Make Me a Star (1932)

A lot more amusing than I thought it would be.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

For a film that was based on a George S. Kaufman collaboration with Marc Connelly, Make Me A Star strangely lacks the acid wit that Kaufman was known for. Instead what we have is a whimsical tale of a dreamy young man who wants to be a film star more than anything else in the world.Stu Erwin in probably his best known role plays Merton Gill the young man who was taken from an orphanage and raised by a grocer's family to be a grocery clerk and maybe later a part owner of the store. But Erwin loves the movies, he's even taken a correspondence acting course. That by the way is something I can't compute. Can you Lee Strasberg making records for a correspondence school on the Method?Erwin leaves his Hooterville like hometown to pursue his dream and won't be discouraged. His childlike innocence even wins over bit movie player Joan Blondell on loan from Warner Brothers to Paramount. Erwin in his performance touches on Stan Laurel in portraying innocence in a tough world.Besides Erwin and Blondell, Make Me A Star is best known for a whole flock of Paramount stars doing walk-ons as themselves in and around the studio and at the premiere of Erwin's movie. As I said, Erwin is almost Laurel like in his innocence and a sharp director decides to take advantage of that. Of course the gag is he doesn't tell Erwin. Gary Cooper and Tallulah Bankhead are seen in costume from The Devil And The Deep which was also shooting at the same time. Such others as Fredric March, Sylvia Sidney, Charlie Ruggles, Jack Oakie, etc. show up at the premiere. Make Me A Star, originally Merton Of The Movies ran for 392 performances on Broadway during the 1922-23 season and starred Glenn Hunter who also did a silent screen version of it. Later on MGM secured the rights and Red Skelton did a version of this in the Forties.Although the big studio system era is gone, people still dream of getting into the motion picture business. For that reason I doubt we've seen the last version of Merton Of The Movies. Can you see someone like Jim Carrey doing it for today's audience? This one will certainly do until that ever happens.

This is high modernism at its best - a powerful recognition of the enormous power of cinema to both elevate and crush talent, told through the means of a simple "boy wants to go to Hollywood" story. It is so affecting because though it can be viewed as a relatively straightforward tragicomedy, it ultimately becomes a light but heartfelt meditation on the constraints that art places on the artist and the artist on the art. But that's what they were doing in 1932 - a particularly great year for Cinema - when the technology had really come together (this movie has music overlays, and film within a film), but the industry had not yet begun to self-police itself in the context of its political role in society, and to abandon the unself-conscious exploration of the latest literary forms. These themes - self-consciousness, the artist as victim to his art - themes that Joyce and Woolf were exploring in literature, can be found right here in "Make me a Star." The Pre-Production Code Enforcement movies almost always contain these nuggets, and I watch them no matter how badly rated the contemporary critics assess them. For example, this movie garners but 2 starts, yet I would put it as solid 3.5 (out of 4). Stuart Irwin's acting is a tour-de-force: absolutely astounding at every turn, and the final scene had me in tears: Laugh if you well, his statement "I'm a clown" reminded me of the great aria "Rire Pagliacco" from Il Pagliacci - it was that kind of moment - the self-conscious realization that the actor and the role were one, but in contrast to the opera, here the clown accepts his fate rather than fighting it.Ruth Donnelly has a cameo role and is her usual work-horse self - always great to see the old girl, and let's all work to put her into the pantheon of great stars, for she certainly was. The brilliance of her acting is that she doesn't thumb her nose at conventional morality, she doesn't know it exists. She is too busy in the day-to-day to understand the oppression of woman, but if confronted, she will make it clear that others may be oppressed, but she ain't (and you'll learn the hard way soon if you don't agree with her).I do not know if the 1924 play includes the homosexual innuendo found in this movie, when Joan Blondell says to Sam Hardy, "You're not going soft on him, are you?" Regardless, this moment is fine, and there is no shame or circumspection in either Hardy's or Blondell's interchange - but unlike today you don't know or care whether Hardy is gay or straight, just that he's a great director and yes, he has gone a bit soft on Erwin. I need to research Sam Hardy, but his cameo here is superb.And what else can one say about Joan Blondell, other than to say that the 26-year old she is in this movie could step into 2007 and deal with it just fine? - truly, completely liberated, but still with a tenderness to the conventional morality that she bows to but knew was slipping away. I don't know who insisted on down-playing the romantic angle between the role of Menton Gill and 'Flips' Montague, but this also makes the movie startling. Menton Gill could be gay and Flips just a 'girl-friend' - they really are equals here, whose only real sexuality is the desire to perform.I taped this movie onto a DVD and am sitting my 5 and 8 year-old daughters down to watch this as soon as I can budget 1.5 hours for the three of us (or four, if Mom wants to join) to enjoy this together and to understand its lessons. It is a perfect antidote to the silly point our culture has come to, where celebrity qua celebrity is all that matters, and at least in the ephemera, talent is irrelevant. This movie reminds us that talent is everything, and there is a great price to pay for it.

Slight Spoiler.I was profoundly touched and moved by this small Paramount picture, a fervent and well-made satire on Hollywood. As it unfolds, "Make Me a Star" turns out to be more dramatic than humorous, with amazing performances by the two leads, Stuart Erwin and Joan Blondell. Erwin's Mertin Gill, a grocery clerk that dreams of becoming a cowboy actor in Hollywood, is fabulous without overdoing his part. Blondell who understands him better than anyone in Hollywood, gives one of her most honest and touching performances ever. My favorite scene is when Gill is in the movie theatre watching the preview of his unedited film `Wide Open Spaces'; the audience is laughing hysterically while Gill sits there looking stunned and speechless. It is a sincere blend of comedy and pathos, like the picture itself. This is a very special, heartwarming film and you will fall in love with it. The star cameos include Maurice Chevalier, Gary Cooper, Clive Brook, Jack Oakie, Charles Ruggles, Frederic March, and Sylvia Sidney.

Having done the 'starving actor thing" in LA for several years, I fell in love with this movie late one night on Turner Classics. It has some great scenes of the naive midwestern dude learning how to act and get in the business. And it doesn't necessarily have a happy ending, which I loved. Does he stay and starve, does he go back home, does he make it? The casting scenes are great and Joan Blondell does a great job as the sympathetic inside woman. Accurate, tongue in cheek portrait of the business that still stands.