TeenzTen An action-packed slog

Freaktana A Major Disappointment

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Allissa .Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

JohnHowardReid Copyright 11 February 1936 by Paramount Productions, Inc. New York opening at the Paramount: 25 March 1936. U.S. release: 7 February 1936. Australian release: 22 April 1936. 10 reels. 8,010 feet. 89 minutes.SYNOPSIS: The opening credits set a comic tone for the farce that follows: a cow in the Paramount logo à la MGM's lion! In the first scene the owner of the Sunshine Dairy is giving a pep talk to his milkmen and congratulating his better salesmen. Burleigh Sullivan (Lloyd) is passed over in the laudatory remarks. Not only is he apparently an underachiever, to the dismay of his boss, but in the middle of the lecture he gets the hiccups, distracts the proceedings and causes general mayhem. Later that evening his sister Mae (Helen Mack) is jockeying with some soused patrons as she operates the coat-check concession in a local hotel. They wait for her outside; when she leaves to go home, they detain her with childish pranks. Burleigh comes to her rescue and gets mixed up in a brawl — when the crowd clears it seems he has knocked out the middleweight boxing champion!NOTES: The stage play opened on Broadway at the Cort on 8 May 1934. It ran a just mildly successful 63 performances. Produced by Harmon and Ullman, it was directed by William W. Schorr and starred Hugh O'Connell as Burleigh, Brian Donlevy as Speed, Leo Donnelly as Gaby, and Gladys George as Ann.The 1940 radio adaptation of The Milky Way on Texaco Star Theatre featured Joe E. Brown in the role of Burleigh Sullivan.The 1946 film remake, The Kid from Brooklyn, was produced by Samuel Goldwyn, distributed by RKO, and directed in Technicolor by Norman Z. McLeod. It featured Danny Kaye as Burleigh, Virginia Mayo as Polly, Vera-Ellen as Susie Sullivan ("Mae" in original), Walter Abel as Gabby, Eve Arden as Ann, Steve Cochran as Speed, Lionel Stander repeating his original role as Spider, Fay Bainter as Mrs LeMoyne, Pierre Watkin as Mr. LeMoyne, and Clarence Kolb as Wilbur Austin.COMMENT: If ever there was a typical Friday flick "The Milky Way" is it. An "A" feature from a major studio with all the publicity, pizazz and highly enthusiastic reviews that such an offering can generate, yet starring a once-super=popular silent comedian who had made a none-too-successful transition to sound. Even worse from the showman's angle, Lloyd was not only billed as the only above-the- title star, but in letters twice as thick and twice as big as the Milky Way title itself. So you were forced to sell the film with a name star that many of your potential patrons had already written off. Moreover, your own opinion of the film — an opinion re-inforced by talking to other exhibitors at the Paramount trade screening — was that it wasn't half as funny as the critics opined. True, the pace was fast and frantic enough, and some of the knockabout stuff was pretty amusing, but there seemed a lot of forced shouting and screaming, often to little effect, while many of the occasional wisecracks were either inaudibly thrown away or too sophisticated for your audience.Lloyd's problem, like that of the other great silent comedians, was that the screen persona he had built up was simply too simplistic for sound. And whereas the silent comedian could hold a feature together on his own, with the support players being just that — a support — this was not generally the case with sound. A further distraction was that the comic's voice was often at odds with his image. Chaplin's aristocratic English would have sounded way out of place in the mouth of the Little Tramp.With the notable exception of Langdon (who was actually the same guileless innocent in real life as he was in films), just about all the major silent stars realized these pitfalls, but Chaplin alone succeeded in wholly overcoming them. This he did by creating an entirely new screen personality and by surrounding himself with players who had plenty of charisma in their own right. Lloyd has attempted both these stratagems here, but his success is limited. He still tends to hog the camera to an irritating degree. True, this is great in those scenes where he's supposed to be obnoxious, and also good when he demonstrates his nimble footwork. But when he speaks (which is too often too long) he loses our interest because his voice is too monotonous, too ordinary, it lacks timbre.Of the support players, only Veree Teasdale and Lionel Stander really shine, though Barbier makes the most of his opportunities and Dorothy Wilson is pretty enough as the hot/cold Polly. But Menjou comes on too strong with weak material and Gargan (pronounced "Garrigan") is almost a total write-off.Maybe I'm prejudiced because I saw it first (and often), but I think "The Kid from Brooklyn" is much more entertaining — particularly in those scenes re-stated word for word or blow for blow. The bits I liked best about this Milky Way were the bits of business not used by the Kid, like Lloyd's boomerang hat and all the stuff with the foal in the taxi. With the exception of Walter Abel, the players in Kid are noticeably superior to Milky. Even Lionel Stander excels his own very self. The same goes for the production. In the Goldwyn versus Zukor contest, it's Goldwyn by a mile.

