Avaliação por yrussell

As you would expect, how much you enjoy the film will depend on your tastes. The film is little more than a filmed variety show from that era. It features a diverse set of performers and comedians putting on a show for the audience. The MC is actually fairly funny, employing the style of humour where the talking starts out serious but then falters into something ridiculous. Some of the "connecting" skits (i.e. antics in between the main numbers) are quite good too. The main numbers ranged from excellent to awful. On the awful side, I didn't enjoy the bits of ethnic humour (e.g. Scottish people being cheap, which is the topic of an overly long "comedy" song). Weirdly, there's an act in this movie (featured twice) called "The Three Eddies", which was actually quite a spectacular piece of footplay (I chose to re-watch those dance numbers a few times - also, see Youtube). The "weird" (and sad) part is that "The Three Eddies" were three black men wearing black face! The black face made me feel uncomfortable even though they were actually black men underneath. The movie also has a very rotund xylophonist who made great music but also told an ethnic joke during one of his episodes (that joke ruined an otherwise pleasant scene). Another item of interest is the early colour in some of the other dance numbers. Although primitive, the colour adds a kind of pastel prettiness that makes the number look like a painting rather than real life. There's also, by the way, a few connecting sequences directed by a young Alfred Hitchcock (only one of these sequences has an identifiable Hitchcockian style). Overall, I wouldn't recommend this film to the casual viewer... but it's well worth a look if you enjoy exploring the early history of talking cinema and can overlook some humour that is offensive by today's standards.