User Reviews

I am a big 1930's movie fan and will watch most anything that I see on Turner Classic Movies thats new for me. So I gave this a shot, after all it's the great Harold Lloyd who rivaled Chaplin as a great silent film comedian. I have watched much less of Lloyd's silent films then of Chaplins but I have to say I'm a much bigger Chaplin fan. Anyway this film fell so flat for me that I didn't finish it. I can understand why his sound career was so limited, he didn't get very good material to work with. After you've seen Chaplin, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, Martin and Lewis, The Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy do boxing spoofs (or violence in general), this one is very forgettable. I was also interested in watching Adolphe Menjou as I really enjoyed him in Paths Of Glory but his role here also did nothing special for me. Maybe they should have gotten into the boxing sooner because at least half the film (at least it seemed that way) is before he gets in a ring. I can tell there are a lot of Lloyd fans here and this wont be a popular review but I must rate this as compared to what else was out there at the time, 4 out of 10. Don't watch this with anyone your trying to get to like old movies as they may not watch another one with you again, very flat. For an alternative to anyone who really liked this or is looking for more little known comedies in general I recommend "Kelly The Second" made a few years earlier, another nobody becomes a boxer comedy with Patsy Kelly and in a supporting role Charles Chase. These have both been shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel.

Considering this is a sound-era film from Harold Lloyd, I expected it would be significantly worse than his full-length silent films. And, unfortunately, this WAS the case--as the plot and style of the film just didn't do much to exploit the talents of this great comedian. However, while it is a big disappointment in this respect, compared to other movies of the day, this is still a slightly better than average flick--about on par with an Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope movie of the 1940s.

The plot is VERY familiar (though not for Lloyd) and involves a milk man who people think has knocked out the middle weight champ on a street corner brawl. However, the knockout was just an accident plus the champ was very drunk. However, this incident hurts the champ's reputation. So, his agent thinks "what better way to make the champ look GOOD than by pretending Harold REALLY is a great fighter after all?". So, a significant amount of the movie is spent convincing him to become a fighter, train and box a lot of set-up matches (though Harold thinks they are NOT rigged). Ultimately, he once again faces the champ but, being a comedy, things don't work out like they should but everyone seems pretty happy in the end anyway.

Overall, the acting wasn't bad and it was mildly amusing but it just wasn't anything like earlier Lloyd films. The weakest elements were the rather dismal plot and the fact that the movie lost steam towards the end--my interest, and probably yours, lagged. Not a bad film but not especially memorable either. For a better sound Lloyd film, try MOVIE CRAZY or CAT'S PAW.

PS--This was remade as THE KID FROM BROOKLYN starring Danny Kaye. However, the plot has also been used in various forms on TV shows and other movies as well--so this isn't exactly a unique film.

PPS--The movie and TV veteran Charles Lane is in the film. I'm sure you'll recognize his very familiar face. As of today (6/07), Mr. Lane is STILL alive and doing quite well at 102 years of age! Good luck, Mr. Lane.

"The Milky Way" is one of the last films that Harold Lloyd made before retiring from acting. Along with Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lloyd was one of the great legendary comics of the silent film era. He transitioned OK into sound pictures, but with sound the style of comedy changed from almost all antics to scripts with dialog and other movement. So, he retired early in the sound era.

Keaton didn't have a nest egg built up so he continued to work steadily through the 1960s, first doing many shorts that were still used with features in theaters, and then in lesser and lesser roles of feature films. Chaplin was a prolific writer as well, and a successful director and producer. He had a nice nest egg built up, so he was able to live while working on an occasional hit film. Over the next two decades he made just four films, each one a masterpiece.

This film is a simple plot with silly scenes of Lloyd's Burleigh Sullivan knocking out prizefighters. That is, supposedly knocking them out. A small supporting cast does a good job. Adolphe Menjou is a showstopper in his scenes. He comes on strong as Gabby Sloan, the questionable fight manager. Some supporting cast standards have nice parts. Lionel Stander is very funny as Spider Schultz.

For anyone who hasn't seen Lloyd in a movie, this film is OK. But this doesn't rank anywhere near the classic stuff for which he is most remembered. He is the guy hanging high over a street from the hands of a large clock on a building. That 1923 film, "Safety Last," is among his classics.

This Harold Lloyd feature is pretty funny. Lloyd is a milkman who accidentally knocks out the drunken boxing champion, William Gargan, on the sidewalk and becomes a media celebrity.

Promoters see money in it. They want to take him under their wing and turn him professional, but the vision-challenged and slightly built Lloyd will have none of it, not until the horse pulling his milk wagon collapses and needs veterinarian care. So he does it for Agnes.

Lionel Stander is the trainer who teaches Lloyd the rudiments of boxing but Lloyd is hopeless as a fighter, except that he ducks punches effortlessly, a trick he picked up as a child to avoid being beaten by the other school kids.

