“Million Dollar Legs,” starring among others W.C. Fields (as an uncanny Trumpian clown president of the Republic of Klopstockia) and Jack Oakie, was directed by Edward F. Cline, who was associated with Fields since the silent days. It’s a wonderful film in lots of ways. It’s surrealistic slapstick close to the Marx Brothers’ mode. The film was even offered to them, but they turned it down. Interesting note: there are lots of overlaps with Duck Soup, which was released a year later. Just saying. Cline was a Keystone Cops director, very old school, and the cast has lots of the great silent supporting actors (including Ben Turpin, whom I’d never seen before in a talkie). Two things I really loved about it. One is that it’s like watching Athenian Old Comedy — anarchic, fantastic, one zigzag gag after another, and lots of Aristophanic off-color political joking. (It’s pre-code, of course.) The other is that this is one of the most thoroughly New World Jewish comedies I’ve seen in a long time. The main writers were Joe Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht, and I hope their biographers have something to say about the script. Its new Jewish immigrant feel goes deep. There’s a terrifically ridiculous song-and-dance number by the Polish immigrant actress Lyda Roberti, singing “When I Get Hot in Klopstockia.” Anyway, she sings it in the persona of “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist.” It seems Roberti wasn’t Jewish, but that’s immaterial. She had been in New York long enough to assimilate. She sings and dances like a live-action, 3-d rotoscoped cartoon, to a jazz melody that is obviously klezmer influenced (it’s Rainger-Robin hokum), and her supposedly Polish accent (she was apparently a great comedienne imitating Eastern European accents) comes off as Brooklyn Yiddish. She caps it off scat singing (again, pseudo-Yiddish) as she takes Cab Calloway poses and struts down a set of monumental stairs. (It’s good to remember that Calloway attributed a lot of his musical sensibility to hearing Jewish musical styles.) It’s terrific. Really worth seeing in a good mood.
Another film that really should be restored.
