Strictly Dynamite

Jimmy Durante is relatively subdued here. Maybe because his leading lady is Lupe Velez, who was not exactly a quiet or subtle performer herself. (I love her anyway.) This has a great supporting cast -- Tom Kennedy, Eugene Palette, many, many more.

The plot involves unsuccessful poet Norman Foster's being drawn into to the world of show biz. He begins to write gags for comic Durante, who terms them, and anything he likes, as dynamite.

Foster is smitten with Durante's flirtatious partner Velez. His wife Marian Nixon is patient -- sort of. Things get resolved and there's plenty of fun along the way.

No, this is not a film about explosions, unless they are of laughter. It is an amusing thirties comedy set in New York, starring 'the Schnozzle' (thirties slang for 'big nose'), as Jimmy Durante was affectionately called by his fans. His extreme Brooklyn accent is made more extreme by his over-pronouncing of it, and he gets all his words wrong and says everything in as ungrammatical and incorrect a manner as inhumanly possible, giving rise to many laughs. He and his fellow actors crack a lot of gags. My favourite for this film is when Durante says, unaware of the contradiction: 'I have a verbal contract, and I'm gonna sign it!' Durante specialised in being what the English would call 'dotty and eccentric', and he was a wonderful comic singer as well. The glamour gal for the film is the Mexican actress Lupe Velez, who was highly successful at the time and became known as 'the Mexican spitfire'. She was not much of an actress, but she conveyed a lot of useful jollity and could do a good vamp, as well as sing. Her life ended tragically when she committed suicide at the age of 36, having been dumped in turn by her lover Gary Cooper and her husband Johnny Weissmuller ('Tarzan') and turned to drink, drugs, and depression. She made another comedy with Durante in this same year, THE GREAT SCHNOZZLE. The story for this film is flimsy, but suffices as a skeletal framework for typical Durante nonsense. A young writer with big ideas about himself and no sense of humour at all (hence a good foil for Durante), played by Norman Foster, is urged by his wife to start writing for radio. Durante plays a famous radio star. It is difficult for people these days to imagine, but radio was BIG back then, before television existed, and it was stuffed full of excellent live drama and comedy shows. Foster cannot even understand gags, much less write them, but he ends up writing them for Durante by stealing them from old joke books and modernising them. This satirizes what was a standard practice amongst the top gag writers such as Mark Hellinger and his proteges, who routinely strip-minded old jokes from PUNCH and other such sources. (I know this for a fact because I knew some old-time gag writers personally, who told me.) This was however such an 'in' joke that only the professional gag writers watching the film themselves would fully have 'got' it. Foster fancies himself as something of an intellectual, and more satire raises its lovely head when he starts talking to the uneducated show people about the French philosopher Henri Bergson's book LAUGHTER: AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC (London, 1911), being an English translation of the French original LE RIRE (1900). But this is a double satire, as having read that book, I can assure people that Bergson had just about as much of a sense of humour as Foster in this film, and I wonder if Bergson ever actually laughed at a joke himself in his life. Here is a sample sentence from Bergson's book: 'We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in movements generally; now let us look for it in actions and in situations.' You get the picture, and yes, I have the book right beside me. But no, it is not funny. Another interesting thing I noticed about the film is that two dinners take place in Sardi's Restaurant in New York, but its name is never mentioned. I suppose that observation qualifies under the label of 'Trivia'. The story has its ups and its downs and its twists and its turns and it lasts for 71 minutes, and hey ho.

This is a small film with a pretty simple plot, but I found it enjoyable because of its stars, Jimmy Durante and Lupe Velez. Durante is a throwback to the vaudeville era, pre-Hollywood, and he cracks so many one-liners and malapropisms that you'll have to pay close attention to pick them all up. It was too bad the broadcast I watched didn't have close captioning! He's larger than life, (and has a shnozz that's certainly larger than life hehe), and it's fun to see perform his whole shtick, including the ha-cha-cha-cha.

