oscaralbert Review of A Successful Calamity

A Successful Calamity (1932)

As America's so-called "financial wizards" were bouncing off the sidewalks below . . .

[7/10 · 3 December 2020]

. . . Wall Street's high-rise ledges, balconies and open windows like so many coconuts during The Great Depression, the prophetic prognosticators of the always eponymous Warner Bros. used A SUCCESSFUL CALAMITY to warn the USA of the looming Apocalyptic Catastrophes sure to befall a nation Hell-bent upon retaining the dog-eat-dog Corrupt Capitalist Communist Corporate Crime Society that had brought the entire nation to its knees. At the beginning of this flick, Pops Hank Wilton gives ruinous fiscal advice to Real Life U.S. President Herb "Hoover Slums," traipses away from home on foreign junkets for years at a time and revels in his own private "Art of the Deal" fraudulent "business" shenanigans. Henry's much younger, thoroughly neglected Trophy Wife Emmy engages in flagrant extra-marital affairs with no-talent piano-pounding posers and squanders away the family fortune in senseless spending sprees. Son Eddie thinks that polo is the National Pastime, and flies his private plane to destinations within walking distance for a normal person. Daughter Peggy's furs require a zoo's worth of endangered critters to be skinned every season, as she desperately sells herself to the highest bidder. Clearly, the Warner seers are predicting that there's no room in a tolerable USA for such self-centered fat cat one per center resource hogs.