VividSimon Simply Perfect

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Kailansorac Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

jacobs-greenwood Co-produced and directed by Clarence Brown, with a screenplay by married couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett based on Eugene O'Neill's play, this above average comedy drama about family life just after the turn of the 20th century features a terrific cast that includes Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore, Aline MacMahon, Eric Linden, Cecilia Parker, Spring Byington, Mickey Rooney, Charley Grapewin, Frank Albertson, Edward Nugent, and Bonita Granville (among others). James Donlan, Tom Dugan, Eily Malyon, and Jed Prouty (among others) also appear, uncredited.Barrymore is the patriarch of the family, he runs the newspaper in small town America, 1906; Byington is his wife. Beery plays Byington's live-in brother who can't find a steady job per his drinking, MacMahon plays the family's cook (?) who maintains an "on again, off again" relationship with him. Albertson plays the oldest, college aged son, whose pal is played by Nugent. Rooney plays the youngest son who's younger than Mickey's 14 years, Granville is the only daughter. Linden plays the middle son, who's just graduated from high school along with his girlfriend Parker; Grapewin plays Parker's father.It's a coming of age story primarily focused on Linden's character, whose views on life are more liberal than those of his conservative family and in their community.Richard Miller (Linden) reads books that were considered racy, scandalous, or even subversive at the time: Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Swinburne's poetry, and political tomes about the oppressed working man. This makes him somewhat out of place in the idyllic community in which he lives where his father Nat (Barrymore) runs the local paper. Richard's mother Essie (Byington) has asked Nat to take their son's subversive reading materials away from him. Regardless, Richard is the valedictorian of his class, and he's told his girlfriend Muriel McComber that he's going to use his high school graduation speech to expose the capitalist ways he deems are wrong. Fortunately for Richard, Nat is on stage to hand out the diplomas and, after reading his son's speech beforehand, interrupts his son just in time, to keep him from making a fool of himself and upsetting virtually everyone else there. Richard's odd ways have already alienated Muriel's father (Grapewin), who forces his daughter to write a "Dear John" letter to her boyfriend after he reads the corruptive poems Richard had written her. He also cancels his ad in Nat's paper, which means a considerable financial loss for the Millers.Nat's ne'er do well brother Sid (Beery), who had left their town where everyone already knows him (for his drinking and reputation) to take a job in another town, returns in time for the town's annual Fourth of July celebration. Tommy (Rooney), and the rest of the town's preteen boys, have been setting off firecrackers all day. Sid keeps the fact that he's lost his job, for presumably the same reasons, a secret by hiding his luggage in the front bushes, at least temporarily.Sid enters the Miller home to charm Lily Davis (MacMahon), who'd promised to finally marry him if he'd sober up and hold a respectable job. But after an evening of celebrating with Nat, Sid returns drunk on beer to join the Millers for dinner. Malyon plays the Miller's maid Nora. Nat says that Sid will be staying, that he's offered his brother a job on his paper. Unfortunately, Granville, playing the Miller's only daughter Mildred, isn't given much to do in this film besides laugh at Sid's drunkenness or rib her brothers, especially Richard.After receiving Muriel's letter, Richard accepts Wint's invitation to go out on the town with him and a couple of 'fast' girls. Wint (Nugent) had come by to go out with Richard's older brother Art (Albertson), but Art had another date playing tennis instead. Richard then finds himself in a hotel bar with a much older floozie named Belle (Helen Flint), who with the help of the bartender (Dugan) and encouragement from another patron (Donlan), gets him drunk and "extorts" some money from him. Richard returns home drunk, much to Mildred's delight and their parents dismay.Later, Belle gives a note describing her evening with Richard to Nat's office mate (Prouty), which leads to father and son conversation about "the birds and the bees" after Richard had insisted that nothing had happened the woman. Belle's motivation had been to get the bar's license revoked for serving a minor, after she had been unceremoniously thrown out of the place.In the end, Richard makes up with Muriel whose father has decided (for some reason) that he's not such a bad kid after all.

