Mister Antonio

Back in 1929, some films were still being made in the States that were silents. As for the talking pictures, they were a primitive lot. While the studios were quickly switching over to sound, they still didn't quite understand how to use sound and many of these early films are pretty dreadful when you see them today. However, while "Mr. Antonio" is no great film, for 1929 it's quite good and holds up today.

The film begins in New York. Some poor schmuck (Frank Reicher) has just come out of a bar--drunk, disoriented and taken for everything he has. A nice traveling hurdy gurdy player, Tony (Leo Carrillo), comes to the stranger's aid and they become friends.

Some time passes. The poor schmuck turns out to be the mayor of an extremely conservative and judgmental town--and they have no idea about his escapade in New York. He is loved in this place because he's a sanctimonious jerk in a town filled with sanctimonious jerks. Obviously the guy is a hypocrite because when he finds out that his ward stopped by a roadhouse and she was seen by the townsfolk, he disowns her-- even though she really didn't do anything other than go there to dance. The girl (Virginia Valli) is now homeless and guess who she meets on the road---Tony. And when Tony learns what the mayor did to her, he decides to visit this town and see his old friend!

This is a humorous little film that also has a point to make about hypocrisy and moral superiority. It's very watchable--even if Carrillo does seem to over-act just a bit. Plus, even with the overacting, he is quite entertaining.

By the way, if you do see the film, look closely at the character Joe, don't you think he looks a lot like Paul McCartney?!

A movie in which a young girl is thrown onto the street by her guardians for the unthinkable crime of drinking ginger ale with a boy in a roadhouse is only ever going to have the most tenuous links to reality, and Mister Antonio subsequently has little to hold an audience's interest. Leo Carrillo comes over all Chico Marx as the title character in this slight tale, but he doesn't quite have the strength of personality to carry the movie - and comes across as downright creepy when attempting to persuade innocent young Virginia Valli to spend a night under the stars with him.

This is a fairly good early talkie, thanks to a good original story by Booth Tarkington and an amusing performance by Leo Carillo who, in this phase of his career, always wound up playing Italians. Here he seems to be channeling Chico Marx and he comes to the rescue of orphan Virginia Valli, who has been tossed out of her uncle's house for drinking ginger ale in a road road while he is running for election on a temperance ticket, and he'll keep the two thousand dollars left her, thank you.

Given that start, I don't have to tell you how everything turns out. The performances are good. Carillo's role was originally intended for Otis Skinner, but he dropped out for some reason. Cinematographer Ernest Miller -- who spent his long career mostly shooting B Westerns -- and editor Arthur Roberts manage to keep you from noticing the stage-bound shooting by a careful combination of cutting and changing perspective. The sound track is a little thin and scratchy, but that might be an artifact of this particular print.

There are several amusing lines scattered throughout the dialogue and the result is a pleasant, if old-fashioned time waster.