Jogo de Amor

The film is actually a musical comedy remake of the 1927 silent film "Spring Fever", which starred William Haines and Joan Crawford. Montgomery plays the part of wise-cracking shipping clerk Jack Kelly who gets a holiday at a resort courtesy of his employer when the employer learns that Kelly is a great golfer and the employer needs help with his own golf game. At the resort Kelly meets Marilyn Crawford, daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and the two fall in love. They elope with Marilyn believing that Kelly is wealthy too, but Kelly's conscience soon begins to bother him about the false pretenses under which he has married his new wife.

This movie lacks the poignancy of the silent "Spring Fever". Montgomery does a good job as Kelly, but nobody can really replace Joan Crawford as the leading lady. In fact, you get the feeling that this actress was hired for her musical talents - she is pretty good in the musical numbers - and then as audiences began to reject musical films in 1930, MGM cut a bunch of the musical numbers and was basically left with an ineffective leading lady in a film lacking a good plot. In the original, Kelly is marrying to up his station in life. In this film, Kelly falls in love with a girl who just happens to be the daughter of a wealthy man. This film replaces all of the drama of Spring Fever with a musical comedy style. The musical numbers are catchy, but the comedy is somewhat dated. Released in September 1930, it is a good example of how entertainment was transitioning from the Jazz Age into the Great Depression. Recommended for those interested in films from this time period.

Love In The Rough casts a young Robert Montgomery as a shipping clerk in J.C. Nugent's department store who happens to be a greatamateur golfer. Just the man to help Nugent with his game so he brings Montgomery alongt to his country club. There Montgomery meets and romances Dorothy Jordan who assumes he's as rich as all the others there.

This s a remake of William Haines's silent classic Spring Fever and it would have been a whole lot better without an incredibly insipid score from Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields. Made worse by the fact that neither Jordan or Montgomery could sing a lick.

No doubt that MGM saw in Montgomery someone wh could eplace Bill Hines and at the begnning of his career Montgomery was playing smart aleck parts like Haines. Either those or cads or punks. Montgomery was also safely straight in the studio's eyes and Haines was beginning to rebel against the studio enforced closet.

Love In The Rough would have been somuch better without the music.

Love in the Rough initially resembles the legendary disastrous early talkies which almost brought down the heavily indebted film industry in the early '30s. Based on a Broadway flop play with music seemingly added on by hiring top song writing team of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, it had all of the elements that the movie moghuls though would add up to boffo box office but, because of the depression's arrival following the Oct. 29 stock market crash, people didn't have a taste for stories about people in evening dress or college hi jinks. The failure at the box office was always blamed on the static camera imposed by the crude and clunky sound equipment but this film exposes that canard.

The outdoor shots, seemingly with direct sound, are airy revelations. The camera work is fluid with out calling attention to itself with flashy moves. The musical numbers are imaginative, but, considering the work of Busby Berkeley to come, these are merely a stone age precursor. Maybe they didn't know enough at the time to shoot strictly in the studio with back projection process shots and post dubbed music but this is enjoyable for nothing else than its atypical uniqueness. The static scenes are embarrassing, as in did anybody find the opening scene with broken porcelain funny at any time? Likewise the racial 'humor', Jewish, Italian and African-American, is highly cringe worthy. The plot is nearly non existent, a reminder of the pre-Showboat musical which was virtually a series of scenes, songs and routines from a Vaudeville review.

This is an early performance by Robert Montgomery (his sixth of seven releases in 1930) in which he apparently sings, if, as I suspect, the music was recorded direct. Dorothy Jordan looks pretty, at least for the standards of the time but doesn't project much personality, unlike her support one Dorothy McNulty who pops from the screen. Jordan was a star in late silent and early sound times but retired to become Mrs. Merian C. Cooper.

After returning to vaudeville and radio, McNulty returned to films and modest fame as Penny Singleton of the Blondie series. An interesting trivia item is the fact that both Montgomery (Screen Actors Guild) and Singleton (American Guild of Variety Artists) were union presidents.

Montgomery's support was Benny Rubin, a dialect comic and a huge star in vaudeville. It was Benny Rubin who people like Jack Benny and Bob Hope aspired to become, and, years later, when they became big stars, they would always throw Benny a featured bit on radio and TV. Most of his comedy here is from hunger except for a laugh out loud two spot where Benny is acting as Mongomery's caddie and he meets Allan Lane's (as Harry Johnson) caddie going by the name 'C. Wesley Rappaport' and they conduct a hilarious dialogue in Yiddish. Even if it could be translated the subtitles wouldn't be able to keep up, and, with the timing lost, the humor would be lost. 'Rappaport' is not credited but as he appears later leading a harmonica quartet perhaps it could be Borrah (Boris) Minevitch, Russian born leader of the Harmonica Rascals. The tune introduced by the Harmonica quartet provides an excellent opportunity for an eccentric duet dance with Rubin and Singleton, one of the more delightful examples of what was lost with the demise of vaudeville.

Again this is not anywhere near what might be considered a 'good' film but specialists will find it more than just a historical curiosity. The plot is a swiss cheese. Montgomery is a golf champion working as a shipping clerk in Walter's Department Store and is enlisted by the golf mad proprietor to help him in the country club championship. This gets Montgomery to the country club and meets the millionaires daughter whereby the "mentoring the boss" is just dropped. The rest is just poor boy/rich girl bla bla bla.

At least LOVE IN THE ROUGH attacks the groundless convention that it was the staticness of the early sound films which nearly drove the Hollywood studios to the wall in the early 30s.

Love in the Rough is a B comedy film starring Robert Montgomery before he attempted more serious films. It also features Benny Rubin, a talented Jewish comedian, who was far more successful in burlesque and vaudeville than in early Hollywood films. The plot of an office worker becoming a ringer in a golf foursome is fairly different from the norm, and the filming of the episodes in the open air, rather than a studio, gives it an air of authenticity.

After about forty minutes, however, the film begins to lose its energy, and bogs down quite a bit. The end result is a pleasant, but not too stimulating comedy that captures the mentality of the 1930s corporate mindset for impressing others at the club.

"Love in the Rough" is a cute little comedy-musical with a golf club setting, starring a callow Robert Montgomery (who sings and dances!). The first hour is quite winning, though the plot bogs down a bit in the latter reels. There is a nice visual fade at the very end, so keep watching. The film has a surprising immediacy since it was filmed open-air on a real golf course rather than being studio-bound. And it provides a nice portrait of innocent courtship (just holding hands is considered pretty erotic).

The film is really a showcase for the comic talents of Benny Rubin, who is hoodwinked into being Montgomery's caddy. A lot of movie history books state that Rubin could not find work in the movies after the early 30s because he looked "too Jewish". Probably what they really mean is that his stereotypical Yiddish character (God-given looks included) was offensive. Of course, Chico Marx, Henry Armetta, Mantan Moreland, etc., got away with coarse ethnic stereotypes for years, so maybe he was really offensive to the moguls. Anyway, he has plenty of entertaining shtick to display in this picture, the highlight being a hilarious Yiddish palaver with another Jewish caddy. He's also menaced by a crude Italian greenskeeper. The politically incorrect portrayals are trumped by Roscoe Ates's incredible take on stuttering. In this movie, he takes his "art" to the extreme (he even gets Young's character to catch the bug). The dancing – much of it comedic – is fine, especially an interlude by one Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker.

One thing that really gets my goat is the writers' obvious ignorance of golf. They think that yelling "fore" means to be quiet, and that if an opponent's golf ball is blocking your putt, you have to putt around it! The latter leads to the climax, where the hero cleverly finds a way to overcome the obstacle.