that were considered suitable for turning into movies. Some of the famous ones include The Letter and The Razor's Edge, but there's a ton more out there. A movie that I didn't realize was based on a Maugham play until I sat down to watch it is Another Dawn.

Errol Flynn is the star here, playing Denny Roark. He's a pilot with the British military in one of their possessions in Arabia, serving under Col. Wister (Ian Hunter). For some reason, Denny's sister Grace (Frieda Inescort) also lives in the area, which I'd have thought unlikely. In any case, as Denny returns from a mission having survived by the sking of his teeth, he gets some good news from Wister who, in addition to being his commanding officer, is also a friend. Wister has to take two months' leave for reasons, and is going to be going home to England for the time. Denny is getting a temporary promotion to commander, which is good career advancement for him.

On the same boat as Wister is Julia Ashton (Kay Francis). She's an American going to England for reasons, and is being pursued on board ship by a businessman in whom she has absolutely no interest. Wister saves Julia from this guy's advances, and the two become friends, although this being prim and proper England under George V, it's not going to go any further just yet. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Julia is staying with the same friends in England that Wister is staying with, so they keep seeing each other.

Wister immediately falls in love with Julia, but the feeling isn't mutual. It's not that Julia has anything against Wister; instead, she was engaged to the sort of pilot who in those days would have been considered an explorer. He went out one evening on an experimental flight and never returned, with no evidence of his plane ever having been found. Presumably, he crashed into the Irish Sea and the plane sank with him drowning. But Julia is still in mourning for her late boyfriend and can't love anybody else. However, since Wister is so nice, and she knows she can never love anybody, she agrees to make Wister happy by marrying him. She does consider him a friend, after all.

Wister and his new wife get back to the Arab sheikdom where he and Denny are stationed. Julia gets off the train and Denny sees her, treating her like a perfect gentleman because he doesn't realize who she is: Wister hasn't seen any need to wire ahead that he's returning with a wife. Denny, like his commanding officer, falls in love with Julia, which is obviously going to be quite awkward when he finds out that this woman is married to his commanding officer. But how is the love triangle going to be resolved?

One subplot in Another Dawn, which is frankly not well handled, involves Wister's manservant Wilkins (Herbert Mundin). Wilkins goes back to England with Wister, and is given a give by some of his fellow soldiers. That gift is a box of white feathers which, if you've seen the movie The Four Feathers, you'll know means his fellow soldiers consider him a coward. It's so obvious that this is foreshadowing for something that happens later in the movie, and frankly, it's a subplot that doesn't do very much to advance the movie.

As for the rest of Another Dawn, it's the sort of drama where you can see why one of the studios of the 1930s would want to acquire it and turn it into a movie. There's a fairly good love triangle story at its heart, and the sort of story that would have given a studio ample opportunity to open up the action what with the exotic setting (not that there would have been any location shooting, of course). The cast does a good job with their roles, although the movie is ultimately just a programmer. A competent programmer, but a programmer nevertheless. I think that's why Another Dawn is not as well remembered as some of the other movies based on stories by Somerset Maugham.

Before RCA got the trademark

Rin Tin Tin was a German Shepherd rescued during World War I, and his popularity in movies naturally led competing studios to make dog pictures of their own with similar-looking canine actors. One such silent was His Master's Voice, starring a dog named Thunder.

The structure of the movie is a bit interesting. Thunder is much older and has a son, Flash, and the two can talk to each other as it were through the use of title cards, not that the humans would have known this. Anyhow, Flash asks his dad how his dad's master became the hero he is, which goes back to the Great War. So, once again, we get a flashback....

Before the US entered the war, Bob Henley (George Hackathorne) was an architecture student in one of those small towns, with a girl Mary (Marjorie Daw) he was interested in, although piece of work Jack tries to steal Bob's girl because he knows Bob is a coward who won't stand up for himself. Even worse is that when there's a contest to design a new library for the town, Jack "offers" to take Bob's design into the office to submit it, even though it should be obvious that Jack is going to submit it under his own name.

