Stardust

Yup, put me to sleep. I cannot imagine anyone actually wasting all 71 minutes of this movie's time to watch it. Has anyone who has seen this on VHS or DVD ever really watched it without ANY fast-forwarding? This is another example of the lead side of Hollywood's Golden Age. The only time this thing lit up for me was when Harry Langdon was on. And he is on screen very, very little. And they waste him.

Langdon is just as fascinating in 1938 as he was in the mid-1920s. But he has nothing to do. It appears he improvised what little time the writers and director gave him. And I have to give him credit; with nothing going for him, he is spellbinding to watch--for those few seconds here and there when he appears...

The movie is mostly the characters talking their way through the story, which I consider the worst kind of movie-making. The musical numbers are based on some nice surreal ideas, but the routines are too long and the dancing never takes off.

This is not even a movie for Langdon completists. Or Lupe Velez fans for that matter. (She only gets to rave and throw things one time in the whole movie, and then acts embarrassed about it.)

Would someone PLEASE convince SOMEBODY to release Langdon's Hal Roach shorts?!

A fine cast stuck in a musical with production numbers so ineptly directed one wonders if a monkey wandering by was responsible. Given the bad print quality and murky visuals, it also comes across as a faded relic from some bizarro planet, which is actually one of its unintended attractions. The highlight is a wacked-out space jaunt with an eye-rolling moon face and tapsters on stars, but it sounds better than it is, owing to extremely clunky direction and editing. The dance ensembles are good, just flatly recorded. Lupe Velez and Harry Langdon do what they can to keep things lively, but the movie is pretty much sunk by uninspired direction.

Ben Lyon and Wallace Ford are film makers in Britain, making a musical using a new color process. They have the rights to the process ... but only if they can get the movie made. Unhappily, they are up against the deadline and just about broke. Enter Lupe Velez, masquerading as a Latin American Cattle Queen, and Jean Colin, who loves Lyon, but is being pursued by predatory film magnate Ronald Ward. Harry Langdon is also visible on screen, identified as an idiot who inherited a brewery because his uncle hadn't gotten around to disinheriting him. That's all we'll hear from him.

American-born film producer William Rowland, working at American-born Joe Rock's unit at Elstree, hired American director Melville Brown to direct this movie and filled it with American talent, presumably to appeal to the American market. They also produced this is a new color process, but the previews turned out so poorly, they released it in black and white.

If it played more clumsily before, then it must have been dire. As it is, it's trite, sloppily edited and filled with some flashy but not particularly cinematic choreography to forgettable tunes. It winds up being a failed satire about people pretending to have money to get what they want, since it looks like the people who made it had no money.

This musical looks as if it had a reasonable budget. The cast is good. Ben Lyon,the lead,would stay here in the UK during the war. Harry Langdon at the tail end of his career. Lupe Valez not yet the Mexican Spitfire,and the ubiquitous Wallace Ford,Canadian by birth so qualifies for quota purposes. The musical numbers are good and are directed by Larry Ceballos,who did many early talkies.

The plot may not be up to much but then that could be said about most musicals of that era.