Ladies' Night in a Turkish Bath

Saw this last month at the UCLA film Library along with 3 others. It shows Dorothy in a comic plot which is very different her usual milieu. She pulls it of with the aid of very amusing story. James Finlayson with his movie affectation, his bushy handlebar mustache, was a scream. The scrambling around in and around the ladies bath, by Dorothy, Jimmy and her mother was very inventive. I gave this an 8. Why this library does not release this and their other Mackaill flicks to TCM is very annoying. There has to be many that UCLA has that, some in nitrate form which can be very delightful to the army of Mackaill fans nationwide.

Very inventive for its time,not the usual unfunny Chaplin stuff, and way better than the Arbuckle boring attempts at humor.

LADIES NIGHT IN A Turkish BATH (1928) proves that you don't have to have a major comedian in a film to make a funny comedy. Jack Mulhall and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams (a dead-ringer for former President George W. Bush) are two construction workers who work on a high-rise building. Jack starts frequenting the "Ma and Pa" lunch-box stand, and his banter with very pretty Dorothy Mackaill is wonderful. Her parents, Jimmy Finlayson and Sylvia Ashton, decide to sell the business and move "uptown" to nicer digs. Their new neighbor immediately takes a shine to Dorothy. Jack and Dorothy get engaged, but they fight frequently over the neighbor's attentions to her.

Dorothy's mother decides to go on a diet, and we all know that when Momma goes on a diet that everybody goes on a diet. This makes hubby Finlayson (and the dog) miserable, as there is nothing good to eat. Fin gets his wife a giant wedding anniversary cake, but of course she can't eat it, so they quarrel.

The men head out to a "gentleman's club" to see a "hoochie coochie" dancer (i.e. stripper), while the ladies retire to a Turkish bath to relax and forget about the insensitive men in their life. The men's club gets raided by the police, so Fin and Mulhall climb in a window of the building next door, which is of course the Turkish bath and is full of naked women wrapped in towels. What follows is a hilarious climax.

The recent UCLA restoration looks very sharp. I saw this at at Cinecon with a large audience that roared with laughter throughout.

"Ladies' Night in a Turkish Bath" starts off as what is basically a character-driven romantic comedy, and then -- just as you are wondering, about two-thirds of the way through, whether the title is all a tease -- suddenly swings into all-out farce. But it's not really a question of poorly paced setup, or a pay-off too long delayed; it's very much a picture of two parts, each with their own quite individual merits. If anything, the initial section is the most charming and enjoyable.

However, I think the film probably does go on a little too long: a criticism levelled by reviewers of the time. After the family have moved 'uptown' the plot gets a bit bogged-down, and with hindsight, needlessly complex. Helen and 'Speed' are more fun when they are courting than in the throes of various disagreements, and one feels that the whole centre section could probably have been streamlined a bit.

Having finally got its cast into the Turkish bath, the film spends its main action sequence in a prolonged attempt to get them safely out. Helen finds herself alternately dupe and conspirator, her father gets hot under the collar, her mother is all steamed-up, and the preternaturally mobile face of Jack Mulhall as 'Speed' gets a very thorough work-out indeed. It's pretty much pure knockabout comedy with the promised element of titillation, and by and large on those terms funny.

But it was Guinn Williams -- who would later feature as sidekick to Errol Flynn in a string of popular Warner Brothers Westerns -- who really had me howling with delight. Here again he's playing comic relief as the hero's best friend, a cheerful cynic with a penetrating eye for lovers' folly, and he manages it without any of Mulhall's lightning-quick switches into mugging. (In one scene, caught out in apparently bizarre behaviour, he extricates himself via a masterfully camp -- and hilarious -- proposition.) Overall this is a decent little comedy with a slightly incoherent feel; the pacing suffers from trying to pack too much subplot in. There are a few laugh-out-loud sequences and a good many mildly amusing ones. It's not among the greats and never claims to be, but is entertaining enough.