QUICKIE: The best, most heart warming movie you will ever see. It is so fabulous it makes me cry with glee.
PLOT: A Christmas Wish is a heartwarming holiday classic about a New York family (led by Durante) who is down on their luck at Christmas time. Shortly before Christmas, they move into a ground floor apartment where Rupert the squirrel lives in the attic rafters. Just when it seems that the holiday will come and go without so much as a Christmas tree, Rupert acts as the family's guardian angel, not only saving Christmas, but changing their lives forever. The film is enlivened with the warmth and sweetness of an unforgettable love story between Terry Moore (of Mighty Joe Young) and Tom Drake (of Meet Me in St. Louis). Rupert the Squirrel (created using George Pal's Academy Award winning animation technique) will charm young and old alike. Jimmy Durante shines when he sings Jingle Bells and other well-loved Christmas carols in the evocative voice that made him one of America's recording legends.
SUMMARY: I'm not the biggest Jimmy Durante fan, but here he is genuinely good and sweet. This movie is just so darn good that even a month after seeing it, I get teary eyed with joy. The ending is so fantabulous with everybody becoming rich, famous, beautifull, successfull, married and on and on. It's gushing miracles, love and joy, and it's just wonderfull. This movie will cheer you up immensely. I need a kleenex.
The Great Rupert ~ 1950 -BW
Speak Easily ~ 1932 -BW
QUICKIE: Geeky proffessor who thinks he's inherited $750,000 hooks up with a vaudeville act and backs them to do a show on Broadway. His dangerous slapstick "accidents" ruin the opening night, but make it a hysterical success, saving the day.
PLOT: Naive, bookish Professor Post (of Potts College) inherits a huge amount of money and decides that now he can afford to go out and enjoy life. He falls for a dancer in a bad stage show, and with his new money decides to buy the show and take it to Broadway. Opening night is a disaster as the clumsy Professor continually ends up on stage trying to correct a mistake, but wrecking the scene. The story is ruined, but his antics make the "play" a success with the crowd.
SUMMARY: Wow, Buster Keaton movies scare me. I think it's that the stunts he does are so unbelievably dangerous, and sometimes border on violent. The most mesmorizing moment of this film is when he manages to get himself caught in a rope that spins him around a roatating scenery, slapping him into the curtains as he flys around the stage mid-air.
Throughout every slapstick film I find myself not believing that anybody could be THAT stupid and clumsy. How has he made it through life without dying? I never find people getting hurt being humorous and everything Buster Keaton does in a film would probably kill me. Maybe I should classify this as a horror film? But if you like slapstick films Keaton films are the best as he does amazing stunts and is unafraid to be an idiot for laughs.
The story is actually pretty good and Jimmy Durante is always amusing with a big screen presence. The scene where Keaton and Thelma Todd are drunk is very funny.