marcslope MGM's four big movies of 1935 were "Mutiny on the Bounty," "A Tale of Two Cities," "David Copperfield," and this one. It's the quietest of the four but to me the most impressive, a distillation of Eugene O'Neill's memory play (not his childhood, he said, but his childhood as he wished it were) that's bathed in nostalgia that's more potent and poignant than ever. Screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett get it past the Hays Office without really whitewashing its racier aspects (and Helen Flint's superb as the floozie who nearly corrupts our hero), and Eric Linden, who's entirely up to it, never again had this good a part. Top-billed Wallace Beery perhaps overdoes his drunken- charmer shtick, but Lionel Barrymore nicely underplays opposite him, and Aline MacMahon, always perfection, has one of her best roles--watch her reactions, how she plays love, disgust, and pity simultaneously. The rest of the family--Spring Byington, Mickey Rooney, Frank Albertson, Bonita Granville--are all exactly right. The MGM engineering--always-appropriate music, photography, costumes--helps rather than standardizes the material, the pacing's beautiful, and the warmth is unforced. You can weep at it and not feel like you're being manipulated.

theowinthrop Eugene O'Neill remains, some fifty two years after his death and some eighty seven since his first plays appeared on stage, America's greatest dramatist. This is not hard to understand - no one ever dissected our personal miseries as well by laying bare his own tragedies. It is understandable that he rarely touched on comedy (it does crop up in some forms in his plays - in HUGHIE look at the way the hotel night man has some twisted hero-worship of the gambler crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein). Twice (actually) O'Neill tried comedy. First a spoof, MARCO MILLIONS about Marco Polo. The other was AH, WILDERNESS!, which was his only successful Broadway play in the 1930s - 1955. It is a lovable look at middle class, small town American family life in 1905 (about the same time that that far more horrifying version of family life, A LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, occurs). And because we know what O'Neill was going through, seeing this version is not reassuring at all. The play will amuse, but in our cynical souls we know that it is what O'Neill really needed and never got.One thing the audience never got (unfortunately) was the star of the original production. In his penultimate Broadway performance, George M. Cohan played the father, Nat Miller. The critics of 1932 raved for Cohan's meaningful and wonderful performance, but we can only read of it - he was never in the running for the movie role. He was extremely difficult to work with under other directors, and would have been hard to control. It's too bad. The original choice for the role at MGM was Will Rogers, but Rogers wanted to make a round the world plane trip with Wiley Post, and went to their joint death in a crash at Point Barrow instead. Still Lionel Barrymore is good as substitute for either Cohan or Rogers.The cast on the whole is first rate, from Barrymore and Spring Byington as the parents (note the business about the problems Barrymore has eating certain types of fish) to Wallace Beery as the inebriate uncle and Aline MacMahon as the spinster aunt. The business of the three sons, Arthur (Frank Albertson), Dick (Eric Lindon), and Tommy (Mickey Rooney), and the daughter Mildred (Bonita Granville) all helps paint a picture that is close to Norman Rockwell (although the apparently alcoholism of the uncle is troubling). But it has some terrific moments, as towards the end when Nat warns Dick about fallen women/prostitutes as "sepulchres". But with a knowledgeable audience of O'Neill fans they can put in the dead older brother who wasted his talents on booze and women, and the baby brother who died prematurely. Suddenly the glitz and glare of the 1905 small town America on the 4th of July weekend turns into the shadow world of four dead souls pursuing an endless mutual fight in a New England summer house. It is a finely made movie of MGM near it's height, but the source for all the pleasant humor of the piece has a long dark shadow that is unsettling.

Robert D. Ruplenas I found this mildly engrossing, if a tad dated and a bit of a period piece. Certainly it's always worth watching Lionel Barrymore. But the thing I found interesting - almost disturbing, really - is the change in attitude toward alcoholism since the time this play was written. Even though Wallace Beery's character is clearly struggling with alcoholism, the scenes in which he falls off the wagon are played for straight-out laughs. The dinner scene, in particular, in which everyone at the table finds his drunkenly boorish behavior amusing, is almost painful to watch in light of how we view this affliction today.