Reno or Bust

This is much more interesting comedy than the existing reviews suggest. It starts with a rather fine car-chase, whose purpose is not entirely clear to the viewer - is it two cars chasing to a wedding (the couple are dressed for that occasion) or one car pursuing another to prevent a wedding? In fact we soon discover it is the latter and that the par are an eloping couple.

The second feature of interest is that the wedding is not prevented and the two are duly married. The girl's parents remain however determined and whisk her off to Reno to get a divorce. There would incidentally be no difficulty in annulling an unconsummated marriage provided the parents are able sufficiently to twist the arms of their daughter or even, regardless of her views, if she is still a minor.

This marks the film from most familiar elopement comedies and is a reminder that, even before it passed legislation to make divorce easier in 1931, Reno in Nevada already had a reputation as the US "divorce capital", a trade that was of considerable economic consequence to both the town and state. Its role in this respect goes right back to 1908 when when the wife of William Corey, president of United States Steel Corporation, came there to get a particularly scandalous and well-publicised divorce. The key to the quick divorce was a short residence requirement and this had been reduced from six months to three months by 1927 (and was reduced to just six weeks in 1931). Perhaps however it is true that Reno judges could easily be persuaded to waive the residence requirement altogether as the film suggests (the Reno judge who "makes more money out of the fight game than Jack Dempsey" - a very neat title).

Since his new bride and her family done gone to Reno, our hero has no choice but to pursue in his very zippy little motor. The subsequent battle against the combined forces of the family, corrupt judge and the entire Reno police force is genuinely thrilling in a way slapstick chases rarely are and lead to his being returned across the state-border to California.

After failing to overpower his rival at the railway station where the latter is about to embark on "the alimony special, he is arrested for assault but escapes and heads across the desert to Reno in the detectives' car. When this car breaks down, the police catch up with him but this time he escapes in the police-car (this films is a real feast for motor-fanatics, arriving just in time to prevent the remarriage of the girl to his rival.

How he finally manages to force the family to agree to her remarriage to him I leave viewers to see for themselves.....

Bobby Vernon has just been married to Lila Lee, but her parents object and kidnap her to Reno, where, if not rescued, they will be divorced. It probably wouldn't hold up before a judge, but it does produce a fairly funny movie.

The thing is, Vernon is not particularly funny in this amusing comedy. Yet he had a history in vaudeville, worked for Sennet in such classic comedies as TEDDY AT THE THROTTLE and, after sound came in and he retired from performing to become a writer of comedies at Paramount. So we can see him not as a traditional movie clown, who performs pratfalls, but as a light leading man in this movie, with the comic bits inserted as appropriate and filmed for best comic effect -- there's one in which he steps on a sponge on a hotel register --I have no clear idea why it would be there -- and it squirts someone in the eye. We don't see Vernon in medium shot doing this. Instead the cameraman cuts to a medium closeup of his foot and lower leg, the sponge and the squirt's victim's head: the gag is emphasized, not the performer.

It's not the best way of shooting a comic performance -- the classic clowns always were careful to shoot in such a way, when performing their real gags, to show you there was no camera trickery, But to shoot that gag in a medium shot would be to lose it. So Vernon and director Archie Mayo chose the gag rather than the performer.

That's by no means the best gag in the movie. There are others, much better. Enough, I think, to make this worth your time.