by Merciel » Fri Apr 29, 2016 10:15 am
Dinner at Eight (1933)
Two things I don't understand about Dinner at Eight: how Jean Harlow was ever considered a super-gorgeous sex symbol and how SVC got snookered into thinking this film was a comedy.
I told him last night that I wanted to watch a funny movie because it's been a kind of shitgarbage week and I was not in the mood for anything heavy, so he picked out Dinner at Eight and it turns out this is a "comedy" that actually spends three or four minutes showing you a character committing suicide on screen after his increasingly pitiful life falls apart over the course of several excruciating scenes.
COOL
It's not that this is a bad movie (although I didn't think it was great either), but it definitely is no lighthearted romp through fields of beautiful bon mots. Most of the characters are dead, dying, or on an unbroken trajectory toward misery at the end (the doctor isn't going to stop cheating on his wife, his wife isn't going to stop suffering through it, the shipping magnate isn't magically going to get advanced heart surgery in 1933, the aging diva isn't going to get younger or less ridiculous and she'll probably burn through her stock money pretty quickly with no prospects for getting more), and the one character who has some reasonable prospect at future happiness and success (Oliver's daughter) is somehow still not into her rich, handsome, and smitten fiance.
And like even that stuff could be played for laughs (Always Sunny has done worse), but it isn't here. So yeah, whatever this movie is, it definitely is not a comedy. Wikipedia calls it a "dramedy" but I think even that is overselling the amount of humor here.
Other thoughts:
-- Mrs. Oliver has the most grating voice. I really hate that swoopy-fluty affectation. One of the few things in these Old Movies that I'm glad to see died out.
-- When Larry Renault took off his cufflinks to sell for booze money, I was like "wait is he wearing snap links in 1933?" because I'm pretty sure he snapped those links off instead of unthreading them, and if you were wearing snap links in 1933 then they almost certainly wouldn't have been worth very much (at that point, snap links would have been a moderately successful white-collar guy's everyday workwear set, not special occasion jewelry; at best they'd have been gilt or silverplated, but not solid precious metal and not expensively designed), and then when the bellboy came back saying that he couldn't get any money for them, I was duly gratified that I'd guessed right and also that the movie went to the trouble of telegraphing Renault's poverty in that small way.
-- I'm pretty sure Jean Harlow's big white foxfur mantle is not real fur, which would make it one of the few times I've seen a distinguishable fakie in one of these films. I could be wrong about that, but yeah, I think that one's a fake.
7/10