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American youth, "full of zing, full of zest, full of zowie," no better specimen than Harold Lloyd on the gridiron. American middle-age locates the go-getter from The Freshman squashed in the bookkeeping office, a calcified "bottleneck" to embody the Forties hangover of Twenties fizz. Forcible retirement is the reward for the ideas-man with no ideas, a gold watch is his parting gift, on his way out he takes down the plaque reading "Success is just around the corner." Rebirth awaits in a seedy saloon, the desiccated little hustler (Jimmy Conlin) is his guide as the inspired bartender (Edgar Kennedy) whips up the teetotaler's maiden cocktail: "You arouse the artist in me." The potion resuscitates the old war whoop, the doleful protagonist blooms in plaid zoot suit and 500-gallon Stetson in a cacophonous spree that goes straight into Kurosawa's Ikiru, except here he awakens with blank memories under Margaret Hamilton's disapproving gaze. "It's what you call an impulse. Like a man works all his life in a glass factory. Well, one day he feels like picking up a hammer." Preston Sturges on idealism and disillusionment is a deconstruction of the Lloyd persona, an anagram of The Blue Angel, an anticipation of Tashlin. The upshot of the blacked-out carouse is a circus full of hungry cats, getting rid of it means visiting plutocrats with leashed lion in tow. A most admirably sustained panic, buoyed by a catalog of sketches all the way down to the plummy dowager who also happens to be the Bearded Lady. "Why, I wouldn't trust a face like that to empty a spittoon!" The climax is a modification of Safety Last! on a Wall Street ledge, the love cry at the close "sounded like a cross between a Mongolian lynx and a wounded moose." Death of a Salesman premieres not long after. With Frances Ramsden, Raymond Walburn, Rudy Vallee, Lionel Stander, Franklin Pangborn, Robert Dudley, Arline Judge, Jack Norton, Al Bridge, Arthur Hoyt, Robert Greig, and Georgia Caine. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |