Some Thoughts
Bert Lahr secured screen immortality by playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. But his first film, Flying High, demonstrates why he otherwise never achieved major success in Hollywood: he was simply too big for the screen, like Jimmy Durante turned up to 11. Lahr’s gurning, his exaggerated physical movements, and his insistence on saying most of his lines twice, may have come across well in the stalls of a Broadway theatre, but are just too much in medium-closeup.
When Lahr is on screen with co-star Pat O’Brien, it would be an understatement to say it is as though they were in two different films: it is more as if they were two different species. This is not to suggest that Lahr is not entertaining, because he is, but it is also a relief when he is off screen for a while.
It is interesting to contrast Lahr with his co-star, Charlotte Greenwood. She, too, was a stage performer with an eccentric bent, but she was actor enough to be able to modify (or moderate) her stage persona to the greater intimacy of the screen.
Flying High is an enjoyable romp but, as one of MGM’s three 1931 musicals, prior to the 1932 moratorium, it is rather light on music. Twelve of the thirteen DeSylva-Brown-Henderson songs from the Broadway show are missing, replaced by three from the bottom drawer of Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh. There are a couple of production numbers directed by Busby Berkeley and featuring Kathryn Crawford. These show Berkeley refining the techniques he had developed on Eddie Cantor vehicles at Goldwyn, but still lacking the precision that would be on display a couple of years later in 42nd Street.
Berkeley’s numbers are the liveliest parts of the picture, with Charles Reisner clearly happy to point his camera at Bert Lahr and let him get on with it.
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