Movies

I got a set of mostly pre-war Bing Crosby movies from the library and bailed out of Waikiki Wedding (1937) in the middle of his first rendition of Blue Hawaii. I just couldn't take all that phony hawaiianity (and Martha Rae), even with Grady Sutton as occasional relief. In Double or Nothing (1937), Bing, Bill Frawley, Martha Rae and Andy Devine are honest strangers brought into an Eccentric Will to compete against the machinations of greedy relatives and win the million dollar inheritance. Rae is invariably repellent to me - if she would keep her mouth shut and take her clothes off more often she wouldn't be so bad. Bing's aggressive pursuit of a young woman is supposed to be cute I guess but I found it rather disgusting. The real interest in this for me was a series of bizarre vaudeville specialty acts ranging from hand shadows to knockabout dancers, and a spectacularly literal deus ex machina finale. 5/10

Goodbye Love (1933) is a short bill-filler in which Charlie Ruggles is a rich man's valet who masquerades as a wealthy big game hunter while his employer languishes in Alimony Jail, a sort of men's club where victims of the alimony scam bemoan the loss of their happy homes to unscrupulous gold-diggers. Since alimony is just a con game villainous women use to rob decent men, it is okay to plot a stock swindle and crash the market to get out of paying it. Of interest mostly for this skewed world view - there is not much depth to any of it and the marcelled vamps are rather frightening. Hattie McDaniel appears. Better than not watching a movie. 5/10