New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ClassyCo" data-source="post: 234611" data-attributes="member: 7">Parachute Jumper (1933 / B&W / 72 minutes) I'm sure a lot of you are already laughing at this selection right after reading the title. I had to make sure I ordered Parachute Jumper because it was one of the films used to showcase Jane Hudson's horrendously bad film acting at the start of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). I had absolutely no other pretense to ordering it. Well, it was pretty cheap on Amazon, too. There's a few spoilers afloat (not that any of you will be disappointed in that) United States Marine Corps lieutenants and pilots Bill (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) and Toodles (Frank McHugh) are shot down in the sky over Nicaragua. When they are found drunk and unarmed in a cantina, the two men and the marines go their separate ways. They are offered jobs as commercial pilots in New York, but when they arrive, they learn the operation's gone belly up. By chance, Bill meets blonde-haired Southerner Patricia (Bette Davis), who he nicknames "Alabama". Bill invites Alabama to share the apartment and expenses with he and Toodles. Bill narrowly escapes death when he parachute jumps for extra cash, before he finds work as a chauffeur for Mrs. Newberry (Claire Dodd), who makes it clear she wants special "treatment" from her hired help. Mrs. Newberry is the mistress of a man called Weber (Leo Carrillo), a gangster who hires Bill on as his bodyguard. By coincidence, Alabama gets a job as Weber's office secretary. Bill and Toodles get tangled up in some dirty dealings with Weber and his henchman Steve (Harold Huber), who tend to set Bill up for a murder at the 51 Club. Bill and Toodles later learn that Weber and Steve have been smuggling drugs into the United States. While Weber tries to escape, with Bill flying his plane, the border patrol guns them down. Bill has enough time to make it appear as if Weber was flying the plane and he was a prisoner. In the end, after Toodles decides to reenlist in the marines, Bill proposes marriage to Alabama, who accepts.Parachute Jumper is an assuming little comedy-drama. Like I said earlier, I hadn't any reason to purchase this movie outside of it being used as Baby Jane's earlier acting work. I found myself waiting anxiously to see the clips I saw in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and when they finally popped up, it kind of felt like I was watching the latter film (no worries, though, I snapped out of that).This movie came out back in 1933. There are a few things that signify that Warner Brothers wasn't abiding by the Production Code yet (that wouldn't be enforced strictly until 1934). When Bill asks Alabama to live with him, I'm sure a lot of audience members (however few there were) scratched their heads. Two bachelors living with a young woman ─ that was shocking for the time. There was no pretense of marriage at first, they were just "living together". There's one scene when Bill comes out to "check on" Alabama at night, and she rolls over and takes to leave, feeling he's like all the other men she's known and wants to go to bed with her. Whether his intentions were honorable is up to your view, but Alabama believes him when he says he was just seeing if she was sleeping alright. There's also the subplot surrounding Bill's job with Mrs. Newberry. She makes it clear she wants special "treatment" from her hired men, which is basically old movie lingo for she wants him as a lover. Mrs. Newberry turns the tables on Bill by asking him to remove his overcoat and practically "strut his stuff", which she admires for being "athletic". Alert the censors, this movie needs some tuning.  I honestly didn't think about Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. being in this film until I started watching it today. Sure, I saw his name on the DVD cover, but it wasn't clicking with me that he recently divorced Joan Crawford before production on Parachute Jumper started. This is truly his vehicle, his unshining hour. He's a handsome man, and he does well enough with what material is given. When interviewed later in his life, he always spoke of this film as "junk". The distaste Fairbanks held for the picture cannot hold a candle to how Davis felt about it. Whenever she was interviewed in her golden years, she was often asked about her earliest work and why she found it inferior. Without hesitance, Davis would say that Parachute Jumper, and other movies like Bureau of Missing Persons and Housewife, were all "just junk". She loathed this era of her career, a time when Warner Brothers was desperately trying to fit her into a "type". Davis was her own type, she didn't need a Hollywood manufactured one. Parachute Jumper moves at a quick pace, running around seventy-two minutes (yes, I clocked it). There's not a whole lot of "filler" scenes, and there are occasions when it seems like someone wasn't exactly cutting the film right. I swear some of it had to be left out, or the writing was just that bad, because the plot holes here are big enough for planes to fly through. The aerial shots of the planes flying in the sky look decent, but that doesn't mean this movie isn't without its faults in the special effects department. There's a scene when Fairbanks' character is working as a chauffeur and he races back to pick up Mrs. Newberry and Weber at a nightclub. The shots of the car and the police that end up chasing him are blurry and clearly not the actual cars in the film. The screen seems to jump and jerk, and I literally found myself shutting my ears or looking away from the television because I was getting a headache from watching it. Now, I am being melodramatic, but it really is bad. This really isn't a movie I'd recommend to anyone. If you're a Bette Davis fan and you actually want to watch some of her earlier pictures, then I know she had to do some better than this one. She isn't even really the star of this film. Even if you happen to like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who is the real star here, I'm sure he's done better work elsewhere, too. It's a junky little flick, full of jumps, fade ins and outs. You can watch it to critique. That's about the only reason to watch it really.  [ATTACH=full]21957[/ATTACH][ATTACH=full]21958[/ATTACH]</blockquote>

Verification: 6 + 4 =