Not the champ

Tomorrow's lineup in 31 Days of Oscar is movies set in Mexico. Among the movies being shown is the 1931 version of The Champ at 10:30 AM, which I blogged about back in 2010. There was a remake of The Champ in 1979, which will be airing at 3:45 AM on March 11 as part of a prime-time lineup (starting on the evening of March 10) of movies with people who have drinking problems. In between those two there was another version which isn't being shown because it didn't get any Oscar nominations. That movie is titled The Clown.

Red Skelton plays the titular clown, a man named Dodo Delwyn. He used to be big, but as you can guess he has a drinking problem and can no longer get good jobs as a result. He's reduced to a job on Coney Island as a clown making the guests getting off amusement park rides part of his act. He ticks off one such person to the point that man fights back, and Dodo's boss not only blames Dodo, but gives Dodo reason to believe he's accusing Dodo of having gone back to the drink. There goes your job.

Dodo, meanwhile, has a son who admires him in the form of Dink (Tim Considine) and basically takes care of Dodo every time Dodo goes on another drunk, which is about to happen soon now that Dodo is once again out of a job. Now, in a lot of movies this single dad with a son relationship would be down to Mom having died, thank you Production Code. That's also the lie Dodo has been telling Dink. But here, the reality is that Dodo's wife Paula (Jane Greer) couldn't handle her husband's alcoholism and more or less abandoned his fate, divorcing him and marrying another man and having a daughter by that man. How she didn't get custody of Dink is never well explained.

It doesn't take much to guess that Paula is about to meet Dodo again. That happens when Dink goes to one of Dodo's old agents from the talent agencies who gets Dodo a temporary job that Dodo considers do degrading that he doesn't want Dink to see the act. Among the people in the audience is Paula, who wants to see Dink again. She knows that she and her second husband can offer Dink so much more than Dodo can, and tell Dink they'd be more than happy to bring him into their new family, although for obvious reasons Dink is none too happy about this because he still loves his father and considers Dad his hero.

It's going to take a lot for for Dad to hit bottom, which even includes smacking poor Dink. But just as Dodo hits bottom, his old agent realizes there's a new technology out there: television! This would be a great chance to show Dodo to a new audience and possibly get Dodo a stable job if only Dodo can remain sober. The worst that could happen, one supposes, is that the show flops on its opening episode and gets treated as a one-off special rather than a series. But Dodo seizes the lifeline. If you've seen either version of The Champ, however, you know how this movie is going to end....

The most surprising thing about The Clown is the opportunity it offered Red Skelton to do straight drama, since he was mostly known for his physical comedy. Of course, as a clown, that also provides lots of chances to put that physical comedy into the movie in a way that integrates seamlessly into the plot. Skelton shows that he really did have the acting chops necessary to do at least melodrama; I don't know if anybody would have ever taken him seriously if MGM had put him in a straight drama like The Bad and the Beautiful the year before, or Executive Suite a year later. But in The Clown Skelton is by far the highlight in what feels like another of those movies MGM was churning out while trying to fund the Freed Unit musicals.