As for that war that's about to come to America, Bob has no desire to fight, and his mom has no desire to let him go off to Europe. But the draft board comes, and not only drafts Bob, but finds that Thunder would be great for service with the Red Cross. Now, you'd think this would be a perfect opporunity to have Bob be Thunder's handler and work in the ambulance corps or some such, but the US military being assholes, they split Bob and Thunder up.

Over in France, Bob is about to desert since he's still a coward who is unable to fight. But then he sees Thunder, and the two being reunited, Thunder becomes Bob's mascot in the trenches. Bob gets sent on a dangerous mission, and at least this time it's not his cowardice that lets him down, but in fact getting injured by German fire. Thunder is there to save the day, however, as well as let Bob take credit for heroism. It even makes Bob able to stand up to Jack when he returns home, so that we can have our requisite happy ending.

To be honest, the story in His Master's Voice is kind of sappy. But the production is actually fairly well handled, for a movie that clocks in at a bit under an hour. That short running time, however, makes things feel a bit more like a skeleton of a story than something that's fully fleshed out. His Master's Voice is another of those movies that's certainly not bad, but not great, and memorable more for the fact that the dog is a main character here.

A different affair from Summertime

Another of the movies that had been sitting forlornly on my DVR waiting to be watched before it expired is The Venetian Affair. So, as is once again the case, I sat down, watched it, and then wrote up this review.

As you might have figured out, the movie is set in lovely Venice, Italy, although the story itself isn't quite so romantic. Instead, it starts off with some sort of international conference on disarmament, this being the days of the Cold War. Except that one of the participants in the conference blows the thing up, killing a dozen high-level diplomats!

Bill Fenner Robert Vaughn is an American journalist working in the New York bureau of the International Wire Service. This is a big story that needs more than one correspondent, so he's called to Venice where he's going to work with his colleague, Mike Ballard (Roger C. Carmel). Or, at least, that's what he thinks. At the airport, he's met by Frank Rosenfeld (Ed Asner, still early enough in his career that he's being referred to as Edward). Rosenfeld is a CIA station chief, and already knows Fenner because Fenner used to work for the CIA himself.

And, indeed, that's part of why Fenner was called in. He's got spy knowledge but, no longer being a spy, he can do things that the known spies can't really do. One of those things is to get close to Dr. Vaugiroud (Boris Karloff), who has written up a report on the investigation into the bombing at the conference. That report may itself be a bombshell, pun intended, so if the Americans can get their hands on the one copy of the report, never mind just knowing its contents before publication, so much the better. Fenner sees Vaugiroud at a press conference and learns the Americans may be coming out on the bad end of the report.

But that's not the only reason Fenner was brought over to Italy. It seems that one of the people who has more knowedge of what's going on that she's let on is one Sandra Fane (Elke Sommer). Sandra just happens to be the former Mrs. Bill Fenner, with the two divorcing in part because of Bill's character, and in part because of Sandra's politics.

There are, of course, people around who don't want the Americans to get the report, and they're more than willing to kill to get at the report. Not only that, but they're willing to do things that some might consider even worse, like mind control. So everybody flits around Venice for a good 90 minutes or so until it's decided to wrap up the story by blaming everything on the Communist Chinese, who were at this point still pariahs in the eyes of the First World.

I think I've stated before that the dark and cynical spy movie of the 1960s is not my favorite genre of film. And to be honest, The Venetian Affair might be even worse than other movies in the genre that I've seen like The Ipcress File. There's just no reason to care about any of these characters, and the movie is also very slow. I suspect it was an opportunity for the Americans involved to get a working holiday in Venice, which has always been a photogenic place. They just got lousy work to do.

The Lodger (1944)

I mentioned a few months back that one of the movies that's back in the FXM rotation is the 1944 version of The Lodger. I'd seen it before, but surprisingly, a search of the blog claims that I haven't done a post on it. With that in mind, I decided I'd wait for it to show up again on FXM so that I could re-watch it and do up a post to go with the FXM showing. That next showing is tomorrow, July 13, at 7:15 AM.

