Min and Bill

Min and Bill (1930)

*** (out of 4)

Marie Dressler picked up the Best Actress Oscar for her performance here as Min, a waterfront rat who was given a small baby after its mother decided to run off. Min raised the kid to a young woman (Dorothy Jordan) along with the help of her friend Bill (Wallace Beery) but she is pretty much forced to throw her out to get her away from the trashy life on the waterfront. Then, Min must do even more when the girl's drunken mother shows back up. The actual screenplay here, by Frances Marion, is pretty standard for the era as it really doesn't try to do too much but there are some excellent performances that make the film worth viewing. I've been rather hit and miss on my opinions of Dressler but there's no question that this film belongs to her and it's without question the best work I've seen from here. I guess this was a real coming out after apparently considering suicide only a few years earlier when she made her comeback in THE PATSY, which eventually led to more roles and then this one, which got her the Oscar. Again, her look is just right for the film but I was amazed at how much heart and soul she pumped into her character and the film. This is a pretty dark little movie that doesn't take any comic turns or center on fake moments. The characters are shown as being ugly and trashy and it doesn't try to make them look good at any point. The film and Dressler's performance also makes it clear that ugly people can have good hearts, which I believe is the real point of the film. I was surprised that the film took a few of the twists that it did but then again, we're dealing with a pre-code era where happy situations weren't always forced on movies. Beery is also very good in his supporting role as his always plays the idiot well. I was also impressed with Jordan in her role and Marjorie Rambeau is fine as the drunken mother. Again, the screenplay is pretty straight forward and simple and it was clearly written to fit Dressler and Beery but the two take it, run with it and in the end deliver a nice little gem.

Given the running time of barely over an hour my guess is that MGM did not think Min and Bill would wind up the success it did. But the team of Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler proved to be box office. It also proved that you didn't necessarily have to appeal to that all knowing youth market to have box office attraction. Min and Bill was definitely for the senior citizen trade.

Director George Roy Hill created a real waterfront atmosphere for the telling of this story of an old woman who runs a cheap waterfront boarding house and the old fisherman who's her boyfriend. Min has a young girl living with her who was deposited on her doorstep by her mother who took off.

Years later the mother, played by Marjorie Rambeau comes back with a vengeance and wants her kid. The daughter is played by Dorothy Jordan who is now in a finishing school and about to be wed to a rich young man.

Of course this sets up the final conflict. Marjorie Rambeau deserves some accolades as well for her performance as a waterfront tramp.

Since the conflict between Dressler and Rambeau is what drives the film, Beery is around, but he's not central to the plot. Still even today he and Dressler provide a few good laughs.

Marie Dressler who was in her sixties when she won her Oscar for Best Actress, lived only four more years after this film was done. On the strength of this film, she became a box office draw, making something of a comeback from her days in vaudeville in the ragtime era where she was a star. She and Beery partnered again in the lighter Tugboat Annie.

Min and Bill though a real antique from the early talkies retains a certain charm that still comes through for today's audience.

This isn't a great movie, certainly. But Dressler's performance is just as certainly great.

She acts with her face. And what a face! If being a movie star meant being beautiful and glamorous, Dressler had that - not at all. Her face was truly homely. But it was capable of a hundred different expressions, some of them quite subtle. She was, in a sense, the female Lon Chaney. You can see why she would have been a hit in the silents.

She can also do physical comedy with the best of them. Her knock-down, drag-out fight with Berry in his room is a stitch. Is that really Dressler in all that fighting? The story itself - lower-class mother who sacrifices everything to let her daughter have a good (read: upper-class) life was common in the 1930s. There are other famous examples, and they are all weepy. But Dressler's stoic performance of the woman who could not tell her daughter how much she loved her - and yet loved her more than her own life - remains as powerful today as it must have been then, though today it is usually presented as a father who can't express his love to his son.

The implied superiority of the "upper classes" is hard to take today, especially when you see how snooty these wealthy are. But that takes nothing away from Dressler's performance, which merited her Oscar even against some very tough - and very glamorous - competition.

An old harridan, owner of a dockside dive, while fighting fiercely for the happiness of a young girl she's raised since an infant, still is caused constant problems by her boyfriend, the boozing captain of a fishing boat. But through violence & heartbreak, nothing can shake the true affection MIN AND BILL have for each other.

Marie Dressler was a phenomenon, almost a force of nature. Described once as having a face like the back of a bus, she nonetheless was Hollywood's greatest star the last three years of her life. She earned that position by her innate goodness, a quality that moviegoers could sense in all her roles. Here she gives her Best Actress Oscar winning performance and she is wonderful.

Equally memorable is Wallace Beery. Once characterized as having a body like an overstuffed laundry bag, he had the part of the lovable rogue perfected & patented. Very popular with the fans, with Dressler he created one of the legendary screen couplings.

The rest of the cast is really there to support the two stars, but Marjorie Rambeau does stand-out as a slattern who knows too many of Min's secrets.

A good representative of its era, this early talkie is sparked by the chemistry between Dressler & Beery. Some of the staging may be a bit stiff, but Miss D. & Mr. B. always fascinate. Location filming in an actual harbor also helps the movie considerably.

The dialogue is not as modern as my summary, as "Min And Bill" is shot through with the vernacular of the 20's. Love it when people say, for instance, "So's your old man", or "Aw,jeepers ....". It's almost like a lost language, one that you only hear in old movies. Problem is that often accompanying old expressions is that the plots of the movies are often threadbare with age, and that's what happens here. This one is the one about the guardian who raises a baby from infancy, and doesn't want to part with it when hemmed in by circumstances. It's been done many times since.

But this one stars Marie Dressler, which sets it apart. Here she is a rumpled old 'wharf rat' who runs a waterfront hotel/flophouse saddled with a barnacle/fisherman (Wallace Beery) who has attached himself to her. She is raising a teen-age girl who was dropped at her doorstep as a baby, and here is where the story becomes familiar.

Marie Dressler died too soon. She was, for a short time, a national treasure - even though she was Canadian. She starred in too few pictures but won an Oscar for this one. In all her movies, she was pitch perfect, with a little staginess - but she was a stage actress before Hollywood called.

Sad to say, there will never be another like her, but "Min And Bill" is a good example of her thoroughly entertaining on-screen persona. She was good in "Anna Christie" and, especially, in "Dinner At Eight", in which she achieves immortality with the knock-out punch last line in the picture.