Soupe au lait

This enjoyable Harold Lloyd comedy makes good use of a familiar setup, and it also gives Lloyd a chance to do a lot of the kinds of physical gags that were such a big part of his silent movie classics. Adolphe Menjou and the supporting cast give Lloyd plenty of help, and director Leo McCarey is also right at home with this kind of material.

Lloyd plays a milkman who gets involved with a shady fight promoter, played by Menjou, after a chance encounter with the middleweight champ gives Lloyd's character a reputation as 'the fighting milkman'. The premise is funny, but it calls for some good acting and direction to make it hold up for a full-length feature, and fortunately this movie has both.

Lloyd's ducking and dancing antics bring to mind some of the classic routines in his silent movie triumphs. Besides the boxing scenes, there is a hilarious, classic sequence with Lloyd and Marjorie Gateson practicing the ducking technique together. Menjou is also in his element as the fast-talking promoter, helping even the most implausible material to work smoothly.

The result is a solid comedy that, while a cut below Lloyd's silent classics, has some very good moments and is enjoyable to watch.

This entertaining film deals with a timid milkman named Burleigh Sullivan (the name of the lead character, "Burleigh" is an inside joke since it sounds like "burly" which means 'strongly and heavily built, husky' which the character is not) . Sullivan (Harold Lloyd), somehow knocks out a boxing champ in a brawl. The newspapers get hold of the story and photographers even catch Burleigh knock out Speed again . Speed's crooked manager (Adolphe Menjou) decides to turn Burleigh into a boxer . Burleigh doesn't realize that all of his opponents have been asked to take a dive. Thinking he really is a great boxer , Burleigh develops a swelled head which puts a crimp in his relationship with pretty girl called Polly Pringle (Dorothy Wilson) . He may finally get his comeuppance when he challenges fighter Speed (William Gargan) for the title. So the sleazy manager decides to substitute him with Sullivan , who is now groomed for stardom. Naive Burleigh does everything the crook says, only to be blamed when it all explodes in their faces big time.

This light-hearted comedy and enjoyable story is basically a showcase for the many talents of Lloyd , as a frail man mistaken for a potential champion and probably to be Harold's last classic picture . The yarn is appropriate , but no equal to Lloyd previous silent productions. Amusing acting by Harold Lloyd as a shy milkman Burleigh Sullivan who accidentally knocks out drunken Speed McFarlane, a champion boxer who was flirting with Burleigh's sister . Harold plays a milque-toast weak man , a funny and totally extroverted Lloyd who thinks he really won all those fights that he was signed up by crooked manager Adolphe Menjou who shows to have a big flair for slapstick comedy . Features great support cast such as Helen Mack , William Gargan and Lionel Stander will repeat his role from this original version ten years later and film debut of Anthony Quinn. Producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights for the property in the mid-1940s for his remake The kid of Brooklyn (1946), as well as the original negative and almost all existing prints, and destroyed them. The ending struggle scenes for the championship is hysterically fun , an adequate material for Harold LLoyd's physical skills . Beautifully filmed in black and white cinematography as well as atmospheric musical score . It proved to be a very profitable film , being this original rendition with Lloyd and McCarey crisper and funnier than subsequent retelling . The motion picture was professionally directed by Leo McCarey ; however , when director was in the hospital, Norman Z. McLeod directed some of the scenes . The film is definitely for the lighthearted.

This flick has been adapted several times , as firstly the original play opened at the Cort Theatre in New York on 8 May 1934 and closed in July 1934 after 63 performances , titled the Milky Way (1934) , written by Lynn Root and Harry Clork , directed by William W. Schorr with a cast formed by : John Brown, Brian Donlevy (as "Speed McFarland"), Leo Donnelly (as "Gabby Sloan") , Edward Emerson, William Foran, Gladys George (as "Anne Westey"), Emily Lowry, Hugh O'Connell (as "Burleigh Sullivan") . And reworked a decade later by Samuel Goldwyn as The kid from Brooklyn (1946) , it even features some of the same supporting characters the Lloyd version . The big difference is the addition of the songs , the players are : Danny Kaye as Burleigh Sullivan, Virginia Mayo as Polly Pringle , Vera-Ellen as Susie Sullivan , Steve Cochran as Speed McFarlane , Eve Arden as Ann Westley , Walter Abel as Gabby Sloan , Lionel Stander as Spider Schultz . Furthermore , The Hedda Hopper Show - This Is Hollywood" broadcast a 30 minute radio adaptation of the movie on March 22, 1947 with Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo reprising their film roles. And finally a special version titled ¨The Calcium kid¨ (2004) starred by Orlando Bloom , Michael Lerner , Billie Pipper , David Kelly ,in which an English bachelor milkman, 'accidentally' knocks down his boxing club's champion as stand-in sparring partner.

