Goofy Movies Number Six

Bless the hearts of the folks at Turner Classic Movies for showing these curiosities. They're not Great Art, they're just good for a chuckle. A chuckle is worth having.

My favorite line is "Goodness, I seem to be dying! Come, boys!" ...it's a typical Pete Smith moment. Without TCM nobody would know what a typical Pete Smith moment was like.

Here's the sixth of ten Goofy Movies narrated by a Smith called Pete. Like most of them, it starts out with a miked newsreel, then moves into a collection of clips from silent movies, stitched together into a nonsensical story by Pete's snarky voice-over.

It has very little to do with the way silent movies are put together (although I recently looked at a French film from 1924, THE MASKED LADY that made as little sense). However, the clips that were used in these burlesques were drawn from actual movies, and sometimes that's all that survives of them. In this case, I noticed a clip that is clearly from LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, perhaps the second most famous lost silent movie; if the late Forrest J. Ackerman were the authority, it was the worst loss to cinephiles, as he spent decades telling the readers of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND,

A decade or so, there was a clever 'reconstruction' of he film using production stills and the shooting script. I'm sure that some one is ready to go and add these three seconds. Certainly, every time they find another clip from METROPOLIS, they add it in, despite the quality.

Goofy Movies Number Six (1934)

** (out of 4)

Another entry in Pete Smith's "Goofy Movies" series, which has him narrating over silent film footage. Here we get various forms of "survival tips", which gets us scenes where cars race across tracks to beat a train, cars going off cliffs and various dangerous acts. This takes up the first five minutes then the final four are left with a fake movie with a character known as Mad Mike. I believe this is my third or fourth film from this series and to say they're hit and miss would be an understatement. The episode here really doesn't work because the narration is poorly written and none of it is very funny. I'm a big fan of the work of Smith but this here isn't one of his better moments. What worked best was seeing all the film clips from the silent movies and that's especially true during the first half when we see all these amazing stunts. I wish I knew what movies some of this stuff was from because I'm sure they're even more entertaining watching them on their own. The scene with the train going across the bridge that collapses is pretty interesting but the narration added to it does nothing.

It's Wotaphony Newsreel. Two trains crash and destroys a bridge. It's an obvious miniature. A passing car barely missing the train. That's a classic footage. Two trains crash into each other. That's another classic real footage. There is a dangerous motorcycle stunt with a train. That's an old school stunt. I like the train motif. I would get rid of the obvious miniature. Mad Mike Arch Fiend of the Universe is the silent film being spoof. It gets very random and goes all over the place. Even as a comedic spoof, one would like to be able to follow the story. It's the lesser half. It also has the old school African savage humor. It's not aging well.

With not a lot of stock film footage to work with in 1934, this Pete Smith short is long on silly tricks, (showing footage multiple times, running film in reverse/back and forth, freeze frame, etc.) and short on substance. An early attempt at humor that seems rather quaint today.

As these things go, this is about average for the time. Since most of the film footage used is silent era stuff from the 1920's, the entire nine minutes has only added sound effects and Smith's narration. There is really no cohesive storyline here, just a bunch of short film clips pasted together.

On a VERY obscure note, when "Mad Mike" is posing as a witch doctor and Smith says "Africa speaks!", you then hear the witch doctor speak in what is obviously reverse English. I did what maybe no one in history has ever done; I reversed the clip to find out what the backwards words really said. It's Smith himself saying, "What a phony newsreel." (That's information provided by unemployment and too much time on my hands.)