lugonian STAND-IN (United Artists, 1937), directed by Tay Garnett, is another behind-the-scenes Hollywood story produced during the 1937-38 cycle that consisted of other such novelties as A STAR IS BORN (1937), Hollywood HOTEL (1937), SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT (1937), BOY MEETS GIRL (1938), THE GOLDWYN FOLLIES (1938), just to name a few. Based on the novel by Clarence Budington Kellen, STAND-IN is interesting mainly for its casting of Warner Brothers stock players (Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell, Humphrey Bogart and later Jack Carson) working outside their studio base for Walter Wanger Productions. It also reunites Howard and Bogart following their initial triumph in both stage (1935) and screen (1936) adaptations to their most famous work of Robert Sherwood's THE PETRIFIED FOREST. One would have expected their reunion on screen to be another hard-hitting drama. Instead, it's a comedy/drama placing Howard as a nerdy bespectacled intellectual with Bogey breaking away from his tough guy image playing a dog carrying movie producer.Opening at the Pennypacker and Sons Bank in the Wall Street district of New York City where the Pennypackers (Tully Marshall, J.C. Nugent and William V. Mong) are stockholders for Collossal Film Company, an independent movie studio. Because the studio is facing financial ruin, the Pennypackers employ its executive vice president, Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard), their efficiency expert of four years, to go to Hollywood to discover why the studio is failing and whether or not to sell it out as a bad investment. While at the movie capital of the world, Atterbury, ignorant of motion picture industry, up to the point of not even knowing who Shirley Temple is, encounters meets Miss Lester Plum (Joan Blondell), a former child star employed at Collossal as a stand-in for temperamental movie actress, Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton), who is loved by her hard-drinking producer, Douglas Quintain (Humphrey Bogart). Thelma, however, shows more interest in her phony accented speaking director, Koslofski (Alan Mowbray). Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon), is a rival movie producer for another studio, would want nothing more than to see Collossal Film Company fail, thus sending Tom Potts (Jack Carson), a loud-mouth publicity agent, to spy on Dodd. Rather than staying at a plush hotel where he's constantly disturbed, Atterbury moves into Mrs. Mack's (Esther Howard) Boarding House, living among other has-been/unemployed actors, including Lester Plum, whom he later hires as his personal secretary. Discovering that a gorilla gathers more attention than Thelma, leading lady of "Sex and Satan," Atterbury takes it upon himself to save both movie and studio, only to get fired for his troubles and to stand in front of a very angry mob of unemployed studio workers blaming Atterbury for their predicament.As much as Humphrey Bogart gathered the most attention for his excellent portrayal as Duke Mantee in THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936), STAND-IN very much belongs to Howard and Blondell. As in her Warner Brothers films, Joan is sassy as usual, yet caring and sympathetic towards a man unlikely to become the one she wants. She teaches financial genius Atterbury the method of dancing, the art of self-defense through jujitsu, but fails in getting through to him the method of love making. STAND-IN even includes some brief vocalizing at the Café Trocader to an old standard, "That Old Feeling," initially introduced in another Walter Wanger production, VOGUES OF 1938 (1937), as well as an a little girl named Elvira (Florie Capino) doing a Shirley Temple imitation by singing (very badly) her signature song, "On the Good Ship Lollipop." For being credited as Leslie Howard's last American comedy, STAND-IN is as good as it gets. Character types come off best, leaving the funniest piece of business with staff members giving a birthday celebration to the oldest Pennypacker (Tully Marshall) by filling his cake with a huge assortment of forest fire type candles.Being one of the earliest movies to be distributed onto video cassette dating back to the early 1980s, and currently out-of-print DVD format, STAND-IN did enjoy frequent late night broadcasts on commercial television (1950s to 1980s) before shifting over to cable television channels as American Movie Classics (1994-1999) and Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere: September 30, 2003). For anyone who enjoys movies about the movies, especially those from Hollywood's heyday, should definitely enjoy viewing this now rare find. (***)

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?

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.

classicsoncall The banking concern of Pettypacker and Sons is about to sell their interest in Colossal Film Studios, until accountant extraordinaire Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard) points out that the five million dollar deal is worth at least twice that much. Standing up to the senior Pettypacker, Dodd offers to head to Hollywood to head up his own internal investigation of the studio.The characters Dodd meets in tinsel town are more like caricatures than real people. There's the blustering movie director Koslofski (Alan Mowbray), the alcoholic producer Quintain (Humphrey Bogart), the annoying publicist Potts (Jack Carson), and the prima donna of all time Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton). Even Dodd himself is the consummate number cruncher, reducing meaningful personal relationships to "cogs" and "units". The only real heart and soul person that Dodd discovers is the delightful former child star Lester Plum (Joan Blondell), reduced to stand in roles that earn her a meager forty dollars a week when she can get the work.The film has a lot of bizarre scenes that produce double takes, such as the Shirley Temple wanna be that performs on the spot auditions, and the seal and penguin act that share a room in the boarding house where Miss Plum resides. Blondell's character earns Dodd's interest when she uses a judo flip to throw him on his keester; that move will be repeated more than once as the film progresses.At the center of Dodd's investigation is the production of a guaranteed to flop movie that will put Colossal over the financial edge and insure a bargain basement sale to big shot businessman Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon), who will then lay off virtually the entire studio. The name of the film, and you better sit tight, is "Sex and Satan" - it's a jungle movie! With lines like "Goodbye little jungle goddess", the movie is guaranteed to be dead out of the water. Making lemonade out of this lemon will take some doing, but Dodd puts on his best human face and organizes the masses for a final rally to save the day. And all of this after being fired by Pettypacker!I would probably never have seen this film had I not been such a loyal Humphrey Bogart fan. Though he's third billed behind Howard and Blondell, his screen time is nominal, alternating between one of the studio heavies and his later conversion to a Dodd ally. It's a rare comic role for Bogey in which he appears somewhat uncomfortable, but ultimately satisfying once he decides to ditch gold digger Thelma Cheri and edit a gorilla into her jungle scenes.The movie closes on the hint of a romance between Dodd and Miss Plum, just about when she's run out of options and hope of pinning him down. Fortunately the number cruncher decides to have a heart, as unlikely as that may have seemed at the outset. It's a well deserved finale for Joan Blondell's character, her good natured warmth and sincerity deserved to win out in the end.