The Lodger is based on the same source material as the Alfred Hitchcock movie of the same title, a 1913 novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes; that novel was also the basis for the Jack Palance movie Man in the Attic. As you may know, the material is based on the famous Jack the Ripper serial murders of 1888, although, as the identity of the real Jack the Ripper was never determined, what happens to the stand-in character here is obviously different from whatever happened to Jack the Ripper.

In a portion of the Fox backlot that stands in for London, a drunken music-hall player heads for home, only to get waylaid and murdered by an unseen person. This is presented as not being the first of the Jack the Ripper murders, so the whole press already has been been reporting breathlessly for some time on the murders and everybody has been waiting for the next one to happen.

At about the same time, even though it's late evening, a man walks up to a middle-class house not quite where the murders have been occurring but close enough to get there at night. The man, taking the name Slade from a nearby street sign (Laird Cregar), says that he got the address of this house from an estate agent who told him that the house was letting out rooms. In fact, that is true; man of the house Robert Bonting (Cedric Hardwicke) has suffered some financial reverses and he and his wife Ellen (Sara Allgood) need to rent out the upper rooms to make ends meet. Slade is presented as someone we're obviously supposed to suspect of being Jack the Ripper, and he takes the rooms.

Things get worse when the Bontings' niece, Kitty Langley (Merle Oberon) returns from France. She had been working there as a singer in a revue, but she's about to take on a new job as the lead in a London music-hall revue. However, she's also the same exact sort of actress whom Jack is believed to be attracted to. Slade seems to be OK keeping to himself, although Kitty takes an interest in him, trying to invite him to see her new show. This also serves to increase the suspense, as Kitty seems to have no clue that she might be in any sort of danger. Her aunt and uncle, however, begin to suspect that Slade and Jack the Ripper might be one and the same.

Meanwhile, an old acquaintance who used to work in the same theater where Kitty is now performing shows up briefly; after leaving she too gets murdered by Jack. This brings in Scotland Yard in the form of Detective Inspector Warwick (George Sanders). He too takes an interest in Kitty, although you might think this is a bit unprofessional. In any case, the police do have to be around to keep Kitty safe, since she is in their eyes an obvious target for Jack especially once her aunt and uncle bring their suspicions to the police.

This version of The Lodger effectively brings all of this to a successful climax. The one objection might be that, because of the Production Code we know the Jack the Ripper mystery can't be left unsolved. Be that as it may, the cast does a good job, especially Laird Cregar, who died much too young. There's a fair bit here that bears similarity to Cregar's final film, Hangover Square, another smallish picture that's very well done. Both of them deserve to be seen more often.

The Mayor of 44th Street

I mentioned some time back that I somehow wound up with several movies on my DVR which all star George Murphy. So I've been watching them and writing up these posts to save in draft and then schedule them after a suitable break between them. This time, the movie that I watched is another RKO programmer, The Mayor of 44th Street.

Murphy plays Joe Jonathan, a booking agent who works with a whole bunch of musical acts (which conveniently is also a way for the movie to pad things out) serving the sort of nightclub that started going out of style in the years after World War II and espeically once television came along. It's the sort of business that's ripe for having the Mob try to push in and force people to book specific acts or pay protection money to keep the Mob away.

One such gangster is Bits McKarg (Rex Downing) who, it turns out, is actually just a teenager leading a whole bunch of teens who basically heckle the sort of bands that they don't like, although they're really no more harmful than the Dead End Kids were, whether it was in the Dead End Kids days or even when they became the Bowery Boys. But Bits looked up to the movie gangsters of the 30s, and wants to be a tough guy, and his gang of youths is going to be useful later in the movie.

The more important gangster is Ed Kirby (Richard Barthelmess in his final role before retiring). Ed and Joe had a past together, but Kirby got sent up to prison some years back. Cop Tommy Fallon (William Gargan) shows up at Joe's office one day to tell him that Ed is applying for parole. This is something that troubles Joe, but even more so troubles his long-suffering girlfriend and dance partner Jessey (Anne Shirley). The obvious fear is that Kirby, if he gets out of prison, is going to come back to Joe and cause a whole world of trouble.

