Sit down, don't cheer

Another of the movies that got pulled out of the Fox vaults recently for showing on FXM is Stand Up and Cheer!. It's going to be on again over the coming weekend and again on July 5. It's also on DVD, so since I don't have that big a backlog of recently-watched movies to blog about, I'm going to do a post on it now.

The movie was released in 1934, and the first thing you notice is that this is likely a re-release print: the 20th Century Fox fanfare starts before we see that this is from the "Fox Film Corporation", the merger between Fox and 20th Century not having come until 1935. (IMDb suggests that the original ran about a dozen minutes longer than the 68-minute version FXM ran.) On to the threadbare plot, we see Broadway producer Lawrence Cromwell (Warner Baxter) going to meet president Roosevelt (only seen from the back). With a depression on, the president thinks America's spirits need to be raised, and the best way to do that is with a Department of Amusement. Cromwell, being an important Broadway producer, is just the man to do it.

Now, my immediate thought is that a department like this would be a money pit for propaganda of the sort that the Federal Theater Project was, churning out stuff like ... One Third of a Nation...; people of political interests would try to capture the bureaucracy if only to see that the people they oppose didn't capture it first. But Stand Up and Cheer is pretty obviously pro-New Deal propaganda, so it would never suggest anything was wrong with a program like this.

There are two senators opposed to it, and a shadowy cabal behind them, but the two senators are played by guys who had a slapstick vaudeville routine, "Mitchell and Durant". Their brand of humor is unfunny. We also get treated to Stepin Fetchit, and the humor that the screenwriters forced him to do is even more unfunny, especially in the later scene with a penguin doing a Jimmy Durante impression.

In between all this, we get several musical numbers that are unrelated to the plot of the movie, and a love interest in the form of Children's Section head Miss Adams (Madge Evans). One of the numbers involves a young Shirley Temple before Bright Eyes made her a real star; she dances with James Dunn playing characters named Shirley and James probably (I'm guessing) because Shirley was still young enough that this would make it easier to remember her lines. She shows up again in the retch-inducing finale, a song with large groups of people marching in formation looking like the old Soviet military parades going through Red Square as the Great Leaders watched from Lenin's mausoleum.

Stand Up and Cheer! is terrible, although at least Shirley Temple shows she already had talent at a young age. The two DVD listings at the TCM Shop both focus on Temple, although at least in one case it's fair because it's a box set with six Temple films. I might think about getting the box set for the other five films; I certainly wouldn't bother with the standalone.