Polo Joe

"Polo Joe" was a vehicle for Joe E. Brown. This 1936 Warner Bros. comedy has some funny moments and it's always a pleasure to see Mr. Brown in anything. As directed by William McGann, the movie has some funny moments.

Joe Bolton (Joe E. Brown), a wealthy man has just returned from China. He is trying to settle down in a community where the game of polo is the sport to play among the rich people of the area. Joe wants to make Mary Hilton (Carol Hughes) be interested in him. How to go about it? Polo, that's how! The only thing is Bolton is allergic to horses. Any time he is near them he starts sneezing. There is a great sequence that involves Bolton practicing with a little donkey that his valet, Heywood (Charles "Skeets" Gallagher)brings into one of the rooms of Aunt Minnie's mansion. The results are hysterical.

Joe E. Brown proves he was an actor capable to the viewer laugh. The supporting cast is excellent.

Joe E. Brown polishes up his usual braggadocious self in Polo Joe. In this film Brown is courting society girl Carol Hughes and she's a polo groupie. So naturally Brown has to become the greatest polo player in the history of the world. As in Alibi Ike and Elmer The Great where he exaggerates his baseball skills, here he has to put up or shut up when he's pressured into a polo match. His rival is future cowboy hero Wild Bill Elliott and Hughes has a thing for men in riding habit.

There are some nice comedy sequences as Brown takes a crash course in polo with his valet Skeets Gallagher. It doesn't help that Brown is also allergic to horses. The final match is to polo what the final football game in Horsefeathers is to that sport.

Fans of Joe E. Brown should love Polo Joe and seeing it might gain him some new fans.

The novelty value of POLO JOE (1936) is found chiefly in two scenes in which star Joe E. Brown sings songs in Chinese. He also frequently resorts to using Chinese phrases in the course of his frenetic activities throughout the film, even talking to a horse that way in one bit. This is all a result of his character having worked in China for the previous decade in a job that's never defined. The first song is heard in the very first scene as he sits in a train car on his way to his Aunt Minnie's home, where he will be staying. Later, at a dinner party welcoming Joe, Aunt Minnie (Fay Holden) reveals that she's hired three Chinese musicians, performing traditional instruments, to accompany Joe as he sings. One of the musicians, played by Dong Yuen Jung, even sings a duet with Joe, who has wisely made sure, before his performance, that the musicians speak the same Chinese dialect that he does, a rare acknowledgment of China's multiple languages in a Hollywood film referencing China. (I'm assuming Joe speaks Mandarin in the film, although he never identifies his dialect and the way he speaks it is not clear enough for me to rule out the possibility that it's Cantonese.) This isn't the only time I've heard Caucasian Hollywood stars speak Chinese in a Hollywood film. Shirley Temple does it in STOWAWAY, the same year as this film. And twenty years later, Clark Gable does it in SOLDIER OF FORTUNE (1955) and both John Wayne and Lauren Bacall do it in BLOOD ALLEY the same year. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, although these are the only ones I can think of offhand.

Otherwise, there isn't much to recommend this film. It uses the standard Brown plot line of lying about possessing a particular skill and then being called on it and having to prove it. He did this also in YOU SAID A MOUTHFUL (1932), where he pretends to be a swimming champ. Here he pretends to be a polo champ, all to impress a girl (Carol Hughes). Brown was a natural athlete and is always impressive when he engages in any sports activity on film and invariably did all but the most dangerous stunts, so his character didn't have to lie about anything. It's a cheap and lazy device on the part of the screenwriters. In any event, polo is not a particularly compelling sport, nor does it lend itself very well to comedy. And the people who practice it and watch it are all idle, shallow rich people who get tiresome on screen pretty quickly. The best scene in the film involves a donkey who runs loose around Aunt Minnie's house up and down staircases, butting into every room and terrorizing the occupants, giving the audience, for a brief moment, one noble critter worth rooting for.

Gordon Elliott plays Brown's snooty polo-playing romantic rival and I was surprised to learn that he later took the name of Wild Bill Elliott and became a notable B-western star. I've seen some of those films and reviewed one of them, HELLFIRE (1949), on IMDb and the actor in this comedy hardly looks like the later western star and doesn't sound like him at all, which means he underwent one remarkable transformation in creating his western persona. Carol Hughes, who plays southern belle Mary Hilton, the object of Brown's affections, later played Dale Arden in the third Flash Gordon serial, FLASH GORDON CONQUERS THE UNIVERSE (1939).

POLO JOE was the last film Brown made at Warner Bros., ending a successful seven-year tenure at the studio. He left to go independent and his career suffered greatly as a result, thanks to the lackluster low-budget vehicles he chose to make. He never regained his star status, although he did a number of notable character roles over the subsequent decades.

Predictable plotline is not tremendously funny, but not bad. Strange scene of Brown singing Chinese songs with a trio of Chinese musicians. Usual scenes of Brown on a run-away horse, and in a polo game. Brown is always funny, but most of his other movies are better.

Up until the 'hilarious finale' I rather enjoyed this Joe E. Brown comedy. However, the ending was pretty dumb and really disappointed me....and I hope you can look past it and enjoy the movie.

When the story begins, Joe Bolton (Brown) has arrived back in the US after having lived in China for some time. Soon, he falls in with some society folks and there's a lady he wants to impress...so he pretends that he is an experienced polo player. Not surprisingly, his big mouth soon gets him in all sorts of trouble when they try to get him to play. Not wanting to be discovered, he comes up with a scheme to get out of it. Does it work? No...which leads to him playing in the big match.

The first portion of the film was pretty good and it was interesting to see Brown singing and talking in Chinese. As far as I know, it might have all been gibberish...and it would be interesting to know which it is. But the ending just made no sense at all and having the entire story depend on this finale was a mistake...at least how they handled it. It all comes off as ridiculous, to put it mildly.