Is the joke on us for watching this? I suspect the big wigs at RKO thought it might be amusing for them if they deliberately made an appallingly bad film but told their audience it was meant to be ironic.
The plot of this film surely must be the true story of how this dreadful picture was made. The plot concerns a gangster whom upon hearing a dreadful song sung awfully by Zasu Pitts forces a producer to make her the star of a musical comedy written excruciatingly badly by the gangster and his pals. He then forces the critics to say how great she is and how funny the jokes are. There is no other explanation I can think of as to why this exists.
Max Steiner's background music (yes, Max Steiner) reminds me of a Laurel and Hardy film. It creates that similar mood but without any humour whatsoever. In these types of films, cartoon characters can sometimes work but in this case without any sense of irony it's simply terrible. THE MIDSHIPMAID (1932) used the same idea - that was also pretty awful but at least that had the divine Jessie Matthews in it.
The problem with this film is that it is not funny at all. Nat Pendleton and Zasu Pitts are usually tolerable in small doses as comedy relief but they're not really actors. There's no attempt to make these cardboard characters seem even slightly real and since THEY ARE NOT FUNNY you're just looking at a couple of people reading their lines for an hour and a half. EE Horton and Ned Sparks do their best but with such a weak script, they're fighting an uphill battle and you just feel sorry for them having to do such rubbish. RKO was known for it's sparkling comedies in the 1930s but in 1934 there was a lot of turmoil with the management there and the company temporarily lost its direction. If someone who'd never seen a 1930s comedy were to watch this, they'd never watch another one again - it' that bad!
The plot of this film surely must be the true story of how this dreadful picture was made. The plot concerns a gangster whom upon hearing a dreadful song sung awfully by Zasu Pitts forces a producer to make her the star of a musical comedy written excruciatingly badly by the gangster and his pals. He then forces the critics to say how great she is and how funny the jokes are. There is no other explanation I can think of as to why this exists.
Max Steiner's background music (yes, Max Steiner) reminds me of a Laurel and Hardy film. It creates that similar mood but without any humour whatsoever. In these types of films, cartoon characters can sometimes work but in this case without any sense of irony it's simply terrible. THE MIDSHIPMAID (1932) used the same idea - that was also pretty awful but at least that had the divine Jessie Matthews in it.
The problem with this film is that it is not funny at all. Nat Pendleton and Zasu Pitts are usually tolerable in small doses as comedy relief but they're not really actors. There's no attempt to make these cardboard characters seem even slightly real and since THEY ARE NOT FUNNY you're just looking at a couple of people reading their lines for an hour and a half. EE Horton and Ned Sparks do their best but with such a weak script, they're fighting an uphill battle and you just feel sorry for them having to do such rubbish. RKO was known for it's sparkling comedies in the 1930s but in 1934 there was a lot of turmoil with the management there and the company temporarily lost its direction. If someone who'd never seen a 1930s comedy were to watch this, they'd never watch another one again - it' that bad!