A series of bouts is fixed and Lloyd wins until he faces the champ, Gargan, in the ring. Gargan is to deck the wonder boy and win a lot of money for Adolf Menjou and his crowd of crooked promoters. I don't think I want to give away the ending -- as if you couldn't guess it -- but the trick turns on the barely literate Lionel Stander mixing up the word "ammonia" with the label on a bottle of medicine for "insomnia." There are three babes in the movie. Two are young, attractive, and quite sexy. The third, Verree Teasdale, is given the best lines in the movie and is a treat to watch. I'm trying to think of one of her throw-away cracks and I'm failing.

This was remade ten years later as a Danny Kaye movie, "The Kid From Brooklyn". Lionel Stander appeared in both -- as the same character, I think. This is one of those instances in which the remake is perhaps better than the original. Danny Kaye sounds more at home in the movie, he's quicker on his feet than Lloyd, ducks punches more absurdly, and his antics in the ring are even funnier than Lloyd's, which are ludic enough to begin with. Except for Kaye, color, and the ever-seductive Virginia Mayo, both films are comparable. Lloyd's gets extra points for being first.

Either version should induce smiles.

Harold Lloyd's talking films were a mixed bag, lacking the visual thrills of his "Safety Last" type comedy where dangerous situations got laughs out of amazing photography and choreography. Fans of his silents will be disappointed by the lack of this style, because now with a voice, he was like everybody else struggling for laughs in talkie comedy. His early talkies were filled with a few of the qualities of his silents, but by the end of the 1930's came around, he seemed to loose heart even though his films were still above average in the comedy genre.

Taking the legend of Harold Lloyd, the silent star, out of the train of thought, "The Milky Way" is still a good film, with some funny moments and certainly filled with a fantastically huge supporting cast and excellent direction. Leo McCarey, one of the finest writers and directors of the 1930's, had a semi classic with thus that does not deserve to be so easily dismissed.

The story has Lloyd as a well spoken and friendly milkman who ends up in the fight game when he comes to the rescue of his sister (Helen Mack), beating up professional fighter Lionel Stander and ending up coached by Stander's manager (Adolph Menjou) to become the country's latest champ. Seductive Verree Teasdale takes classical music to train him, while Lloyd has a funny scene showing society matron Marjorie Gateson how to block hits, then later imitates a naying pony. This isn't all laughs, though, with Lloyd concerned about the horse that pulled his milk truck. Still, it's pretty good as a whole, but it is necessary to look at Lloyd in a different light when viewing this and his other talkies.

Copyright 11 February 1936 by Paramount Productions, Inc. New York opening at the Paramount: 25 March 1936. U.S. release: 7 February 1936. Australian release: 22 April 1936. 10 reels. 8,010 feet. 89 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: The opening credits set a comic tone for the farce that follows: a cow in the Paramount logo à la MGM's lion! In the first scene the owner of the Sunshine Dairy is giving a pep talk to his milkmen and congratulating his better salesmen. Burleigh Sullivan (Lloyd) is passed over in the laudatory remarks. Not only is he apparently an underachiever, to the dismay of his boss, but in the middle of the lecture he gets the hiccups, distracts the proceedings and causes general mayhem. Later that evening his sister Mae (Helen Mack) is jockeying with some soused patrons as she operates the coat-check concession in a local hotel. They wait for her outside; when she leaves to go home, they detain her with childish pranks. Burleigh comes to her rescue and gets mixed up in a brawl — when the crowd clears it seems he has knocked out the middleweight boxing champion!

NOTES: The stage play opened on Broadway at the Cort on 8 May 1934. It ran a just mildly successful 63 performances. Produced by Harmon and Ullman, it was directed by William W. Schorr and starred Hugh O'Connell as Burleigh, Brian Donlevy as Speed, Leo Donnelly as Gaby, and Gladys George as Ann.

The 1940 radio adaptation of The Milky Way on Texaco Star Theatre featured Joe E. Brown in the role of Burleigh Sullivan.

The 1946 film remake, The Kid from Brooklyn, was produced by Samuel Goldwyn, distributed by RKO, and directed in Technicolor by Norman Z. McLeod. It featured Danny Kaye as Burleigh, Virginia Mayo as Polly, Vera-Ellen as Susie Sullivan ("Mae" in original), Walter Abel as Gabby, Eve Arden as Ann, Steve Cochran as Speed, Lionel Stander repeating his original role as Spider, Fay Bainter as Mrs LeMoyne, Pierre Watkin as Mr. LeMoyne, and Clarence Kolb as Wilbur Austin.

COMMENT: If ever there was a typical Friday flick "The Milky Way" is it. An "A" feature from a major studio with all the publicity, pizazz and highly enthusiastic reviews that such an offering can generate, yet starring a once-super=popular silent comedian who had made a none-too-successful transition to sound. Even worse from the showman's angle, Lloyd was not only billed as the only above-the- title star, but in letters twice as thick and twice as big as the Milky Way title itself. So you were forced to sell the film with a name star that many of your potential patrons had already written off. Moreover, your own opinion of the film — an opinion re-inforced by talking to other exhibitors at the Paramount trade screening — was that it wasn't half as funny as the critics opined. True, the pace was fast and frantic enough, and some of the knockabout stuff was pretty amusing, but there seemed a lot of forced shouting and screaming, often to little effect, while many of the occasional wisecracks were either inaudibly thrown away or too sophisticated for your audience.