I like to see Lupe Velez in films in part because of the diversity she brings, but also because she's so animated and fun to watch. She plays Durante's girlfriend and sidekick on his radio show. The radio show has a couple of very nice moments, starting with a delightful musical performance by The Mills Brothers at the beginning of the film, which was probably my favorite part (and even though Durante and Velez also both sing tunes). In a later scene, we see how the sound effect of a storm are created in a fairly elaborate set to the side of the performers and orchestra.

The movie is not really about that, though. The gist of the story is that Durante hires a new writer (Norman Foster), who takes the job after some nudging from his wife (Marian Nixon). Foster is an aspiring serious author who doesn't know all that much about comedy, but with the help of an agent (William Gargan) promises to deliver lines which are "strictly dynamite." Things get complicated when Foster begins having an affair with Velez.

Most of the film is pretty tame, but there is some pre-code banter and suggestion, and aside from the adultery, little lines like Durante asking the agent, "do you get 10% of her too?", referring to Nixon. Nixon and Velez are a study in contrasts, and nowhere is this more evident than when Nixon begins trying to start an affair of her own with the agent. She encourages him to kiss her in the taxi a few times, and while she's certainly kissable and he's interested, sparks don't fly for her. Cut to Velez in a cab with Foster, bubbly and laughing, asking the driver to take them to Atlantic City, and then pulling Foster over so they can make out. In her first scene with Foster, she tells him she can do a great Mae West impersonation as she caresses his face, hinting at where her intentions are. In another scene, she wears a pretty wild dress, one with ribbed metallic detail that almost make her look like she has robot arms. I just love seeing things like that in these old films.

There are some annoying bits, such as the acts who try to see Foster in his office once he's hit it big. Even with this filler, the story is brief at 71 minutes, and not all that original. There were enough cute little bits to make it interesting and entertaining though.

Nick (Norman Foster) has just moved to the big city, and suddenly he's looking for a new job. He hears Moxie (Durante) and Vera (Lupe Velez) performing on a radio show, and ends up writing jokes for the show. Also stars Marian Nixon as Sylvia. Nick is a simple working stiff, the straight man to the star Durante; Durante spends most of the film mixing up his words and doing physical gags. Fun film, if a little strained in some parts. Awesome supporting cast includes Franklin Pangborn as Bailey, Eugene Pallett as Sourwood, and Sterling Holloway as Fleming. It's the supporting cast that helps keep this thing moving along. Just about everyone sings a song in this one -- of course, Durante sings a couple, Lupe sings, and even the Mills Brothers. All that singing fits right in, and doesn't interfere with the story as it did in so many films. A scene by 13 year old Jack Searle was just annoying, which was probably the goal. Directed by Elliot Nugent, who would also go on to direct a whole bunch of Bob Hope films.

This movie may star Jimmy Durante, but he isn't front and center most of the time. The film is about a radio star, Moxie (Jimmy Durante), who can't find any good gag men. Enter Nick (Norman Foster), an unemployed writer who really wants to be a poet. His wife Sylvia (Marian Marsh) has caught the eye of agent Georgie (William Gargan). Georgie does Sylvia a favor by convincing Moxie to hire Nick as a gag man, a job that Nick excels at - for awhile. The problem isn't so much that Nick gets a big head, but that Moxie's girlfriend Vera (Lupe Velez) tries to get her claws into him. She can't do this very well with Nick sober, so she gets him drunk with somewhat anticlimactic and ambiguous results that could only happen at the transition from the precode to production code eras, which is when this film was released.

This may sound like it has the makings of a melodrama when in fact it is pretty much played as light comedy. There are some numbers by Durante, a rather humorous number with Velez and Durante together, and the somewhat rare occurrence of Durante playing a rather irascible fellow. He even has two bodyguards to follow Vera around and beat up anyone who flirts with her. Marian Nixon, who did quite a bit of heavy melodrama over at Warner Brothers, doesn't get much screen time here, but when she does she is the loyal and supportive wife even when you wish she wasn't.

This film was made by RKO, not Durante's home studio MGM, and you get the feeling they really didn't know what to do with him or Velez, although of the two she comes off best. Neither laugh out-loud funny nor hand-wringingly tense at any point, it would be a nice film to show people who are recovering from a nervous breakdown and can't take any excitement but still want to be entertained. Not Durante's best but a fun way to pass 70 minutes or so of time.