Movie Memories

Movie Memories #1 (1933)

** (out of 4)

A rather bland short from Vitaphone has a narrator talking over clips from silent movies but adding his own brand of comedy. Most of the clips scene here are from early (pre-1905) Edison movies and it should go without saying that they're pretty much just used to mock and make fun of. There's one clip of various police walking in front of the camera but this film with pause to make it look like they're posing for a picture. Not very funny. We also get a clip from a movie dealing with a house fire where the narrator gets to joke about how one scene the house isn't on fire while the next it is. I'm going to guess this thing was meant to spoof newsreels but even this attemp at humor doesn't work. This isn't a horrible waste of time but one does wonder if people in 1933 even found it funny.

This annoying and supercilious short subject from 1933 makes fun of how stupid people had been twenty or thirty years earlier. They show clips of Mayor Robert van Wyck and the Jeffries-Fitzsimmons fight and point out how unimportant they were in the 1930s. They also show a cutdown of a comedy starring Kate Price with an annoying voice over commentary provided by Leo Donnelly. Who knows or cares who he is? This and a followup in 1934 were Warner Brothers' response to the Goofy Movies series at MGM, which was a wild burlesque narrated by Pete Smith. All that it demonstrates is that we all think the way our parents ran things was idiotic and our children will think so too.

If you watch this movie, it will be because you love old movies. If you have any sense, this will not be one of the old movies you love.