(People ask me why I don't have Netflix, and honestly, adding that to this sort of paralysis isn't going to help me watch more movies.)
Anyway, I've been amassing movies much faster than I watch them for a while, so what to do? Well, make a game of it. Therefore I present "Film Rolls" (the third name I've put on this post but this one's sticking), a board game (of sorts) which admittedly has all the strategy of Chutes and Ladders and the arbitrary scoring of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. First, the board:
Row One
Box One: Western movies from early cinema to 1935
Box Two: Western movies from 1989 to 2014
Row Two
Box One: Western movies from 1935 to 1954
Box Two: Western movies from 2015 to present
Box Three: Chinese/Hong Kong movies from Bruce Lee to 1994
Row Three
Box One: Western movies from 1954 to 1967
Box Two: Japanese movies
Box Three: Chinese/Hong Kong movies from 1996 to 2017
Box Four: Tsui Hark, Zhang Yimou/Gong Li, and Pang Ho-Cheung
Row Four
Box One: Western movies from 1967 to 1973
Box Two: TV sets and Korean movies
Box Three: Chinese/Hong Kong movies from 2018 to present and John Woo
Box Four: Johnnie To and music discs
Row Five
Box One: Western movies from 1974 to 1988
Box Two: Hitchcock!
Box Three: The Star Wars saga
Box Four: Ringo Lam, ShawScope, Wong Jing
That's the board, although there's a good chance it gets rearranged. Here are the players:
As for the rules: I roll a giant d20 and move the figure across the board. The setup is made so that I don't get too mired in any one sort of movie, even if I roll a bunch of ones. The "players" get points from the star ratings in the review, so landing on a box set is a great opportunity to pull ahead. Whoever scores the most by the time they get past Wong Jing wins!
Of course, given that the point of this is to get me watching my backlog, I feel completely free to make new rules up as I go along and apply them inconsistently (I mean, if I don't feel like going through a 10-disc box set…). One I think I'll go with is that a 20 roll gets that "player" a bonus pick from the "recently purchased but previously seen pile". Maybe I'll do something wacky if someone hits the Funkos being used to fill space in the shorter rows. Oh, and the board itself will change as I take the movies I've watched out and slide stuff from new orders in. If I were "competing" with someone else, I still think cheating would be encouraged.
So let's get started. Roll that die, Mookie!
And for Bruce…
So, let's see how our guys did!
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
It's kind of a neat trick this movie pulls, making its central romance feel both impossible and inevitable, especially since the other options presented are fine - honestly, Ralph Bellamy's Allen Macklyn is so thoroughly likable that you kind of get mad at the movie for basically treating him as less than a viable leading man because he's in a wheelchair. He's just thoroughly well-meaning even if Fred MacMurray's Theodore Drew III is so feckless. Amiably so and self-aware in his fecklessness, but ridiculous nonetheless. In just a little bit of time, one even becomes fairly fond of Astrid Allwyn's Vivian Snowden, the heiress to whom Drew is engaged.
So how does it work? More than anything, I think, by convincing the audience that these two like each other and let that attraction grow without a whole lot of fanfare. Carole Lombard's Regi Allen is serious enough when she says she's looking to marry someone with money, yeah, but she's not really able to go through with it, befriending Allen rather than targeting him. Lombard is spiky and sarcastic here and it plays well off MacMurray's easy patter, and there's a whole cloud of supporting character around them that do what they need to but never overload the movie.
From 75 years down the line, it's a fun time capsule, too. Regi is a manicurist working out of a barber shop but also dispatched to rooms in the apartment building/hotel for which the shop is an amenity, and it's funny to see this as a sort of male vanity. The Depression is there and having no money is taken seriously, but minimized a bit by one of the film's funnier lines ("remember the Crash?" / "Yeah?" / "That was us."). There are also some uncomfortable bits of stereotyping - all three movies in this box set have some cringe-worthy bits with Japanese and Black characters.
Love Before Breakfast
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 February 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Oof, but some movies really don't age well, to the point where one is tempted to look back and see if there were people backing away from this one. It's a romantic comedy built around obsession that always finds the antics of the man who would wreak havoc on everyone else's life to get what he wants funny.
