Flirtation

This is an odd little film from the early thirties. The film starts with a montage of young man and his dog scenes set in the country. For no real reason, he and the dog travel to New York and it's soon the classic country boy in the big city scenario. Boy meets city girl with a shady past, they fall in love and you can guess the rest. Meanwhile the dog gets lost and the love story is inter-spaced with the dogs adventures.

So why would you bother with this film? There is one big reason....Jeanette Loff. Wow! What a forgotten star. She's gorgeous, talented and has quite a presence. Her life was cut short in 1942 with a possible suicide (not proved), she reminded me of an even more attractive (but equally tragic) Thelma Todd.

The only other star of the film is the dog, I think his name was Corky. The male lead was just your average early 30's B picture love interest.

See the film for Jeanette Loff, and then track down her other films.

Ben Alexander is a farmer and cheese inventor. One day he packs his luggage and heads to the city with his dog, Corky. He soon loses Corky, and that's one plot thread. He also finds burlesque chorine Jeanette Loff. Her mother is coming to visit, and Jeanette has written her she has a husband and a baby. She can borrow the baby. Alexander volunteers to play the husband.

Writer-producer-director Leo Birinsky seems to have set out to make a gloss on SUNRISE. That's a daunting task, but a noble one. He collaborates with Wells Root and Paul Ivano as the cinematographer, and that's a good start. The actors are fine, and most of the situations work, but it's overly sentimental -- nice dog, though -- and there was something wrong with the print, as if the soundtrack was not matched properly, and it makes everything appear looped. It may be wrong to base a review on that, but I can do no other. The net effect is a movie of well-made components that doesn't gel.

I noticed that on both YouTube and IMDb that "Flirtation" is described as a Pre-code film. Well, technically it is not, as the new Production Code came into effect in July of 1934...and this film came out in November, 1934. So, you can rest assured that it is not as sexy or risqué as some of the more infamous Pre-code films.

As for the story, it's a rambling tale of a rube who comes to the big city with his doggy. Both find love. In between, there is a lot of singing and adventures...none of which I found particularly noteworthy one way or the other. In some ways, the dog part of the story reminded me of "Lady and the Tramp". But apart from this, it never really caught my interest.

Considering this wasn't from a big studio, the cast, even in '35 were unknowns or has-beens and it was made with a budget that probably wouldn't cover the sandwich bill at MGM, this isn't too bad. It's definitely not 'good' either but if you enjoy mindless trash drenched in 1930s atmosphere you just might enjoy this.

Independent little pictures like this had no guarantee of being shown in cinemas so they had to make them as well as they could and then sell them as well as they could - such as by populating their advertising with pictures of very scantily clad girls! Being made just after the pre-code era means that it's far less risqué than it would have been were it made a year earlier. Nevertheless - for those of you who enjoy seeing sexy young ladies born over a hundred years ago bouncing around in skimpy outfits, you're in luck! Or are you? Nancy works in a Burlesque show but because she gets fired, we only get about one minute to see the goings on back stage with the young ladies wearing very little. For the rest of the film Nancy is trying to impress her strait laced mother by dressing...well, just like her mother.

Like a lot of early and mid thirties pictures, especially comedies, the plot is not what you'd call sophisticated: a dancer needs to convince her respectable mother she's respectable to so asks a stranger to pretend to be her husband and to complete the illusion, she 'hires' a baby from her neighbour. Yes, this film doesn't know of the existence of the concept of credibility. Somehow however you just accept this nonsense without criticism - although if you're not used to what was considered comedy in the 1930s, you might just think this a pile of puerile, poorly written garbage....which it is! Some of us however occasionally enjoy low brow rubbish - as long as it's not really bad! This just about gets over the line between watchable and unwatchable.

OK, Jeanette might be quite pretty, Ben Alexander is quite likeable but unquestionably without a shadow of a doubt, the real absolute star of this picture is Corky the dog. He honestly out-acts everyone else. He's great and I'm not joking, he really is the star of the show. He also deserves a more considerate and responsible owner than Ben Alexander's Dudley character. You'd have the RSPCA onto him these days. It's probably saying something when the best thing about a movie is a dog doing tricks but hey-ho, huff the Talbot!