Forget About It

 The Statler Brothers had a catchy song called "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott," which contained a very true line: "Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears...'True Grit's the only movie I've really understood in years." 

We like to watch old old movies on Turner Classic Movies, and the other night we hit on one which, while not the greatest movie you'll ever see, did a least say a lot about the times in which it was made.

The picture was called "The Housekeeper's Daughter." It came out in 1939, a comedy directed and produced by Hal Roach, who had previously produced Laurel And Hardy and "Our Gang" movies. The stars were Joan Bennett and  Adolphe Menjou, and it featured the film debut of Victor Mature, a man famous for saying many years later, "I can't act, and I have 140 movies to prove it."

The brief rundown goes like this: Joan Bennett plays a gangster's girlfriend who goes home to her mother, who runs the house for the high-class Randall family, but all but one Randall goes away, leaving Robert Randall, who wants to be a newspaper reporter, so he gets a job through connections and stumbles on a murder case which is a huge scandal and leads to the police converging on the house and people shoot off firecrackers and the gangsters think it's gunshots and Robert winds up with Joan Bennett.

OK, I left out some minor details, but the point is this. We look at movies like this, 80-some years later, and we shake our heads.

There were others, called "screwball comedies," around that time. Try to spend some time watching "You Can't Take It With You" sometime and see if your head doesn't spin. That's the one with a crazy family whose normal daughter falls in love with a normal boy and the families get together and all hell starts popping.

There was a movie called "Hellzapoppin' " a couple of years later which was nothing but crazy antics without the barest semblance of a plot.

But think about the times: the Depression was still going on. People were either out of work or just eking out a drab existence, and the only reasonable entertainment was the neighborhood movie theatre where for a nickel or dime ticket, you could take your mind off your troubles and not worry about next month's rent or another night of cereal for dinner or the storm clouds of war menacing Europe (Nazi Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, leading to France, Australia and the United Kingdom declaring World War II.The US was inevitably drawn to the conflict on December 7, 1941, with the invasion of Pearl Harbor.) Tough times call for at least an hour or two of diversion.

And at the Bijou or the Rialto or the Towson Theatre, all that trouble seemed far away  for a while as people, in the pre-television world, watched their favorite stars sing and dance and act, with the exception of Victor Mature.

Victor Mature (l) and Joan Bennett

The days of people going to the movies two or three times a week are long past, but today we download movies to take our minds off what's out there.  And with Victor Mature gone, we still have problems to forget about, and that's why we have Will Ferrell.