Lloyd's problem, like that of the other great silent comedians, was that the screen persona he had built up was simply too simplistic for sound. And whereas the silent comedian could hold a feature together on his own, with the support players being just that — a support — this was not generally the case with sound. A further distraction was that the comic's voice was often at odds with his image. Chaplin's aristocratic English would have sounded way out of place in the mouth of the Little Tramp.

With the notable exception of Langdon (who was actually the same guileless innocent in real life as he was in films), just about all the major silent stars realized these pitfalls, but Chaplin alone succeeded in wholly overcoming them. This he did by creating an entirely new screen personality and by surrounding himself with players who had plenty of charisma in their own right.

Lloyd has attempted both these stratagems here, but his success is limited. He still tends to hog the camera to an irritating degree. True, this is great in those scenes where he's supposed to be obnoxious, and also good when he demonstrates his nimble footwork. But when he speaks (which is too often too long) he loses our interest because his voice is too monotonous, too ordinary, it lacks timbre.

Of the support players, only Veree Teasdale and Lionel Stander really shine, though Barbier makes the most of his opportunities and Dorothy Wilson is pretty enough as the hot/cold Polly. But Menjou comes on too strong with weak material and Gargan (pronounced "Garrigan") is almost a total write-off.

Maybe I'm prejudiced because I saw it first (and often), but I think "The Kid from Brooklyn" is much more entertaining — particularly in those scenes re-stated word for word or blow for blow.

The bits I liked best about this Milky Way were the bits of business not used by the Kid, like Lloyd's boomerang hat and all the stuff with the foal in the taxi. With the exception of Walter Abel, the players in Kid are noticeably superior to Milky. Even Lionel Stander excels his own very self. The same goes for the production. In the Goldwyn versus Zukor contest, it's Goldwyn by a mile.

THE MILKY WAY is a middling late-stage comedy for former silent comedian Harold Lloyd, whose best days were long in the past here (similar to the '40s-era work put out by Laurel and Hardy), leaving this a film that offers a couple of chuckles but very little else. Lloyd plays his usual mild-mannered and clumsy character, a milkman who saves a girl from a couple of scruffs and becomes a local hero in the process when he knocks down a boxing champion. What follows sees him rising to the top of the field, but it's all rather dated and uninteresting, focusing too much on repetitive character scenes and not enough of the memorable slapstick and physical comedy that the star was best known for. The film was originally a stage play which has proved highly successful for screen adaptations over the years; the most recent being THE CALCIUM KID with Orlando Bloom.

A comedy with Lloyd, Menjou, Verree Teasdale, Helen Mack, W. Gargan, directed by a distinguished craftsman. Menjou is at his best, very believable as a dishonest manager.

It is slapstick with a reek of folksy artfulness, but the thoughtful plot also has this neat dramatic dimension, required by Lloyd's style, which elicited, entailed this dramatic sharpness; his character was unusual and surprising among the peers, with unexpected means, and skillful in his own way, a naughty wag, determined not to be a victim, which makes the role so truth-like and folksy, with a certain folk realism, slyness and cleverness, a survivor, not at all helpless or clueless, he has his own merry pranks. The lead's slapstick was extravagant (the parades with bagpipes, the horses, already the lion, the flying hat) and baroque, compared to Keaton's.

The protagonist is a proletarian. His _naivetés proceed mainly from inexperience (the puddle, the sportive delusions), not from imbecility, he has a gleam of cleverness. His story synthesizes two lines of realism, a modern popular one, and a folkloric one, reminding of the legendary jesters, and the movie's outlook needs to be explained by both of them, plus the extravagant slapstick, whether satirical (the lion, the hat, the bagpipes: the milkman's delusions of glamor …), or not. The milkman is decent and kind (and reasonably gullible in a milieu unusual for him), but not an idealist (this would be a type of lead unknown to the school of folkloric humor).

Of the three ladies, Helen Mack plays the milkman's sister, Verree Teasdale the heartless blonde (Miss Westley).

Menjou gives one of his best performances as the unprincipled, scheming and shrewd manager, he has an astounding ease.

W. Gargan, who is very likable and handsome, plays Speed, Burleigh's future brother-in-law.

So, a work of thoughtful and crafty comedy; the engine is the storyline, very polished. Some of the characters are glamorous (Miss Westley, the manager, Speed), others not (the sister and the girlfriend); there is a blockhead, Spider, but even him is the generic blockhead of the '30s comedies, not a slapstick one. Lloyd had this possibility of folk drama, because there is something dramatic in his character's struggle to survive. The movie begins with his humiliations, and he finds the way to upstage them all, he finds a makeshift. His Burleigh is sometimes clumsy, but neither naive, nor humble, he vanquishes the wealthier and their routine. He's sly.