Hal Roach remakes My Man Godfrey

Another of the movies that I recently watched off my DVR is Merrily We Live, which I think got a TCM airing during a Constance Bennett day in Summer Under the Stars. I'd never blogged about it before, which is why I made the point of recording it so I could do a post on it here.

We start off with the hired help, led by Grosvenor the butler (Alan Mowbray), being irritated because all the good silver is missing. That's because the lady of the house, Mrs. Kilbourne (Billie Burke), has had a bad habit of bringing in "forgotten men", not that this movie uses that term the way My Man Godfrey did, and trying to reform them. One of those tramps decided to walk off with as much of the silver as he could carry. So it's going to be a nice surprise for the family when they have their breakfast this morning and have to use whatever utensils are at hand.

In addition to Mom, there's the father (Clarence Kolb) who's big in business and trying to get in with the politicians who hold sway; an adult daughter Geraldine "Jerry" (that's Constance Bennett if you couldn't tell) who is as close to a rational person as you'll find in this family; adult son Kane (Tom Brown) who looks like he's never worked a day in his life; and the stereotypical bratty teenage kid Marion (Bonita Granville), a few years older than the Virginia Weidler character in The Philadelphia Story and not nearly as charming. At least they're all able to convince Mom not to bring in another tramp.

Cut to a winding mountain road that seems to be much too far away from the house where the Kilbournes live for the story to work. Wade Rawlins (Brian Aherne) is driving a jalopy up the road, and stops to get water for the car's radiator, at which point the car rolls backward off a cliff. Rawlins walks down the hill to call for help, and apparently the first house he finds is the Kilbourne place. He tries to ask if he can make a phone call, but Mom is so ditzy that she winds up hiring Rawlins on as a chauffeur before he can explain who he is and what he wants.

Jerry already has a guy pursuing her in the form of Herbert wheeler, but we see that he's pursuing her too fast and how Rawlins has to save her from Wheeler's advances. It's obvious that Jerry is going to fall in love with Rawlins by the end of the movie, although she doesn't know it yet. Meanwhile, Dad is going to be hosting an important dinner, but Marion decides she's going to be a jerk and bollix things by having Rawlins get invited to the dinner when everybody in the family thinks he's a tramp.

Merrily We Live is the sort of screwball comedy that wouldn't have been so bad if it came out two years earlier, before the release of My Man Godfrey, in which case it would be the sort of movie you could look at and see why My Man Godfrey was the better movie. Unfortunately, it came later, so it's hard not to think of producer Hal Roach as ripping off My Man Godfrey. The other problem Hal Roach had is that I don't think he ever really had a particularly big budget to work with. Everything here feels slightly threadbare.

Still, Merrily We Live isn't exactly a bad movie, it's just that there are so many classics of the genre, a standard which Merrily We Live doesn't quite reach.

Presented with no apologies to our Canadian readers

One of my recent viewings on TCM was the early talkie Men of the North. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you get a blog post on it now.

Gilbert Roland plays Louis La Bey, also known as "Le Fox", a French-Canadian trapper working out of a trading post village somewhere in a northerly part of the country that has mountains. But before we're introduced to him, we see an unidentified person riding on a dogsled and get attacked by another unidentified person. Louis shows up at the post, just in time for a party.

Meanwhile, it's determined that somebody is attacking people and stealing gold, as a gold shipment to the post from a nearby mine has fewer bags of gold dust than it should. The mine owner himself, Mr. Ruskin (Arnold Korff) is about to show up with his lovely adult daughter Nedra (Barbara Leonard). She's interested in seeing the real north, not that she's going to get it in this movie.

Louis falls hard for Nedra, which pisses off his more or less current girlfriend Woolie-Woolie (Nina Quartero). She spies on Louis once he's alone in his cabin, and sees... he's removing a stone from his fireplace, behind which there's a secret drawer in which he stores gold dust! So he's obviously behind the gold robberies.

Once Woolie-Woolie figures this out and realizes she's being jilted by Louis, she's going to go to the Mounties at the base, who always get their man. Well, maybe not this time. Louis sets off even though there's about to be a blizzard coming up. The Ruskins also head out for their mine, but unlike Louis, they don't have experience with the sort of snow they get here, and they're going to need to be rescued. The Mounties go chasing Louis, and one of them is going to need rescuing, too....

Oh boy is Men of the North a silly movie. There's not much of a story here, and what there is seems disjointed and more worthy of a two-reeler than an early talkie. There's also a whole bunch of the tropes about the Canadian north that you'd expect from a movie like this: the heavily accented Quebecker, the Mounties, and the snow. Something tells me Canadian viewers are going to be screaming in horror at the stereotypes.

The acting isn't much to write home about with a young but recognizable Roland being the only familiar name. Thankfully, he already had an accent not being a native English speaker, and it's not as much of a riot as the one Laurence Olivier essays in 49th Parallel. Everybody else is no better than unmemorable.

If you remember Men of the North at all, it'll be for being a particularly big artistic failure. It really should be on a Warner box set with some other early talkie B movies, instead of a pricey standalone.