Matinee Idol

Last week I went to the Silent Movie Theatre to see the rarely shown The Matinee Idol (1928), directed by Frank Capra.

First a word about the Theatre. It's a small place on Fairfax south of Melrose. It was doing revival business back in the 40s, shut down, and reopened (and reclosed a few times) in the past 15 years. The latest group to take over is The Cinefamily. It's ten buck per program, or 25 bucks a month. Check it out if you're in town. They've actually removed seats so the ones left are more comfortable, and the first two rows are couches. (And they still have Bob Mitchell at the keyboards to accompany the silents--he's 95 and actually played piano for some of these films when they were originally released!)

Anyway, Matinee Idol is one of Capra's earliest films, but we can already see themes that would interest him--particularly country folk versus city folk. But whereas some directors like Hawks or McCarey would make fun of rubes, Capra tended to have the city slickers outwitted by the common people. (He practically invented screwball and then spent the next decade apologizing.) He doesn't have this down yet in the 1920s, but it's brewing.

The plot is pretty simple. A Broadway star (alas, a blackface comedian, though to be fair it is a plot point) is vacationing in the country with others of his smart set when they run across a local, amateur production. They laugh it up at how bad these hicks are, and the star's producer decides to put them on Broadway as an unwitting comedy act. Making fun of bad acting goes back to ancient Greece, but Capra doesn't exactly go where you expect him to.

The star (played by a guy named Johnnie Walker, by the way) performs in the bad play, pretending he's an amateur. He falls in love with the female lead (Bessie Love, who I've always liked). The ham troupe comes to New York, not knowing what they're in for. They don't recognize the star of the Broadway show is that amateur, since they see him in blackface.

So we get to the climax. They put on their play and the New York crowd howls. It could have been played for laughs, I guess, but that's not Capra's style, whose stock in trade is public humiliation of the naive in front of sophisticates. Suddenly, this comedy turns nasty. It ultimately has a happy ending, but for a while there, it's harrowing.