Sure enough, Kirby gets out of prison and goes looking for Joe. Worse for Joe is that he's made what could be seen as a mistake in taking on Bits as a sort of young man to mentor. Better to teach Bits how to do things honestly and make a good living than have Bits stay the way he was. Kirby is going to need a job to satisfy his parole officer, and the only person who can give him that chance, at least according to Kirby's lawyers, is Joe. (Can't Kirby work as a secretary to the lawyers?) Joe is dumb enough to give Kirby another chance.

It's not too hard to guess what happens next, which is that Kirby goes back to his old ways of trying to shake down everybody he sees, even though this isn't what Joe wants at all. And with Bits still looking up to gangsters like Kirby, it's going to be hard for Joe to resist the pressure, at least not without getting the crap knocked out of him.

George Murphy isn't the world's greatest actor, largely because he doesn't exactly have a ton of charisma. He's nominally the lead here, but it's more of an ensemble of second-tier stars, who more or less work well together. Nobody's going to mistake The Mayor of 44th Street for a prestige picture, but it's another of those films that works for what it does and entertained the people as the bottom of the bill back in the early days of World War II.

Ronald Colman does comedy

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was My Life With Caroline. Recently I finally got around to watching it so that I could write up a review before it expired.

Although Ronald Colman is the star, or at least the male lead, we meet several of the other characters first, at a ski resort in Idaho that's running some sort of charity function. Argentine rancher Paco Del Valle (Gilbert Roland) is at the charity kissing booth with Caroline Mason (Anna Lee) making money for charity. After this, Paco wants to talk to Caroline's father Bliss (Charles Winninger), to tell him that he plans to ask for Caroline's hand in marriage, but that since this is the era when it was common to ask a father for that, well, Dad ought to know.

Of course, there's a minor complication. Caroline is already married, to Anthony (Ronald Colman), a successful publisher in New York City. Obviously the only way Caroline would be able to marry Paco is if her first marriage were dissolved, and Anthony has to be consulted on that matter. So a telegram is sent to Anthony, who has his own plane and is able to get to Idaho. You can see the sort of rich set this movie is about. Anthony gets to Idaho, but doesn't tell any of the other main characters that he's arrived, instead preferring to watch the three surreptitiously. Anthony then breaks the fourth wall, telling us in the audience that he's seen this all before. Caroline is just such a lovely person that other men can't help but fall in love with her. Anthony, however, understands that it's him who Caroline truly loves. And, to that end, Anthony tells us he's going to relate a very similar story that happened a few years back....

Flash back a couple of years, and Anthony is returning from another business trip. His wife and father-in-law introduce him to Paul Martindale (Reginald Gardiner), a sculptor who is "struggling" on $100K a year, and not from the earning of what his sculptures bring in. It's already implied at this first introduction that the relationship between Caroline and Martindale has progressed far enough that he's going to ask her to marry him and that the two might just run off together. And the way the story continues, you get the impression that this one wasn't the first time some guy showed interest in Caroline as Mrs. Mason either.

Eventually, Anthony figures out that Paul and Caroline are going to go off on the same train together, so Anthony maneuvers things so that at least one of them misses the train, which will give Caroline the chance to realize that yes, it truly is Anthony that she loves. And in the final scene, we'll go back to Idaho to see that Caroline and Anthony will live happily ever after, for some values of "happily ever after".

I have the feeling that a director like Preston Sturges would have had a field day with the material. Instead, this being co-produced by RKO, directorial duties were given to Lewis Milestone. The result is a movie that feels off somehow, as though it's all a bunch of conventions that somehow don't work together in the final product. What's supposed to be funny is mostly exasperating, and the characters don't feel like real people.

I guess I can see why somebody like Ronald Colman might want to try his hand at comedy, but My Life With Caroline doesn't do him justice.

Three years before, and a century after, Becky Sharp

TCM ran a night of movies dedicated to the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and I've already written about several of the movies that I recorded that night. One that I haven't mentioned yet is the 1932 version of Vanity Fair.