Admittedly, that's kind of the fine line that screwball walks. It's not impossible for a movie with such a broad premise - corporate titan Scott Miller (Preston Foster), understandably attracted to New York socialite Kay Colby (Carole Lombard), buys the company that employs her fiancé Bill Wadsworth (Cesar Romero) and reassigns him to Japan, only to let it slip and earn Kay's scorn. There's a way to make these characters broad and their actions just play as big rather than malicious, but the movie never does the work to establish that the previous connection between Kay and Scott that's vaguely mentioned has some sort of reciprocal spark, or gives either a personality beyond "selfish rich jackass". There's plenty of room for comedies about how the rich are different or making their antics exaggerations - and this cast gamely makes those jokes and by and large makes them work - and perhaps if Romero's Bill was around more and maybe established as a sort of Diet Scott, there'd be more of a story about Kay stubbornly refusing to face what she really wants. Instead, he lingers as a pleasant default alternative to Foster's stalker, though that's not where the movie winds up going.
The Princess Comes Across
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
This movie reunites Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray just seven months after Hands Across the Table, and it makes me wonder what it was like to watch the same actors have their characters fall in love on-screen in different ways every few months.
They're an especially fun pairing here, with Lombard playing an out-of-work actress doing her best Garbo as "Princess Olga" (because what ocean liner would charge a princess actual money?) and MacMurray as the musician she bumps out of the ship's best suite. They've each got sidekicks, and then there's also a blackmailer, an escaped felon, a ship full of detectives, and ultimately a murder to solve. The script does a nice job of balancing all of that material - it's a cozy enough mystery to allow for some capers and hijinks but not overpower everything to the point where the caricatured international detectives can't be goofy and the sparks between Lombard and MacMurray feel like a distraction.
This sort of movie hasn't entirely disappeared, but it's much harder to come up with a setting that is simultaneously contained but crowded enough to bring in new characters when you need it these days without it being a period piece. It's kind of a shame, because that's a great spot for both comedies and mysteries to be. That Benedict Cumberbatch is kind of a dead ringer for young Fred MacMurray makes me kind of want to see someone remake this while still keeping it in the thirties; it's a solid concept with roles comic actors can chew on.
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I occasionally forget that animated shorts existed between "Gertie the Dinosaur" and "Steamboat Willie", but they did, with this early collaboration between Charley Bowers and "Mutt & Jeff" creator Bud Fisher an example. To modern eyes, it's incredibly stiff - even as Mutt & Jeff are fluid designs, the customers (especially the pretty lady) occasionally feel like they were drawn once and pasted in - but it's got a number of pretty good gags, even if the filmmakers seem to be taking a beat too long for the punchline every time.
It is, of course, also an early example of Bowers playing with mechanical things, although this was so popular a trope in silent films (and presumably other media; Rube Goldberg was of this era) that it wasn't necessarily unique to him.
"A.W.O.L." * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Scroll up one for "animation in this period often seems like a black hole", but it sort of applies to this one as well, with the added caveat that "A.W.O.L." often has the feel of an animated editorial cartoon, with metaphors helpfully labeled and the occasional feel that the soldier who has been tempted by "Miss AWOL" is wandering over a large piece of paper as opposed to France. It's a peculiar sort of thing that is extraordinarily of the moment both in form and content - it's not hard to imagine this being produced quickly, shipped to France, and shown to soldiers getting impatient for the next boat home - and as such even its more inventive bits of cartoon comedy don't exactly work, a hundred years later, but it's still kind of fascinating.
"Egged On"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
"Egged On" is the first known "Bricolo" comedy - that is, the first where Bowers is playing a sort of exaggerated version of himself, an inventor whose elaborate creations eventually take a turn into the surreal - is a pretty fully-formed example of what many would be like, with certain standard props and ideas kicking around: The man loved his eggs and Model Ts. He and his collaborators also had what appeared to be singular talent for designing strange situations that might look like they could exist in the real world and doing stop-motion animation, especially for 1926.
It's kind of a mix of different ideas - initial slapstick bouncing between offices in a building before heading out to a farm to actually build Charley's machine which would make eggs somehow unbreakable, then a frantic attempt to collect enough eggs to do a demonstration. The supporting characters are a kooky sort of hodgepodge, and even at twenty minutes long, one's likely to say "hey, why don't you just…" a couple of times. It's delightfully goofy, though, especially once the Rube Goldberg machine shows up and then just taking a screwy left turn once an automobile's engine starts heating eggs which then hatch as miniature cars.
The whole thing is downright peculiar, but I kind of love it, both as a live-action cartoon and the way it combines excitement about anything being possible and an understanding about how the results might be weird.
"He Done His Best"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The next short on the disc has an infatuated Charley ("Bricolo" en France) taking a job as a dishwasher at his crush's father's restaurant, sparking a mutiny because he's not union, and then converting it into an impossible automat that rapidly grows its produce within the central machine. I had no idea that restaurant workers had such a strong union back then - what happened?
