Stand In isn’t well known. It’s not quite obscure, since Humphrey Bogart has a supporting role in it and the Bogart cult would never let one of his films be ignored. (As it happens, Bogart is the weakest link in it — he snarls, smoulders, and mugs his way through the story, humorless as he often is). It isn’t a great comedy, but it’s funny, and warm, and interesting. It could have been much, much better. It’s marred by a hasty ending that everyone who has commented on it feels is rushed, and I don’t think the people making the film were quite sure what its tone should be. That doesn’t matter, really. Its good parts are good.
The story is pretty interesting, and surprisingly contemporary. Colossal Pictures is on the edge of bankruptcy. An unscrupulous investor who has already bought up two other studios under shady circumstances is offering 5 mill for it. The company’s board wants to sell, but their chief accountant — excruciatingly prim Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard) — has calculated that the company is worth twice that amount and can be saved. And he has absolute faith in his calculations. The board grudgingly tasks him to travel to Hollywood to take over Colossal’s operations, even though Dodd knows bupkis about the movie business. He has only a vague idea of what a star is, he has never heard of Shirley Temple, and he certainly doesn’t know what a stand in is. Miss Lester Plum (Joan Blondell) catches a ride in Dodd’s company car, and informs him that a stand in is what she is — a body who holds the place of a star as a shot is being set up, so that the star won’t have to be bothered with all the tedium. Miss Plum was once a child star, but now has grown into an anonymous laborer in the dream factory.
She lives in a boarding house in the company of bit has-been actors and stuntmen who are perpetually trying out for jobs or waiting to be called. She persuades Dodd to move into the house, too, the better to learn about the business. Miss Plum also convinces him to hire her as his secretary. She’s getting sweet on him — she’s never seen anyone with so little knowledge about movies. He’s a “lamb,” and she wants to prevent him from being slaughtered. Dodd discovers that there’s a plot to make a movie so awful (it’s titled “Sex and Satan”) that it will force Colossal out of business. The board decides to sell, and Dodd is helpless to stop it. But — ta da! — inspired by recent labor actions to keep industries open and workers working (it’s 1937), Dodd leads the studio staff and hands in an insurrection to finish Sex and Satan as a good movie, under the direction of the disaffected, grumpy director Quintain (Bogart’s character).
Stand In is like a Capra movie, with lots less schmaltz. The original story was by Clarence Budington Kelland, who wrote the story for Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. (You may recall the scene at the Algonquin when Longfellow Deeds can’t figure out a rhyme for Budington? Well, that was real.) Dodd and Deeds, get it? But the similarities end there. Dodd’s political transformation from being a capitalist number-cruncher who thinks of workers as “units” to a labor-organizer willing to go to prison if he can save the jobs of the real people who make movies possible is too sudden to be enjoyable. But the implausibility doesn’t really matter; it’s very cool to see a film that makes the audience aware of the staff who toil to make films and are either unknown or disrespected. In 1937. More than one commentator has seen affinities with The Player.
This film has one of the oddest pairings I’ve ever seen in Hollywood comedies: Joan Blondell and Leslie Howard. I like Blondell in almost all her roles — I even think there’s a specific genre of Hollywood comedy we could call The Blondell Farce. She made so many screwballish romantic comedies in the 30s and 40s that she became the face of the genre for many people. At first she played mainly gold-diggers, but she gave them depth — recall that she’s not only a lead girl trickster in Gold Diggers of 1933, she’s also the central “narrator” of that film’s monumental climax, “Remember the Forgotten Man.” There are at least two variants of the screwball dame. One is so daffy that she upsets the staid order, but she is brought to heel at the end — too much daff can be dangerous. But more often the screwball dame is a wisecracking trickster — she throws screwballs not because she’s screwy, but because she’s too knowing to play the game straight. Blondell gradually morphed from being a desperate trickster to being the ideal comic working girl — quick-witted, ironic, constantly alert, always more intelligent than her male leads, with a toughness masking her vulnerability. Her characters always know their place in the world: as women they resist patriarchy at their peril. In predicaments and dialogues, Blondell is like Ginger: dancing backward and in high heels. And Blondell often leads her men without their knowing it.
And then there’s Leslie Howard. The slender heartthrob noble-hearted upper-class beautiful soul with impeccable manners, whose skill with a sword and a word keeps him from being a stuffy twit. Howard didn’t do a lot of comedies, and when I watched Stand In for the first time I didn’t think he could pull it off. It’s possible the distance between Atterbury Dodd and Blondell’s “Sonny Boy” is too great to cover. I’m not sure how contemporary audiences viewed it. But sometimes — and from some perspectives — it’s a good pairing. Howard begins as a version of Henry Higgins, a role he played in the legendary British Pygmalion a year later (he was probably playing it on the London stage the year Stand In was made). This story reverses the roles, and it’s Blondell’s Miss Plum that teaches Dodd how to speak “human labor.”
Garnett was not a bad director — though the speed of his cuts is not good here. Here’s the cute meet of opposites, as Blondell shares a company car with Howard, newly arrived to Hollywood. (Note the excruciating irony — Shirley Temple did not become the president of a bank, just the US Ambassador to the UN.)
Although it’s not any more explicitly political than a Capra film, it does side consistently with the people who are disregarded and exploited by the studios whereas it’s their labor that produces their movies. At one point Miss Plum, eager to secure the job of secretary, demonstrates a skill that Dodd hadn’t even begun to imagine — child actors had to have had prodigious memories. “Shirley Temple could have memorized that dull little speech of yours backwards.”
There’s an intriguing thread about the abuse of child (girl) actors in Hollywood movies that may have been clearer to insiders than the provincials. Dodd’s first job as company head is to decide about a Shirley Temple wannabe in the presence of her mother. (Recall that he has no idea who Shirley Temple is.)
WTF? The scene is grotesque but fascinating. There’s a similar scene in Mr. Deeds, when the frauds come for Deeds’s money — but this is less abstract, and more brutal. This theme of little performing girls comes up in complicated ways. At one point, Miss Plum demonstrates to Dodd that she no longer has the “value” that she did as a child star. (Extra spice comes from the fact, well known in Hollywood fanland, that Blondell could not carry tune, and never tried to.)
This really is Blondell’s movie. She was at her peak in these years, and the prissy Dodd doesn’t give her any competition. But the movie has some fine non-Blondell moments. As when the studios preview the first takes of the ridiculous Sex and Satan.
This is one of those films I wish were better known. It has its unique charms.