The interesting thing about this version of Vanity Fair is that it takes Thackeray's story and moves it to contemporary times, more or less, since it doesn't really mention the Depression. Myrna Loy plays Becky Sharp, and as the movie opens she's going to celebrate the holidays with school friend Amelia Sedley (Barbara Kent) who is much richer, never mind having a family unlike poor Becky. Becky is going to be going to a job as a governess, something Amelia absolutely doesn't have to do.

But Becky has ideas of getting rich by marrying up, and immediately starts putting the moves on Amelia's brother Joseph (Billy Bevan). Worse, she also starts putting the moves on Amelia's fiancé George, which causes Amelia's none-too-stupid mother to take notice. She sees what a threat Becky is and tells Becky in no uncertain terms that perhaps she should go become the governess for the Cawleys like she was supposed to.

When Becky gets to the Cawley place, what does she do? You guessed it: she immediately starts putting the moves on yet another man, young Rawdon (Conway Tearle) who is the son of Sir Pitt, the head of the Cawley family. Rawdon actually seems to like Becky, but Dad isn't happy with the relationship. So when Becky and Rawdon tell his dad that they've eloped, Dad cuts them off financially.

It's the start of the downward spiral for Becky, which you knew was coming if you've read the book or seen Miriam Hopkins in Becky Sharp. She and Rawdon try to continue living in a glamorous part of London, but that's going to require more money than they have, and more than they can earn through legitimate means. So they start cheating people at cards and through blackmail, while Becky continues trying to seduce legitimately rich men. This last move unsurprisingly ticks off Rawdon, who basically kicks her out once his Dad dies so he can inherit what is supposed to be him.

As Becky's downward spiral continues, she eventually runs into both Joseph and later Amelia. Joseph informs Becky that Amelia's husband George died tragically and that Amelia can't bring herself to remarry. Not that this is going to make Becky's life any happier, as the movie continues to the inveitably unhappy ending.

This version of Vanity Fair runs a brisk 75 minutes, which means that there's a lot that's going to be excised from an 800-page novel, which I'll admit I haven't yet read. Myrna Loy is unsurprisingly good, or at least as good as possible since this version wasn't made by a major studio and feels like a lower-budget movie. Director Chester Franklin tries some interesting directorial touches, especially for the finale, but the movie doesn't really rise above adequate. It's not terrible, by any means, but it's definitely not great.

Southside 1-1000

Another of the little-known movies that Eddie Muller selected for Noir Alley was Southside 1-1000. As always, not having heard of it but it sounding reasonably interesting, I decided to record it in order to be able to watch it and put up this post on it.

The movie opens up with expository narration and scenes of Washington DC telling us about the importance of sound money, especially in fighting the war on Communism. The movie was released in late 1950, not long after the start of the Korean War, and this introduction really seems tacked-on since the Korean War and Communists don't really have all that much to do with the movie. Counterfeiters, well yes those do.

Indeed, one of the best counterfeiters, Eugene Deane (Morris Ankrum), has been making his plates while holed up in San Quentin and hiding the prints in a bible. (This wouldn't be the first movie to have a theme of counterfeiters working behind bars; one of the Ronald Reagan Brass Bancroft movies had a similar premise.) In those days, it was the job of the Secret Service to find counterfeiters -- remember, before the Department of Homeland Security the Secret Service was part of the Treasury Department. They don't know who got the plates, so the attempt is made to figure out who's distributing the bills produced, and suspicion falls on a traveling salesman named Bill Evans (Barry Kelley).

Unfortunately, both he and the actual people running the counterfeit ring get the impression he's being watched, which results in his getting defenestrated for his trouble. The Secret Services realizes they need an undercover agent involved in getting the bills distributed, in the hopes that this will lead to whoever is actually running the ring. John Riggs (Don DeFore) is selected for the part. He goes to the Los Angeles hotel where Bill was last known to be staying, run by Nora Craig (Andrea King), in the hopes that he'll be able to meet the person running the outfit. The people running it are of course smart and make Riggs bide his time.

