New Line's recent
Harold Lloyd
Comedy Collection is such a bulging
scrapbook of silent shorts, silent and talkie
features and extras that the packaging for the
boxed set doesn't even list a fraction of the
contents inside. There is at least one buried
treasure awaiting buyers of the set or of
individually-available volume 1. That's 1936's
generally forgotten
The Milky Way. If
it's not Lloyd's best talkie, it's certainly
close to it.
The Milky Way is one of the rare cases
in which Lloyd starred in an existing project,
not something he developed himself or which
was developed expressly for him to star in.
It's based on a 1934 play that briefly ran on
Broadway, and it differs in two ways from what
you might expect from a Lloyd comedy: it's
very verbal and it features a colorful
ensemble that shares the comic load with the
star.
Despite the verbal repartee,
The Milky
Way is also a very physical comedy,
especially during its stronger first half.
That's when we meet Burleigh Sullivan (Lloyd),
an underachieving Brooklyn milkman who gets
into a scrape with two drunks while picking up
his sister Mae (Helen Mack) after she's
finished her shift at a restaurant. The drunks
are hitting on her when Burleigh arrives and,
after confounding them with
nursery-rhyme-style putdowns when they keep
asking him what his name is, Burleigh has the
pair on the verge of a fight when Mae runs off
for a policeman. Director Leo McCarey follows
her as she turns a corner and finds a cop,
while passersby hurry in the opposite
direction, excited by the prospect of the
developing scuffle. The camera follows Mae and
the cop back to the sidewalk in front of the
restaurant and the cop clears the mob away, to
reveal one of the drunks KO'd on the sidewalk.
He's Speed McFarland (William Gargan), the
middleweight world champ, and the altercation
ends up on the front page of the morning
paper.
When the drunks clear the cobwebs from their
heads the next morning, the second, Spider
(Lionel Stander), the champ's sparring partner
and bodyguard, is mortified. The champ's
manager, Gabby Sloan (Adolphe Menjou), is bent
out of shape. Speed wants revenge. And Gabby's
tart-tongued mistress Ann (Verree Teasdale)
wisecracks at every opportunity about these
silly and, in the case of Speed and Spider,
dumb men. Typical exchange: Ann (sarcastically
mocking Spider's brainpower): "Good morning,
Plato." Spider (dumbfounded): "Plate o' what?"
With the press clamoring for reaction from
Speed's camp, Burleigh pays a visit to their
hotel to explain how it wasn't him who KO'd
Speed, it was Spider. Burleigh is just a good
ducker and Speed ended up taking the punch, he
explains. Spider takes a poke at Burleigh, who
ducks again, and down goes Speed again, just
as reporters stampede into the room. The
headline above the new photo: "This is Not
Yesterday's Paper – It Happened Again Today."
These altercations and the attempts of Speed,
Spider and Gabby to get him into a boxing ring
are the highlights of
The Milky Way.
They even include some surprisingly good
schtick involving Burleigh's beloved
milk-wagon horse, Agnes. Spider and Ann
continue to deliver snappy one-liners, like
when the guys size up Burleigh and Spider
jiggles the bottom of Burleigh's upper arm.
Stander says, in his gravelly voice, "Soft as
a bag of dead mice" (Stander played the same
role in the 1946 Danny Kaye remake,
The Kid
from Brooklyn). Burleigh is eventually
persuaded to begin a fighting career, but he
doesn't know that Gabby arranges for his
opponents to take dives so he can be built up
for a title fight with Speed. The action moves
to that inevitable showdown, with laughs
coming from Burleigh's effort to have the
"color" Gabby says the greats have and a scene
in which Burleigh passes on his talent at
ducking to a dowager (Marjorie Gateson).
Burleigh's flamboyant "color" includes walking
into a hotel with a lion in tow, something
Preston Sturges essentially recycled a decade
later when he and Lloyd collaborated on
The
Sin of Harold Diddlebock.
As always with Lloyd, much of the comedy comes
from the discrepancy between his "normal guy"
looks and the absurd situations. The staging
of McCarey also gets the best out of the
physical gags (he'd directed one of Laurel and
Hardy's best shorts,
Big Business, and
the Marx Brothers' best movie,
Duck
Soup, before moving on to more
conventional fare in the 1940s and 1950s). And
the fast-talking cast helps to make
The
Milky Way a splendid souvenir from the
screwball-comedy era. Reportedly, all prints
of
The Milky Way were to be destroyed
after Goldwyn bought its rights for the Kaye
remake, but fortunately a few survived.
Although the movie slipped into the public
domain over the years, the New Line version
looks and sounds better than any of the
cut-rate versions also available on tape or
disc.
For more information about
The Milky
Way, visit
New Line Cinema.
by Paul Sherman
