Daily Blague

1. The what? The who? Yes, "Kockenlocker" is a funnier name. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is a funnier movie. But it's not out on DVD yet. Preston Sturges fans take what they can get.

2. That's right, Preston Sturges. Who else would dream up a name like "Harold Diddlebock?" Only a writer/director/producer with backing by Howard Hughes, that's who. Who was going to make him change it? Hughes was probably afraid that Sturges would say, "All right, we'll change it, to Howard Hughes." After all, Sturges was richer. Maybe he wasn't richer, but he had just paid more income tax than anybody else the IRS knew about. (I always think that this claim to fame prefigures Sturges's impecunious end.)

3. Okay, okay. The cornice scene with the lion goes on too long. This was Sturges's besetting sin toward the end of his career. Think of the "Simplicitas" scene in Unfaithfully Yours. All those trashed side chairs! It does go on and on, and even Rex Harrison can't quite make you keep your fingers off the advance button. But if you're one of the faithful, you watch these scenes straight. They're still too long, but you know you've been admitted to the innermost chambers of the mad genius.

4. Preston Sturges's America is peopled mostly by people who hang out in the innermost chambers of mad genius. There is absolutely nothing boring about it. Even poor Harold's sister, the hyperrespectable Flora (played by Margaret Hamilton), is too monstrous to be tiresome. You can tell that she has been waiting for Harold to make a fool out of himself for years so that she could have a field day insulting him. It's only a movie, and that's sad, because Sturges made movies about the United States of Brio.

5. The Palm Beach Story is coming out on DVD early in 2005. That and Unfaithfully Yours are my favorite comedies on earth period end of discussion. If I had them both on DVD today, I probably would have given The Sin of Harold Diddlebock a pass. There is a widespread lack of enthusiasm about The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

6. Which was made in 1947. Everyone in the Preston Sturges rep company appears to be on hand, except for William Demarest. Robert Greig is great as Algernon the coachman, but it's hard not to miss Eric Blore, who, after all, was not a PSRC regular. Franklin Pangborn - Hollywood's first something - is crazy in plaids; Harold Lloyd is even crazier in the plaid suit that Franklin Pangborn makes for him. I would like to wear this plaid suit, at least once. (Steve Martin undoubtedly has.) But I would not wear the ten-gallon hat - even if it only holds two or three gallons.

7. Harold Lloyd is the original Woody Allen, without the neuroses. One of the silent-era greats, he has a fine voice - rather like Henry Fonda's in The Lady Eve - and he is a genuinely funny man to watch. He has great teeth.

8. Best for last. In the film's first (and best) set-piece, Edgar Kennedy plays the bartender-as-artist who is determined that Harold Diddlebock's first drink on this earth will be - a poem, as Jimmy Conlin puts it. What might have been a shopworn scene has all the varnish stripped off: it's as fresh and raw as if it had never even been thought of by anybody else, much less filmed. Everything about it is just different enough to keep you wondering what's next. And laughing your head off at the smart lines.

9. Frances Ramsden, the ingénue. I can't resist the idea that Ramsden is the movie's albatross. She's not bad; she plays the lovely last scene very well indeed. But that the movie's three big guys (Lloyd, Sturges, and Hughes) picked her out of the Hollywood fishbowl suggests a certain - independence of mind. I can hear them talking themselves into believing that they were launching a new star. Ahem. Ramsden had  three movies to her entire career, according to IMDb. Who was she involved with, off camera? She died, at 80, four years ago.

10. Well, rent it already. You won't be sorry.