Overall, this is entertaining even if it is very dated in a Harold Lloyd-kind of way, meaning a typical role for him where he's the wimpy-but -brave hero. In this story, Harold is "Burleigh Sullivan," the shy milkman who winds up - even though no clue about boxing - as a professional fighting for the middleweight championship of the world! Ridiculous? Yes, but that was Lloyd and his films: slapstick lunacy like Keaton, Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, etc.

Along the way to his fame and glory in the ring, Harold picks up a serious girlfriend (the very wholesome and attractive Dorothy Wilson as "Polly Pringle") and so a little romance is part of the story.

Lloyd provides a lot of laughs but he isn't the only one. Helen Mack has a lot of wisecracking lines as Burleigh's younger sister, "Mae." Also, con-man/fight manager "Honest Gabby Sloan" (Adolph Menjou) gets in his share of funny and serious lines. The three of them, plus some other mentally-deficient boxers, all contribute humor.

In all, it's a sweet-tempered film with a lot of charm. True, some of the humor is too dated and stupid but the "hits" far outnumber the "misses" in the comedy department.

Adolphe Menjou plays up milkman Harold accidentally knocking out the middleweight Champ into a fixed series of fights. And what strikes me is that--unlike poor Buster Keaton, or Charlie Chaplin's Tramp suddenly sounding like an English butler in "The Great Dictator"--Lloyd was perfectly cast in playing the nice likable sound version of his nebbishy Clark-Kent hero, even if he was getting a little too old to play the young twenty-something go-getter of "Safety Last" by this time.

The script was based on a then-hit play, and director Leo McCarey handles the right mix of the play's Front Page-esque late-20's rapid-fire wisecrack snark, and Lloyd's own physical comedy, as a "fighter" with an amazingly developed personal talent for ducking punches. (And, like all Lloyd characters, his embarrassingly ambitious delusions of grandeur once a few fixed fights go to his head.) I may only have a few to judge from, but if you had to see ONE Harold Lloyd talkie out of curiosity to see how the sound era treated him, this is one that will relieve the most worry. He had been making sound films for seven years by now, and although the first one , "Welcome Danger", was just awful, Lloyd improved quickly in the new medium.

In this very solid Harold Lloyd screwball comedy, Lloyd plays an unassuming milk delivery man who finds himself on the front pages when he's credited with knocking out the world middle-weight boxing champion, Speed McFarland, in a street brawl. The negative publicity this news generates for McFarland comes much to the dismay of McFarland's manager, the slick Adolphe Menjou, who instantly plans a damage-control scheme. Lloyd will go up against a number of other boxers and win in fixed fights, building anticipation for a rematch against McFarland, in which McFarland will clobber him in the first round, since Lloyd doesn't really know how to fight. Of course, nothing plays out as simply as it should, and all manner of hijinks and supporting characters find themselves mixed up in this zany plot.

I was impressed by the tight screenplay for "The Milky Way." It's classic 30s screwball, which means the script doesn't have to make a lot of sense, but even so the scriptwriters flesh out little details in the action -- like a thug who can't read, or Lloyd's affection for his milk cart horse, Agnes -- that play a role later in the plot. And the film is filled with all manner of sight gags and one-liners. Some of my favorite set pieces are the ones in which Menjou's sardonic girlfriend, played like a champ by Verree Teasdale, an actress I've never heard of, teaches Lloyd how to box by turning his training into a dance lesson; and a hilarious bit that finds Lloyd racing to his big match with McFarland while lugging around a colt, offspring of the beloved Agnes. Director Leo McCarey knows how to stage physical comedy, and the frame at any given time is stuffed with all manner of characters doing or saying something completely separate from what everybody else is doing or saying, so that the reigning visual style of the film is controlled chaos.

"The Milky Way" may not be in the same league as some of its screwball contemporaries, like "My Man Godfrey" or "Bringing Up Baby," but I guarantee it will put a smile on your face.

Grade: B+