Movie Movie

Stanley Donen in 1978 was old enough to remember how Warner Brothers double features of the 1930s played, and he brings them pretty gloriously back to life in this affectionate double-bill-within-a-single-movie, helped by a knowing, funny script by Larry Gelbart and Sheldon Keller. The first, a Kid Galahad-type boxing melo reveling in bad Clifford Odets-style metaphors, looks wonderful in black and white and is superbly cast, with, among others, George C. Scott in what might have been the Walter Huston role, Red Buttons doing Frank McHugh, Harry Hamlin as Wayne Morris, and a very funny Trish van Devere lampooning Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront. The 42nd Street parody rounding it out has some curiosities--it's in color, which it wouldn't have been in in 1933, the songs aren't all diegetic as they would have been, the camera work's a little more sophisticated than it should be--but gets most of it right, including Barry Bostwick and Rebecca York doing Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and Barbara Harris doing a Joan Blondell. The in-between preview, Zero Hour--War at Its Best!--is a riot, with Scott, Buttons, and Eli Wallach parading around as some hilariously overage young World War I fliers. This didn't make much noise in 1978, and it's hard to know why--it's marvelously entertaining, the cast is aces, and plenty of people around then remembered the originals it so expertly spoofs.