A Penny a Peep (1934) User Reviews

A Curiosity

[allthumbs · 6/10 · 15 March 2010]

this 1934 short is composed of 3 parts: a man, his wife and his overgrown son visit a penny arcade (1), where he drops a penny in the movieola and he (and we)watch The Perfectly Formed Woman(2),(1910, and another penny to watch The Song of the Wildwood Flutes (3),(1910). the man encounters the disdain of his goody-two-shoes plump wife because of his lascivious ogling.

what's curious about this one-reeler is the quality of the excerpts from the 1910 shorts. mary pickford appears in the dw griffith directed Wildwood Flutes, and she's as attractive here as i've ever seen her. the Formed Woman short was made in Australia and also is a first-run- quality piece. re-using the original 1910 material appears to have been a way to fill out the picture, and it looks like WB must have had access in 1934 to the original film elements. in the case of the Australian film, that would have been extraordinary.

as a movie short this is so-so; as a piece of movie history which preserved in a backhanded way long forgotten (and possibly lost forever) one-reeler material it deserves a look. you'll cringe at the rampant sexism and racism in both 1910 and 1934.

Another TCM Time Killer

[Calaboss · 4/10 · 15 March 2010]

I have fond memories of the Penny Arcade on Main St. at Disneyland from my childhood. I don't think I'll remember this one-reeler quite as long. It's essentially two old silent films thrown together with new (in 1934) narration, couched in the antics of a family in a penny arcade.

The first silent has Annette Kellerman (an Australian swimmer and diver born in 1887) giving a diving demonstration. Problem here was, she was diving from the deck of the pool. She was just leaning forward into the water. Not a very impressive dive to be sure. Perhaps people were easier to impress in 1910.

The second silent was Mary Pickford playing an American Indian princess. It, and the accompanying "humorous" narration, pretty much insults and denigrates Indians everywhere.

A Penny a Peep has some interest as an oddity, but it's not the kind of thing you'll wish to see twice, even at a brisk 11 minutes. One of Ted Turner's little time killers on TCM. Has that man bought the rights to EVERY piece of film made before 1940?

We're So Very Modern

[boblipton · 4/10 · 15 March 2010]

This imitation Pete Smith short has me of two minds. I enjoy Pete's shorts, his snarky voice making fun of the mores and methods of his contemporaries. But I also am a great fan of silent movies, from back when they were experimenting with the medium and discovering what, if anything it would become.

And therefore the lack of respect for the society of thirty and forty years earlier -- two featured performers in the silent movies this short highlights are Annette Kellerman, who was not only alive when this was released, but would live another forty years and Mary Pickford, whose last starring movie had been released the previous year -- is actually narrated by Leo Donnelly. So this movie irritates me, not only with its lack of understanding, but its cruelty.

And yet I still enjoyed listening to fake Pete's supercilious, made-up narration. And I think that clip of Kellerman only survives because of its inclusion here.

Ah well. Make of that what you will.

ANTI-NOSTALGIA.

[WesternOne1 · 3/10 · 16 November 2020]

This is one amongst a sub-genre of films of the depression era. Though only a very short time removed from silent pictures, (in this case, only five years) they are treated as relics from a distant eon, as strange and ridiculously quaint as powdered wigs. Though there are a few of these short subjects that have an idea that the recent past had some great moments to offer, such as the Paramount "Movie Milestones" series of 1934-5, mainly that past is shown as worthy of nothing but contempt. This film is typical of that sentiment, films of then ten or fifteen years ago are mercilessly mocked by an unfunny narrator/heckler. The witless jabs are not up to the worst "Mystery Science theatre" scripts. To make the aging flicker "funnier" they are manipulated to repeat action back and forth. The "titles" are written to make them even stupider, as here where a film about Indians is used, they're introduced with Hebrew names (like "Chief Potch in the Punim") and the dialogue supplied by the narrator gives them Jewish dialects. (the comic idea that the Red Indians were the lost tribe was a wheezy vaudeville thread by this time.) The worst offender in this genre was Pete Smith over at MGM, whose "Goofey Movies" sometimes incoherently tied pieces of several old films together and added animation as well. I can't see where this general contempt for their own products by movie men came from. Did audiences feel this way, or were they being bullied into this mindeset, to better appreciate the new offerings by the men, often the very same men, that had made the items on view here?