The film seems a bit more focused than "Egged On" in certain ways - no less anarchic and impossible to predict once Charley's gadgets start working and failing in equally impressive fashion, but there's a certain logic and progression to the jokes that lets it build a bit better than the pure jumpy randomness of the previous one. It doesn't exactly manage the sheer levels of absurdity that some of Bowers's shorts do, but it's genuinely funny from start to finish and has a pretty darn decent punchline.
(It's also one of those weird cases where a nearly-50-year-old Bowers is playing a lovelorn/naive twenty-something, just a ton of makeup, and it works okay in HD but can't have been fooling anyone in the huge movie palaces.)
"Fatal Footsteps"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
"Fatal Footsteps", meanwhile, is almost sensible at points, with Charley trying to learn the Charleston to win a contest despite the farmer he works for being the head of an anti-dance league. Its charm in large part comes from the earnest fondness that said fellow's heavyset daughter has for him; for all that the premise of the movie involves Charley trying to win the hand of some other girl he doesn't even know because he barely considers this one as much more than part of the background, the movie has few jokes at her expense, so it works when she's suddenly visible to him.
Plus, there's plenty of fun destruction caused by the inevitable automatic dancing shoes. The whole gag of Charley covering the house with practice footprints may be one that I suspect never actually happened in real life, but it kind of works here as something a guy as determinedly eccentric as Charley might do rather than a "normal" thing getting out of control, but when the crazy slapstick with going up and down walls and an impossible performance takes off, the short works pretty darn well.
"Now You Tell One"
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
"Now You Tell One" isn't the entire reason why I ordered this set once it became available, but of the four shorts Serge Bromberg presented when I made that trip to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, it's the one that hit me the hardest. On second viewing, there's some weird biological WTF-ery to go along with its cartoon mice and other exaggerations that kind of has to be seen to be believed. If nothing else, it's the one I'd use to introduce folks to just how delightfully peculiar this guy making live-action cartoons in the roaring twenties was.
What I said back in '15
"A Wild Roomer"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I may have just recognized the pun in this short's title, two weeks after watching it for the second time.
This was the first Bowers I saw back at SFSFF '15, and it's a hoot, a bunch of silent-movie tropes smashed together and executed in the most ridiculous fashion possible - and it's not like the Buster Keaton takes on this theme are restrained and reasonable! Of the Bricolo shorts, it's the one I could most easily see extended into something feature-length - maybe a 70-80-minute feature, admittedly - because there does seem to be a little more around the edges than usual
What I said back in '15
"Many a Slip"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I feel like there's a gag missing from "Many a Slip" about how and why the Bricolo house keeps getting further and further off the ground that I missed, like this had to be cut down to two reels and none of the stop-motion bits with the "slipperiness germs" was going. Or maybe it's just a bit that everyone in the 1920s would get but which has fallen by the wayside over the last century.
It's kind of a weird movie in some ways, leaning hard on the hoary "in-laws from hell" gags while on the other hand mocking them by making a big joke out of banana peels suddenly being adhesive. And, no mistake, every time that "banana peel behaves contrary to expectations" happens, the movie works much better than it's got any right to. And if "pretty wife who adores her eccentric husband and is past justifying it to her skeptical family" is a favorite character type, Corinne Powers is a great early example.
What I said back in '15
"Nothing Doing"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
There aren't a whole lot of gadgets and creatures in "Nothing Doing", and I suspect that the result is an indicator of why Bowers isn't mentioned alongside the other great silent comedians (aside from how he never did features) - take away the surreal zaniness and special effects, and have him play a character unlike the inventive eccentric, and he's not that much funnier than any of the likely dozens (or hundreds) of other guys making short comedies in the 1920s. It's not great material - Charley wants to marry a girl, but her father's a cop and won't let her marry outside the profession, so he finds a way around the minimum height requirement to join the force, promptly making a hash of everything - but it's something a the greats could have worked with.
This kind of feels like it wants to be a Chaplin short, but Bowers can't wrap himself around this other persona. His skills are in playing a pretty specific sort of screw-up, and this isn't it.
"There It Is"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Confession: I didn't really remember details of any of the previous Bowers shorts I saw back in SF as I watched them. I remembered the Bricolo persona and the idea of them, but none of the gags really rang a bell nearly seven years later. "There It Is", on the other hand, is hard to forget, the most cartoonish of his live-action shorts and maybe the fastest-paced, a barrage of broad gags, slapstick, and exaggerated characters. The Fuzz-Faced Phantom is right out of a comic strip and by himself makes this perhaps the most successful live-action cartoon of its era.
