J. Spurlin
I just watched a half-great movie. "Stand-in" is a spoof of Hollywood show biz with Leslie Howard and Joan Blondell in top form. The first hour is one of the best stretches of screwball comedy I've seen; the last half hour stinks. I thought, so what? I had my fun.Atterbury Dodd (Howard), an employee of Pettypacker & Sons in New York, has numbers and figures flowing in his blood along with the corpuscles, to paraphrase a girl he's about to meet. He clashes with the eldest Pettypacker himself (Tully Marshall) over the sale of Colossal Studios out in California. Dodd argues against selling it, so Pettypacker sends him to Hollywood to find out why the movie factory is losing money. Back at Colossal, Koslofski (Alan Mowbray), a director with a cheap foreign accent, is making a jungle picture called "Sex and Satan" with Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton), a leading lady whose hips do all her acting.That's according to her producer and former lover, Doug Quintain (Humphrey Bogart), a guy who always carries his Scottish terrier under his arm. Dodd finds himself schmoozed by the publicist Tom Potts (Jack Carson) and harassed by an aggressive stage mother (Ann O'Neal) the moment he arrives, sending him fleeing to somewhere no one can find him: Mrs. Mack's boarding house for broken-down actors, which includes the former child star Lester Plum, a.k.a. Sugar Plum (Blondell), who is now a stand-in for Thelma Cheri. Soon he discovers there's a plot to sabotage the studio and sell it to the unscrupulous Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon). Meanwhile, Plum becomes Dodd's secretary, falls in love with him, and is annoyed to find that he admires her—for her mind.The joys of this film are many. The wheelchair-bound Marshall seems spry enough to compete in "Murderball." O'Neal plays harmonica as her repulsive young daughter brassily sings "Is It True What They Say About Dixie"—only to hear Dodd shout that the girl ought to be out playing in the sun. The boarders at Mrs. Mack's include Charles Middleton, who is perpetually dressed as Abraham Lincoln; Emerson Treacy (Spanky's dad in a couple of "Our Gang" shorts) as the stunt man who has his pride; and Mary MacLaren, who can't get work in a remake of a silent picture she had starred in. Blondell hilariously sings "On the Good Ship Lollypop" and later gives Howard jujitsu lessons. And scenes from "Sex and Satan" show the gorilla out-acting the leading lady.In the first hour, hardly anything is bad. Jack Carson, in a very typical role, gives an oddly strained performance. The only significant defect is Bogart as the producer. Remember that great scene in "The Big Sleep" where Phillip Marlowe puts on glasses and pretends to be a snippy bookworm? It shows that Bogart ought to have been able to pull off screwball comedy, but here he bites off his lines like Sam Spade.Anyway, after a uproarious first hour, the movie drops dead. Dodd loses his job and so does everyone else at the studio; and suddenly the tone of the movie becomes earnest, a paean to working class types and a would-be inspiring demonstration of what the little guy can do if he'll just organize against the fat cats. Frank Capra could pull this stuff off, but Tay Garnett directing a script based on a Clarence Budington Kelland novel, cannot. The last half-hour is so bad it can make you forget what you had just watched before.But don't. How many movies are great entertainment for even an hour?
Mr. Leslie Howard Spaiser
For once Leslie Howard is the star of the movie.Unlike the producers of the DVD want you to think, Bogart is actually a supporting actor. But look at the cover - photo and cast lineup. You would think it is a Bogart movie. Frankly, that is why I bought it.Actually this movie is a Leslie Howard movie with Blondel as co-star. Bogart plays a secondary role and is a supporting actor.I was thinking of the only other Bogart / Howard movie I know of, Petrified Forest. So finally I find a bona-fide Leslie Howard movie.Of course I was biased but I loved it. My mother probably did too. She named me Leslie Howard (Spaiser).P.S. This picture was released 3 years before I was born.
bkoganbing
Colossal studios is in the financial toilet. The bank that's holding the mortgage sends one of their top men, Leslie Howard, to figure out what to do to save the studio or sell it to C. Henry Gordon a rival movie mogul. Howard may not know the first thing about making movies and his people skills leave something to be desired, but he's now wondering why Gordon is so anxious to acquire this property. Howard supersedes Colossal studio head Humphrey Bogart as head of the company and gets a crash course in film making. Of course he's helped quite a bit by Joan Blondell who he meets accidentally while on the way to the studio. She's an extra and a stand-in and she gives him a few lessons in management and a few other things.This was the second and last pairing of Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. At Howard's insistence, Bogey was brought to Warner Brothers to repeat his stage role in The Petrified Forest which he and Howard co-starred in on Broadway. Stand-in is not The Petrified Forest, but it's still an amusing comedy and good entertainment.
Nazi_Fighter_David
"Stand-In" gave Bogart his first real chance to play comedy as it matched him once again with Leslie Howard, "The Petrified Forest" co-star, in a gentle and moderate tale of an efficiency expert (Howard) who is sent to Hollywood to save a stumbling studio from potential ruin… Howard is appropriately stuffy as he enlisted the aid of former child star Joan Blondell to teach him the more practical side of movie-making… Bogart drew his share of laughs... He plays a producer-editor who had taken to the bottle after an unsuccessful romance with one of the studio's stars, but moves to action when Howard uses him to rescue a movie "bomb" and turn it into a success big enough to save the studio
