Screen Savers Movies » The Half Naked Truth http://screensaversmovies.com 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:45:33 +0000 en hourly 1 The Half Naked Truth (1932) http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932 http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:01:32 +0000 Jon Hansen, Publisher http://screensaversmovies.com/?p=176 One kind of 1930s comedy didn’t last very long or become a source of ongoing imitation. I’ll call it the comedy of merry insanity, which is different from the screwball comedies that dominated the second half of the decade and the first half of the 1940s. However nutty, screwball comedies revolve around reasonably recognizable issues of love, class, and bank accounts, while the merry-insanity comedies are far more anarchic, audacious, and eccentric, refusing to allow “real life” to rein them in. The two best, and most famous, of these would be Million Dollar Legs (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). Bordering on the surreal, each is set in a fictional country: the first in Klopstokia; the second in Freedonia. Million Dollar Legs, which revolves around the Olympics and features W.C. Fields and Jack Oakie, and Duck Soup, with all four Marx Brothers immersed in politics and war, are among the funniest movies ever made, partly because of their unwillingness to contain themselves. (The earliest Marx Brothers films, The Cocoanuts [1929] and Animal Crackers [1930], belong, instead, with the aforementioned stagebound adaptations.) The Half Naked Truth isn’t as well known as these two classics, and it isn’t set in a mythical land, but it does share their wackiness, nose-thumbing, and anything-goes surprises: it’s adorable and ruthless. It’s a comedy that can accommodate, among its pleasures, a hotel-room lion, a mock nudist colony, and a sham princess (complete with eunuch). It has the unbound visual freedom of a silent comedy, combined with the verbal dexterity and quickness of the new era, depending equally on these traits to get its laughs. And it really builds, consistently accelerating its zaniness and risk-taking, swooping the viewer along on its brassy, outrageous ride.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

Learn more about The Half Naked Truth

]]> http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932/feed 0 The Half Naked Truth (1932): Lee Tracy and the Fast-Talking Talkie http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932-lee-tracy-and-the-fast-talking-talkie http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932-lee-tracy-and-the-fast-talking-talkie#comments Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:59:19 +0000 John DiLeo http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932-lee-tracy-and-the-fast-talking-talkie/ One kind of 1930s comedy didn’t last very long or become a source of ongoing imitation. I’ll call it the comedy of merry insanity, which is different from the screwball comedies that dominated the second half of the decade and the first half of the 1940s. However nutty, screwball comedies revolve around reasonably recognizable issues of love, class, and bank accounts, while the merry-insanity comedies are far more anarchic, audacious, and eccentric, refusing to allow “real life” to rein them in. The two best, and most famous, of these would be Million Dollar Legs (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). Bordering on the surreal, each is set in a fictional country: the first in Klopstokia; the second in Freedonia. Million Dollar Legs, which revolves around the Olympics and features W.C. Fields and Jack Oakie, and Duck Soup, with all four Marx Brothers immersed in politics and war, are among the funniest movies ever made, partly because of their unwillingness to contain themselves. (The earliest Marx Brothers films, The Cocoanuts [1929] and Animal Crackers [1930], belong, instead, with the aforementioned stagebound adaptations.) The Half Naked Truth isn’t as well known as these two classics, and it isn’t set in a mythical land, but it does share their wackiness, nose-thumbing, and anything-goes surprises: it’s adorable and ruthless. It’s a comedy that can accommodate, among its pleasures, a hotel-room lion, a mock nudist colony, and a sham princess (complete with eunuch). It has the unbound visual freedom of a silent comedy, combined with the verbal dexterity and quickness of the new era, depending equally on these traits to get its laughs. And it really builds, consistently accelerating its zaniness and risk-taking, swooping the viewer along on its brassy, outrageous ride.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
© 2008 Hansen Publishing Group. All Rights Reserved.

]]> http://screensaversmovies.com/the-half-naked-truth-1932-lee-tracy-and-the-fast-talking-talkie/feed 0