What I said back in '15
"Say Ah-h!" (second half)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Only the second half of this exists, so you're kind of being dropped into the deep end, but that does gets you the proto-Svankmajer bits where Charley feeding an ostrich various odds and ends causes it to lay an egg that hatches into a bizarre sort of ostrich kratt that eats everything in sight. It's impressive stop-motion work - for all that Bowers never became a great performer, his animation skills continued to build even if lesser works - and he still knows his way around a simple but effective joke, like a rock-hard egg after the bird eats concrete.
"Whoozit" (second half)
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Bowers thought oysters were really entertaining creatures to anthropomorphize, and, y'know, I don't think that's the case.
"It's a Bird"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
I wonder how common it was for silent artists to try and rebuild some of their greatest hits for sound, which Bowers and company do here, bringing back a few egg gags from previous shorts and the Liar's Club from "Now You Tell One" (although that was apparently a common trope of the time). It's a goofy thing that nevertheless has some genuine laughs and impressive animation, even if it's not one of Bowers's best. What's kind of interesting is how suddenly having sound sort of pings this crew in a different creative direction - where before, the stop-motion creatures were limited to pantomime and seemed a natural fit for it, the bird he meets in Africa with the wacky eggs now talks, and that seems to make sarcastic jibes flow easier than wise frustration.
"Believe It or Don't"
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
It's 1935, and now Bowers is back to animation, and I wonder a bit if "It's a Bird" just didn't work right for him, or if even the smaller studios weren't sure about him in the more naturalistic works that sound encouraged. "Believe It or Don't" has some nifty work to it - some pieces look impressively soft and muddy - but by and large he's rushing to punchlines that don't feel quite that clever.
"A Sleepless Night" (silent)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
The soundtrack for this one is lost, and Lobster didn't commission a score the way they did for the silent entries, which means what you've got here is ten minutes that are more unnerving to watch than they're supposed to be (after all, anyone who's been to a silent movie event will point out that they weren't really silent).
It's fun and impressive stop-motion, though, good enough to pass muster compared to things produced decades later. It's as good as any other short with cartoon mice living inside someone's walls and tangling with the larger animals as they try to steal from the humans' pantries, although there's something really neat about how the three-dimensional environment makes the film both more real and more askew than the painted backgrounds of the typical cartoon. You can see how all the things would have to have space and go around corners to be connected, and it's to Bowers's credit that he works with that rather than trying to just do "normal" animation with a different medium.
"Wild Oysters"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
This is from the same series as "A Sleepless Night", and having dialog and voices available lets the pretty basic personalities of the mice in the wall come out - although, you're not going to believe it, but the husband is kind of shiftless and lazy and the wife is gruff and brooks nothing that's even nonsense-adjacent! They try to avoid a cat and a dog, which is pretty much the same sort of thing as in the previous one, and every cartoon with mice in walls, and you can sort of see why there aren't more. Like with "Nothing Doing", Bowers doing the same thing as everyone else is competent but not necessarily inspired.
But then you get to the really crazy stuff, when the Pop Mouse alternately befriends and ticks off some oysters that are sitting on the kitchen counter, and… well, Bowers likes his oysters, and they are even weirder now that one's got a tough-guy voice and a mouth to go with the little eyeballs. In Bowers' imagination, these ridiculous little blobs are going to flop around alone but also combine into a superorganism, and the results are downright weird in a way that I'm not sure kids were ready for in 1937. Or are now, really. Not that Bowers was the only one who got weird making these things, but this is the sort of short that makes one wonder just who it was made for.
"Oil Can and Does" (aka "Pete Roleum and His Cousins")
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 4 March 2022 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
And here we come to the end of Bowers' career, a stop-motion bit of advertising for the petroleum industry in full color that obviously hits a little differently eighty years and a whole bunch of pollution and conflict later, where he was basically a hired hand, supervising the animation of characters built by the Bunin Brothers in a short film that Joseph Losey made to be shown at the World's Fair. It's noteworthy - these are pretty sophisticated puppets - but even for seventy years ago, the shilling is something else.
… Okay, that was a lot. So here's where we stand after the first round
Mookie: 8 ½ stars - a strong start!
Bruce: 5 ½ stars - note that while I could say I'm weighing each of these shorts by their runtime and how they add up to roughly two features worth, it would be a lie - I feel completely free to make new rules up as I go along and apply them inconsistently, remember? This just feels about right.
So after taking the viewed movies out, where do we stand?
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