Home Movies

Mr. Benchley lectures the audience, in his patented befuddled manner, on how to make home movies. He proceeds to show some awful home pictures with a running monologue on why the subject turned out so badly. The piece is one of a long series he did, beginning with the recording of his stage act 'The Treasurer's Report', winning an Oscar for HOW TO SLEEP and continuing on, in various formats, for MGM and Paramount through his death.

My parents used to take home movies and, for some time, insisted on exhibiting them to people. As they usually concerned the rather embarrassing things my brother and I did when we were toddlers, we managed to grab and destroy the relevant reels a couple of decades ago.

Nowadays, of course, everything is on computers and the internet, where nothing ever dies. I feel for you.

This is a Robert Benchley short. Benchley made a string of everyman films for Paramount and MGM and most showed him looking like a clueless dork. I have never been a huge fan of them though considering how many they made, somebody much have liked them.

"Home Movies" consists of Benchley showing off his boring home movies while pontificating ad nauseum about what a great filmmaker he was. However, time and again he got the shots all wrong and blames it on the machinery. He's such a fat-head that you really want this one to end and mercifully, it is a relatively short film. Additionally, the humor is practically nonexistent and there's little to commend in this one.

I wondered what was the reason behind this silly short: where the old studios worried about the possibility of people making their own films? For those like me who believe that there will come a time when this would be something normal that will put industrial cinema in its place and not as "the only and best way" to make films, this short is a reactionary piece of uninspired filmmaking. It is not even aware that the edited home movie that Robert Benchley shows to his guests is by itself quite attractive. It is an irony. Today it could pass for an "experimental film"! For me this is funnier than what scriptwriter Benchley and director Wrangell intended to do: ridicule home movies. Now that we are thankful that new technology has permitted the democratization of cinema, little by little, "Home Movies" is more dated than it has any right to be.

We catch befuddled Robert Benchley fiddling with some film. Obviously unprepared, he announces plans to share information on "the art of making motion pictures in your own home." Of course, we know this as home movies. Then, Mr. Benchley recollects showing his "Home Movies" from a summer family trip, to a group of uninterested adults. There are problems with focus, camera-work, and other typical amateurish mishaps. Benchley tries to blame them on faulty manufacturing. He is more amused than either of his audiences. It ends with a warning to observe the "No Smoking" sign.

*** Home Movies (2/17/40) Basil Wrangell ~ Robert Benchley, Marie Blake, Hobart Cavanaugh, John Butler

Home Movies (1940)

** (out of 4)

Robert Benchley short has him sitting at his desk where he begins to tell the audience the best way they should make home movies to keep their friends entertained. When then flash to a party he's throwing where he decides to show off his recent vacation but of course everything he filmed turned out wrong. If you're familiar with Benchley's work then you're going to know what to expect. The more films I see from him the more I'm starting to think that he's simply not for me. I'm sure he has many fans out there but I'm starting to lose faith because of seeing one bland film after another. This one here is certainly far from his worse and I actually laughed a couple times but in the end there just wasn't enough to keep me entertained. The humor is pretty much what you'd expect as the "movies" he's showing are out of focus, have heads cut off, have no pictures and feature various other issues that make for a bad movie. There aren't any surprises or interesting aspects to the film so this here is clearly for Benchley fans only.