Runtime: 73 minutes
Directed by: Andrew L. Stone
Starring: Adolphe Menjou, Martha Scott, Pola Negri, Dennis O’Keefe, Billie Burke
From: Andrew L. Stone Productions
Another Tarantino favorite.
As I’ve mentioned before, various episodes of the Pure Cinema Podcast have been heard by moi; the one devoted to public domain was one that featured QT. Hi Diddle Diddle was one I had never heard of before but he put over incredibly strongly. While I’ve heard some bizarre movie opinions from Tarantino-and everyone on the show admitted that the weird title does it no justice-I was intrigued enough to put it in my figurative queue & last night was finally the time to give this a shot.
While I am not over the moon for it, Hi was still a pretty good time. The son of the absurdly named Hector Phyffe (Adolphe Menjou) is a Navy man on a two day shore leave who is going to marry a young blonde he’s known for awhile. However, a heel decides to make the blonde’s mother (Billie Burke) go broke so the son isn’t going to marry into a rich family. There’s also Hector’s wife being an opera singer-silent star Pola Negri in her second to last movie-and more hijinks as he tries to scam a scammer and get the money back. In addition there are some pleasant songs, various running gags, fourth wall breaking, and misunderstandings that so compound onto each other, a senator at one point thinks that someone is married to THREE different women at the same time.
Heck, there’s even a few moments of animation directed by Friz Freleng of Looney Tunes fame. There is more anarchy than you may expect from a film during the World War II era. This gave me enough laughs in only 73 minutes where this gets a favorable moment. It even presents a product that most likely have no knowledge of. One scene features a woman singing a song on what looks like a television; it’s actually a Panoram, a visual jukebox presenting a proto version of music videos. Thankfully, many of those reels of film still exist today so those artists of the era have video of themselves preserved for all time.
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