A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

The Smart Set (Jack Conway, 1928)

William Haines in The Smart Set
Cast: William Haines, Jack Holt, Alice Day, Hobart Bosworth, Coy Watson, Constance Howard, Paul Nicholson, Julia Swayne Gordon. Screenplay: Byron Morgan, Ann Price; titles: Robert E. Hopkins. Cinematography: Oliver T. Marsh. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Sam Zimbalist.

Given that we now know what everyone in Hollywood knew at the time, namely that William Haines was one of the few openly gay leading men of the 1920s and '30s, it's fascinating to watch how he camps up the role of Tommy Van Buren in The Smart Set. Haines mugs, poses, and generally upstages everyone in the film -- and gets away with it, considering that his performance is almost the only entertaining thing about this silly romantic comedy. Tommy is a conceited champion polo player, and the plot, such as it is, deals with his self-centered sabotage of the United States polo team in a match against the British, and his developing relationship with the pretty Polly Durant (Alice Day), the daughter of a wealthy owner of polo ponies. Does Tommy come to his senses and save the day at the film's end, winning the game and Polly, too? What do you think?

Posted by at
Links: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)