Wide Open

Another of my recent movie watches was the early talkie Wide Open, which is available on DVD from the Warner Archive Collection.

A very young Edward Everett Horton plays Simon Haldane, a slightly mousy bookkeeper at a company that manufactures record plays and music to play on those players. At least, it seems as though they make record players since Simon has a plan for a new type of needle that will help the company's flagging revenues.

Meanwhile, he's being pursued by co-worker Agatha (Louise Fazenda), who somehow manages to convince her mother that if Simon doesn't marry Agatha, it'll be something that brings immense shame to Agatha and her family. It must be one of those old-fashioned family honor things, since I didn't quite get it. But all of this is interrupted by our other main character.

Patsy Miller plays Doris, who is seen breaking into Simon's place of work and rifling through the books he's left there, which isn't much since he's been working on the books at night as part of his financial plan involving the new needle. But Doris gets his address and breaks in, the police in hot pursuit. Doris feigns illness which gets Simon to keep her there overnight.

Back at work, Agatha does nothing to stop the gossip going on about Simon, leading everybody to think that Simon has just gotten married despite considering himself a confirmed bachelor. So all of the coworkers crash his house in order to hold a party! Meanwhile, Doris is still trying to find those books for reasons that are made clear at the end of the movie.

Wide Open is one of those early talkies that didn't quite seem to know what it was doing, and tried to deal with that by throwing everything it could against the wall to see what might stick. In that regard, it made me think of So Long Letty mostly because that's the most recent early talkie I watched before this one. I think I'd have to say that So Long Letty is better because it's more coherent, but Wide Open is definitely not without its bizarre charms.

The biggest fault I found in Wide Open is the characterization of Doris, who is a sort of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby type. She's lying so much about why she's at Simon's house in the beginning that it seriously made me dislike her. On the other hand, the movie is so full of plot holes that, where they would bring later movies down, only serve here to make things more nuts. It's never explained, for example, how Simon could afford to live in such a big house and have Louise Beavers as a maid.

Wide Open is another of those movies that really should have gotten a release to DVD on one of those four-movie sets that TCM used to put out in conjunction with Warner Home Video, instead of a more expensive standalone Archive DVD. Still, I'm glad I saw it, even though I'm not one to spend that much money on a standalone for such a trifle of a movie.