The Romance of Digestion

Romance of Digestion, The (1937)

** (out of 4)

Robert Benchley short from MGM has him explaining to the viewer how food is digested. He starts out with a brief chat about the teeth, the tongue and then the digestive process, which is told in a clear manor. I really didn't care too much for this short but I did have to chuckle when thinking about going to see a movie in 1937 and this thing coming on. I'm not sure crowds were demanding this type of entertainment but they got it anyways. The film is mildly entertaining in hearing Benchley discuss this stuff but overall it's just way too dry to be funny or charming.

Here's a must for fans of Robert Benchley, for connoisseurs of nonsense humor, and for anyone who needs a chuckle. This short comic lecture pops up on TCM every now and again, and deserves to be better known.

Benchley originally created this material as a magazine piece, and here he simply recites his text from memory, using a very silly chart to illustrate his points concerning the teeth ("Nature's tiny sentinels"), the stomach, the tongue ("that awful-looking thing right back of your teeth") and the various digestive processes. The journey of the food to the stomach is first described in terms befitting a pleasure trip to the country, then at some point mysteriously turns into an industrial process involving factory workers and the ultimate production of fatty tissues, "which nobody wants." It is, we are told, "probably one of the worst-done jobs in the world." Don't expect fancy cinematography; this is a lecture delivered directly to the camera, a speech that could have been broadcast over the radio airwaves to comparable effect, but then we'd have missed Mr. Benchley's amusing chart, not to mention his wry facial expressions. Our host begins his talk rather tentatively -- and if the stories of his off-camera life are to be believed, odds are pretty good he was struggling with a hang-over -- but he picks up momentum as he goes along, and by the end he's earning a solid laugh with practically every sentence.

Highly recommended, especially to fans of Robert Benchley. And if you don't know who Robert Benchley was, that's quite all right, you're probably not reading this anyway.

I don't know whether my sense of humor is amiss, but frankly I never find these dry ROBERT BENCHLEY short subjects very intriguing or all that original.

He gives a lecture facing the camera on the "romantic" process of digestion, complete with a chart that shows the course food must take when it enters the human body. He talks of the teeth being "sentinels" before food is allowed to be tasted on the tongue and thereafter follows the usual progress toward the stomach, where it plays around in the "playground" area before going on to other digestive chores. The chart with its various markings is supposed to be funny.

Neither illuminating nor very witty, if it manages a few chuckles it's lucky. Benchley is as intentionally unconvincing as ever and since the man has all the charisma of a wet sponge, it's just not my cup of tea.

Dry--very dry instead of droll.

Robert Benchley, whose essays I was forced to read in junior high school, gives us a kind of silly lecture on what happens during digestion. Being a humorist, he tries to make it fun. Unfortunately, as I watched this seven minute effort, I thought he looked in pain. I don't mean physical pain; I mean pain from having to do this little film. it's not all that well done and he comes off as stiff and boring.