Jay Raskin Harold Lloyd was a master of the comic sequence. He would put together 40 or 50 rapid-fire gags, each one building on the one before and knock you out of your seat with laughter with each brilliant ten or fifteen or ten minute sequence. The only problem with most of his films is a little weakness in connecting the sequences. Leo McCarey is not a gag craftsman. He just brings on one gag after another and hardly cares if they're connected or make sense. In his masterpiece, the Marx Brother's "Duck Soup," this style passes for zaniness and fits well with the anarchistic persona of the brothers.In this case, it sabotages Lloyd's genius. Here we have Lloyd's usual lightly connected sequences, but the weakness is compounded by McCarey's disconnection of the gags within a sequence. You can feel Lloyd fighting to connect the set of gags into a sequence and McCarey just moving on to a different set of gags. Only in the last boxing sequence does Lloyd manage to put together 15 or 20 gags for a hilarious sequence, but the five or six minutes here is still much shorter than the great gag sequences in most of his other films. There is also a wonderful sequence between Lloyd and a horse. I suspect if McCarey had allowed Lloyd to expand it for another five minutes, it would have become a classic. Lloyd gets some serious comic help here from Adolphe Menjou and Lionel Stander. Menjou plays sleazy better than any else. Like the brilliantly scheming lawyer he played in "Roxie Hart," here he plays a brilliantly scheming boxing promoter. Stander plays the body guard/funny tough-guy type he always did so well. Lionel Stander makes every scene he's in interesting. Even when he's in a terrible movie like Roman Polansky's "Cul de Sac," (1966) his acting manages to save scene after scene. There's a little political irony here. Adolphe Menjou was a friendly conservative witness before HUAC in the 1950's, while Lionel Stander was blacklisted for his communist beliefs.Lloyd also gets help from Menjou's beautiful wife Verree Teasdale. She delivers some sharp wisecracks that she somehow sneaks past the Hay's Office, and Helen Mack as his sweet sister. Both woman are fine, but are hamstrung by the little screen time their characters are given.This is an interesting movie to compare to Lloyd's last masterpiece, "The Sin of Harold Diddlebock" (Preston Sturges, 1947). There is a short scene of less than one minute with a lion and Lloyd. There is just two or three gags. They're funny, but then the lion disappears from the film. In Diddlebock, Lloyd appears with "Jackie the Lion." This time he uses the lion for about 100 gags in a great classic 30 minute sequence that both sums up and ends his motion picture career.It is sad to think that "Milky Way" was considered a success at the time of its release, while "Diddlebock" was considered a failure.

bkoganbing Apparently we're real lucky to have The Milky Way available to us at all today. Producers like Sam Goldwyn who bought up the negatives and all existing copies so that it would not be compared to his remake of The Kid From Brooklyn weren't concerned with historic preservation. Fortunately star Harold Lloyd was.The Milky Way was Lloyd's last really successful film artistically though it did lose money for Paramount. In it Lloyd plays a milkman who happens to knock out middleweight champion William Gargan, sort of. In truth Lloyd has defense down pat which is half the skills of a successful boxer he can bob and weave having been taught to do that as a 98 pound weakling kid to avoid being hit. But when he does that the publicity makes Gargan's manager Adolphe Menjou who seems to have taken his character from Doc Kearns who managed among others Jack Dempsey. Menjou builds up Lloyd with a series of tank opponents all for a real title shot at Gargan. Of course when Gargan falls for Lloyd's sister Helen Mack things do get a bit complicated.Director Leo McCarey loaded this film with a treasure chest of character players. Playing the Eve Arden part before Eve Arden is Verree Teasdale who was Menjou's girlfriend and real life wife. Lionel Stander is the clueless factotum for Menjou and Gargan whose malapropisms are amusing and who nearly tanks the whole set up in the end. I also can't forget George Barbier as the milk company executive who sees a great promotion opportunity in the milkman/pugilist.The Milky Way holds up great and should be seen with Sam Goldwyn's The Kid From Brooklyn for comparison. You can see why Goldwyn thought this would be a great vehicle for Danny Kaye. Lionel Stander repeats his role and Eve Arden plays the Eve Arden part that Verree Teasdale originated.

MartinHafer Considering this is a sound-era film from Harold Lloyd, I expected it would be significantly worse than his full-length silent films. And, unfortunately, this WAS the case--as the plot and style of the film just didn't do much to exploit the talents of this great comedian. However, while it is a big disappointment in this respect, compared to other movies of the day, this is still a slightly better than average flick--about on par with an Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope movie of the 1940s.The plot is VERY familiar (though not for Lloyd) and involves a milk man who people think has knocked out the middle weight champ on a street corner brawl. However, the knockout was just an accident plus the champ was very drunk. However, this incident hurts the champ's reputation. So, his agent thinks "what better way to make the champ look GOOD than by pretending Harold REALLY is a great fighter after all?". So, a significant amount of the movie is spent convincing him to become a fighter, train and box a lot of set-up matches (though Harold thinks they are NOT rigged). Ultimately, he once again faces the champ but, being a comedy, things don't work out like they should but everyone seems pretty happy in the end anyway.Overall, the acting wasn't bad and it was mildly amusing but it just wasn't anything like earlier Lloyd films. The weakest elements were the rather dismal plot and the fact that the movie lost steam towards the end--my interest, and probably yours, lagged. Not a bad film but not especially memorable either. For a better sound Lloyd film, try MOVIE CRAZY or CAT'S PAW.PS--This was remade as THE KID FROM BROOKLYN starring Danny Kaye. However, the plot has also been used in various forms on TV shows and other movies as well--so this isn't exactly a unique film.PPS--The movie and TV veteran Charles Lane is in the film. I'm sure you'll recognize his very familiar face. As of today (6/07), Mr. Lane is STILL alive and doing quite well at 102 years of age! Good luck, Mr. Lane.