Worth Viewing for Film Buffs

[Michael_Elliott · 15 March 2010]

Penny a Peep, A (1934)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Leo Donnelly narrates this Vitaphone short that has a family going to the movies but these are the early days and they must drop in a penny to view the shows out of a box. We then get Donnelly stepping in to add narration over a couple silent movies including D.W. Griffith's THE SONG OF THE WILDWOOD FLUTE with Mary Pickford playing an Indian princess and Annette Kellerman in THE PERFECTLY FORMED WOMAN. This is a mixed bag in terms of entertainment because on one hand the narration is quite poorly written and the jokes are never funny. They're actually bad enough to make you want to skip the movie but the reason this is a must see is because of the two silent shorts. The Griffith film is available but extremely hard to see and I'm really not sure if the Kellerman movie is out there or not. Being able to see them is certainly a major plus as is the early stuff of seeing these old-time movie machines.

This short harkens back to the days when the so-called "Big Apple" . . .

[tadpole-596-918256 · 6/10 · 9 October 2019]

. . . was rotten to its core. When my dad got out of the service, he said that the movie marquees just beyond the main bus station for New York City were enough to make a sailor blush! (A PENNY A PEEP includes some of the few flick titles of this perfidious era deemed suitable for family audiences, such as NAUGHTY BUT NICE and THE CALL OF THE FLUTE.) Such hard-core fare is virtually impossible to find nowadays, of course, after Leader Trump spent much of his apprenticeship in public service cleaning up smut. That's why America's Peddlers of Filth were so Hell-Bent upon defeating this well-known Paragon of Virtue back in 2016. Amid those Bad Old Days, conversations at the nightly dinner table were punctuated by such inadvertent X-rated comments as "I guess she likes the way he waves his corn stalk" (a direct quote from A PENNY A PEEP). However, now that Leader Trump has been able to spread his Crusade for the Square Deal nationwide, nefarious examples of human exploitation and foreign-dominated "massage parlors" are disappearing from across the face of our USA Homeland. Fortunately, in our new-found Age of Enlightenment, A PENNY A PEEP can be viewed primarily as a grim reminder of our dark B.T. (Before Trump) days.

Sometimes the word "peep" refers to the sound that baby chickens make . . .

[cricket30 · 4/10 · 9 October 2019]

. . . as in (quote) "Peep . . . peep . . . peep." However, A PENNY A PEEP does NOT refer to this type of peeping. Rather, A PENNY A PEEP denotes the sort of lecherous activity giving rise to the legal term, "a 'Peeping Tom.'" Since, as the title of this film suggests, there's a money transaction involved with the ilk of "peepers" featured here, a case can be made that the "Peep Shows" revealed here are akin to Prostitution! Maybe "anything goes" Nevada way, but here in Texas we keep our noses clean. Whenever some pervert tries to open a den of iniquity featuring a "Peep Show" sign or billboard, the sign (and often the front door) are soon riddled with lead! Unfortunately, some destitute folks have a willing spirit, but lack the financial resources to help in this sort of policing. So, why not watch A PENNY A PEEP, as a reminder to generously support your local chapter of BANGS (Broke Americans Need Gun Stamps)?

This movie is hilarious

[wavemekanix · 10/10 · 17 September 2019]

Pure Hilarity. A deep predecessor of a national lampoon style comedy. The first scene for instance, showing the father embarrassingly watching a contemporary swimmer, as he rolls the footage back and forth to watch her bottom. Very base humor, but 60 years ahead of its time.