Vida Boêmia

Presumably this was created as a penance for lustful sinners who only watch pre-code movies for sexy ladies. Only God could have created someone as perfect as Marguerite Churchill. She was made to be irresistible to men so the lustful sinner had no choice other than to endure this hour of hell.

This is one of those abhorrent films where people speak for a lot of the time in rhyme or even in song. When the actors aren't singing, they're doing what was considered at the time, 'comedy acting' - equally horrendous! Paramount made a few of these weird brain-bleaching semi-operas in the early thirties. Another was THIS IS THE NIGHT, which like this, lured red-blooded males into the picture houses with pretty young ladies.

Charles Farrell was ok in some of his pictures but the peculiar nature of this aberration doesn't really allow him or anyone else to act. Charlie Ruggles however as the "modern artist" is almost tolerable.

Even if this wasn't designed by the church to punish sin, Paramount certainly made this to appeal to men. Marguerite Churchill, who was impossibly pretty is given the role of a dissolute, jaded American living in the sexually liberated Paris (as imagined by Hollywood) who spends her days in lacy underwear and an open silky robe. Unfortunately the writers seem to have forgotten to give her role any actual character. What a waste, she could be a great actress in a decent picture.

It also features sexy, sassy Grace Bradley and a couple of seconds of the infamous naked dancer, Joyzelle Joyner. That nude dancing scene is presented as a very, very blurred image from the point of view of Farrell who has been drinking alcohol - allowed in sinful Paris but a banned evil influence in the US. So we're led into a salacious world but told it is a bad, dark place.

There is a shadow in a plot - about the nature of art but really, this doesn't even try to be a normal film. Neither is it remotely funny.

Charles Farrell is a Tennessee painter who wins a scholarship to Paris. On arrival he settles into an apartment in Montmartre, where the zany occupants include Charlie Ruggles, Gregory Ratoff, and Marguerite Churchill. Soon he and Miss Churchill are in love, but the other roomers are busy spending his scholarship money and filling him with hooey. Then Miss Churchill sees the painting he has done under their influence, she calls it terrible. They break up.

The movie starts off briskly with the events given in recitative, but it sags in the second half, despite Ruggles' quavering, good-natured nonsense and Grace Bradley as a peroxide Russian gold digger. It never quite recovers, but the lively first half and occasional bouts of nonsense keep it moving throughout.

If you look at the poster currently on IMDB, you would probably assume that this pre-code film is very tawdry. After all, there is a lady wearing nothing but a towel! But while the morals and situations in this film would have required changes had it come out after the tougher production code was enacted in mid-1934, the changes would have been minor. After all, a guy shares an apartment with a lady...and they aren't married. But they are, despite this very chaste.

Tom Duncan (Charles Farrell) has come to Paris to become a great artist. He soon falls in with a bunch of weirdo bohemians in an apartment building. Can Tom discover and unleash his great talent within and can he manage to win the girl by the end of the film?

This is an odd film. After all, a lot of the dialog is in rhyming prose! And, the characters are weird and keep popping into nearly every scene...much like you'd see in the movie "You Can't Take it With You". It's pleasant and fun...though a tad shrill...as if it's working just too hard to try to make you laugh.

Mostly for Charlie Ruggles fans; he's far and away the most amusing thing in it. It's supposed to take place in Gay Paree but except for a poilu in the opening sequence there isn't a single French character in the entire piece. Farrell and Ruggles talk their way through their "numbers" which are so badly scored you can barely tell they're even supposed to be musical. After "Love Me Tonight," someone at Paramount must have thought there was a demand for musicals cast with non-singers. Except for one short song each by Marguerite Churchill and Walter Woolf King (billed as Walter Woolf,) no one in this musical actually sings a solo. Churchill is initially rather charming in the title role but her character virtually disappears for the middle third of the story. It looks like they shot this on the Merry Widow set at Paramount. It's worth sticking around for the final line in the movie which is the funniest single gag in it.

Charles Farrell is miscast as a young hayseed from Tennessee who goes to Paris to study painting. He wins a scholarship but his painting style is very old-fashioned. He falls in with a loony bunch of Bohemians and learns about women and life and art.

He's interested in Kay (Marguerite Churchill) who's from Atlanta but they quarrel and the greedy Nada (Grace Bradley) moves in on him to take his money. There's also the sullen singer (Walter Woolf) who drinks too much but wants to marry Kay. Charlie Ruggles plays Crock, a fellow artist who tell Farrell his style of painting stinks and says, "You don't paint the whistle ... you paint the blow." If you paint the whistle, it's only photography.

Farrell gets drunk and paints a piece that wins a big prize ... until they discover something about it.

Bright and funny with a few good songs. The Russian duel scene is tedious. Farrell hardly bothers to hide his Massachusetts accent even though he's supposed to be from Tennessee. But Ruggles, Churchill, and Bradley are all quite good. Mischa Auer and Leonid Kinskey have small roles.