Eventually Riggs does get to meet a man who isn't the actual ringleader, but a representative, which is another sign of just how clever these criminals are. John's story is one that it's been a bit tough for the Secret Service to manufacture, leading the counterfeiters to wonder whether or not Riggs is who he says he is. Things gets much more complicated, however, when Deane escapes. He'd been ill enough that the warden wants to transfer him to a prison on the outside, but on the train journey there he overpowers his guard and makes his way to Los Angeles. This leads to the finale, although as you can probably guess considering the opening narration -- and never mind the Production Code -- the good guys are going to win this battle.

Southside 1-1000 is a low-budget movie that certainly betrays that low-budget nature. It does so in large plot by having a plot that feels completely unoriginal and taken from plot elements that had been recycled from a bunch of counterfeiter movies before it. The plot twists aren't particularly surprising either, and Don DeFore isn't exactly the most hard-boild person to be playing a Secret Service agent. The idea is OK, but the execution could be better.

The Working Man

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, July 8, is a series of films directed by John G. Adolfi. One of them happened to be on my DVR, so once again I decided that I would watch that upcoming movie in order to be able to write up this post. That film is The Working Man, and you can see it at 5:15 PM.

The titular working man is played by George Arliss, as a man named John Reeves. As the movie opens, he's the head of the Reeves Shoe Company, headquartered in Buffalo, NY. There's a Depression on, of course, since the movie was released in 1933, but Reeves is a hard worker and sound businessman, so his company is doing moderately well. Not that his nephew Benjamin (Hardie Albright) would have you believe. He believes his uncle is getting past his prime and that perhaps it would be time to take a well-deserved retirement. After all, Benjamin has been groomed to run the company since Reeves doesn't have any kids of his own.

So Reeves goes on a vacation to Maine with old friend Davis (J. Farrell MacDonald). There, their smaller fishing boat gets boarded by a couple of swimmers from the yacht nearby. Those swimmers happen to be a brother and sister, Tommy (Theodore Newton) and Jenny (Bette Davis) Hartland, children of Reeves' rival who has recently died. Reeves doesn't tell them his true identity, but claims to be a bookkeeper named Walton. Tommy and Jenny are trust-fund babies who know nothing about the business, and when Reeves hurts his hand aboard their yacht, they give him a job at the shoe factory just to keep him quiet.

What Reeves finds shocks him. The manager Tommy has installed, Fred Pettison (Gordon Westcott), has been running the factory into the ground. Meanwhile, the siblings have been spending like there's no tomorrow, so if they're not careful they're going to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, it's revealed that the reason Reeves has no family of his own is that Hartland was once Reeves' romantic rival and won the girl they were both wooing. So Reeves begins to see Tommy and Jenny almost as foster children of his own.

Reeves finds out that one of the Hartland trustees is permanently in Europe, which would in theory give the remaining trustees the right to replace him with somebody else. Reeves reveals his true identity to the trustees, but not to the Hartland siblings, and comes up with a way to get them to have him become one of the trustees thinking it was their idea all along. Of course, this is all part of Reeves' plot to show his nephew that he can still run a business: Benjamin still thinks his uncle is in Maine with Davis.

Reeves' time as trustee starts out badly, since he dumps all their bootleg liquor down the drain and fires most of the servants, the two kids not being able to afford all this. Jenny has a bit more sense in her head than Tommy, so she's willing to try to get a job at the Reeves shoe factory to find out how things are run efficiently. That, and when the two kids see just how badly in debt they've gotten, she's able to help convince Tommy to go back to the factory to do the director's job that he's been neglecting.

Now, as you might guess, everything works out all right in the end. So a lot of the fun is in seeing how it works out, because frankly the plot is kind of nonsensical. But with George Arliss as the protagonist, you also know you're going to get a good performance that by itself makes such material worth watching. I think I've more or less mentioned the same thing regarding two other Arliss movies that are on tomorrow's schedule: The Millionaire (9:30 AM) and A Successful Calamity (1:45 PM). Indeed, I see in my post on The Millionaire that I made a comparison to A Successful Calamity.

So regardless of how grounded in reality it is or isn't, The Working Man is another good reason to see just what an entertaining actor George Arliss was.

Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.