No, this is not a film about explosions, unless they are of laughter. It is an amusing thirties comedy set in New York, starring 'the Schnozzle' (thirties slang for 'big nose'), as Jimmy Durante was affectionately called by his fans. His extreme Brooklyn accent is made more extreme by his over-pronouncing of it, and he gets all his words wrong and says everything in as ungrammatical and incorrect a manner as inhumanly possible, giving rise to many laughs. He and his fellow actors crack a lot of gags. My favourite for this film is when Durante says, unaware of the contradiction: 'I have a verbal contract, and I'm gonna sign it!' Durante specialised in being what the English would call 'dotty and eccentric', and he was a wonderful comic singer as well. The glamour gal for the film is the Mexican actress Lupe Velez, who was highly successful at the time and became known as 'the Mexican spitfire'. She was not much of an actress, but she conveyed a lot of useful jollity and could do a good vamp, as well as sing. Her life ended tragically when she committed suicide at the age of 36, having been dumped in turn by her lover Gary Cooper and her husband Johnny Weissmuller ('Tarzan') and turned to drink, drugs, and depression. She made another comedy with Durante in this same year, THE GREAT SCHNOZZLE. The story for this film is flimsy, but suffices as a skeletal framework for typical Durante nonsense. A young writer with big ideas about himself and no sense of humour at all (hence a good foil for Durante), played by Norman Foster, is urged by his wife to start writing for radio. Durante plays a famous radio star. It is difficult for people these days to imagine, but radio was BIG back then, before television existed, and it was stuffed full of excellent live drama and comedy shows. Foster cannot even understand gags, much less write them, but he ends up writing them for Durante by stealing them from old joke books and modernising them. This satirizes what was a standard practice amongst the top gag writers such as Mark Hellinger and his proteges, who routinely strip-minded old jokes from PUNCH and other such sources. (I know this for a fact because I knew some old-time gag writers personally, who told me.) This was however such an 'in' joke that only the professional gag writers watching the film themselves would fully have 'got' it. Foster fancies himself as something of an intellectual, and more satire raises its lovely head when he starts talking to the uneducated show people about the French philosopher Henri Bergson's book LAUGHTER: AN ESSAY ON THE MEANING OF THE COMIC (London, 1911), being an English translation of the French original LE RIRE (1900). But this is a double satire, as having read that book, I can assure people that Bergson had just about as much of a sense of humour as Foster in this film, and I wonder if Bergson ever actually laughed at a joke himself in his life. Here is a sample sentence from Bergson's book: 'We have studied the comic element in forms, in attitudes, and in movements generally; now let us look for it in actions and in situations.' You get the picture, and yes, I have the book right beside me. But no, it is not funny. Another interesting thing I noticed about the film is that two dinners take place in Sardi's Restaurant in New York, but its name is never mentioned. I suppose that observation qualifies under the label of 'Trivia'. The story has its ups and its downs and its twists and its turns and it lasts for 71 minutes, and hey ho.
Review of Strictly Dynamite
