Newly Rich

Gosh, sometimes it's hard to figure out where to begin. I like Edna May Oliver and Louise Fazenda and could appreciate Mitzi Green, of whom I haven't seen a great deal. A previous reviewer mentioned that this is a pre-code movie, but that has no bearing on this picture. And I wasn't thinking of the gender angle, of Mitzi Green acting like a tomboy, as another reviewer mentioned.

I was thinking mainly of the asinine script that these actors had to work with, and the improbable and improvisational nature of the plot, a pail of swill that the screenwriters responsible threw at us. If it's comedy, it's extremely forced and not very funny. If it's anything else, those responsible should have been fired on the spot - except that it was none other than Sinclair Lewis and Joseph Mankiewicz!!

What was the target audience for this mess? Anyone over the age of 10 would be as uninterested as I was. All others must have been looking for a place to get out of the rain (my excuse was that I was a captive audience at a film festival). Edna and Louise did their best but I still am giving it a three, mainly due to their efforts.

This film was released in the USA on June 6, 1931 as "Forbidden Adventure", hence the source of the on-site lobby cards under using that title. Paramount, for whatever reason, called back the "Forbidden Adventure" prints and printed material from their film exchanges (some of which had already been sent to theatres and escaped the call-back) and sent out changed-title prints on June 20, 1932 as "Newly Rich."

This is the story of two of the world's worst stage mothers--women who try to one-up each other through their children. The film starts with Maggie (Louise Fazenda) arriving back in her old home town just to rub her son's Hollywood success in the face of Bessie (Edna May Oliver). She and her little brat, 'Tiny Tim' (Jackie Searl) are insufferable and Maggie's faux sophistication is really annoying. So Maggie decides that her daughter, Daisy (Mitzi Green), is just as wonderful...perhaps more so. So the pair soon show up in Hollywood and Daisy miraculously also becomes an instant star-- though Tiny Tim and his mother do their very best to try to derail her. Through the course of the rest of the film, it's one dirty trick after another as the warring moms try to prove conclusively that their child is amazing...and the other children are just commoners! Eventually, the pair both learn that a child king is in town...and they go to all sorts of lengths to try to suck up to the King and his mommy.

This film is clearly intended as a comedy. Sadly, while it's a cute movie, it's also a sad commentary on stage mothers--both then as well as today. In other words, as you watch you suspect that the mothers' god-awful behaviors aren't really that different from real stage mothers...and you also wonder if the writer (Sinclair Lewis) was perhaps writing this as an indictment against these awful people. This is especially true of the later part of the film...which is less comedy and more about the kids rebelling against their god-awful mothers. Overall, enjoyable and clever...but also a bit depressing.

Mitzi Green and Jackie Searl star in another film together where they run amok. The two were in "Hattie and Finn" together, but this movie is a lot better.

Mitzi Green plays Daisy Tait, a country gal who helped her mother at their small gas station. Her mother, Bessie Tait (Edna May Oliver), packed up and moved to Hollywood when an old acquaintance named Maggie Tiffany (Louise Fazenda) came through. Maggie was a hoity toity big shot now that her son, Tiny Tim (Jackie Searl), was a movie star. Bessie couldn't bear the idea of Maggie being more successful than her, so she sold everything and went to Hollywood to make her daughter a bigger star.

Daisy hit it big fast and renamed Delicia Tait, but she was miserable. She couldn't play and be a regular little girl anymore because she now had an image to maintain. Truthfully, Bessie wasn't all that happy either. How could she be when she spent most of her time worrying about whether or not 'Delicia' was a bigger star than Tiny Tim.

The two mothers were deplorable. They were both phonier than a three dollar bill and their new money simply went to their heads. The kids were alright. They got into good ol' trouble when they went to London to visit the boy king, King Maximilian (Bruce Line).

The movie got significantly better when the venue shifted overseas and the focus shifted to the children. I was tired of seeing the two mothers act like children. They'd both changed their wardrobes, their voices, and their diction to put on airs. Nothing would've been better than seeing them both knocked off of their perches.

Free on rarefilmm.

Director Norman Taurog was developing quite a specialty directing kids during the early talkie era, and lucky for us he kept coming back to it. NEWLY RICH (aka FORBIDDEN ADVENTURE, based on Sinclair Lewis' LET'S PLAY KING) is one of the more obscure examples, and deserves our attention. The first half resembles a poor man's Marie Dressler-Polly Moran social "competition" comedy, and the second half develops into an entertaining children's adventure tale. That the tale involves two boys and a girl sharing equal footing in all aspects of the adventure, ie, no break-down by preconceived gender expectations, should yank it out of obscurity and place it front and center among Pre-Code gems. Appreciating the picture requires a tolerance for the two great character actresses portraying competing stage mothers, Edna May Oliver and Louise Fazenda, both famous and notorious for their distinctive styles. The unusual chemistry results in a sort of burlesque variation of the Bette Davis-Miriam Hopkins duos, with Oliver the indomitable sage and Fazenda the mercurial clod. If you can find amusement with them, you will be rewarded with the performances of the kids involved -- the wonderfully lazy brat Jackie Searle, and the ebullient delivery style of savvy Mitzi Green. Green herself can move you to tears despite a penchant for a too-knowing, too precious delivery (a delivery which often enabled her to steal scenes from adult performers). Despite an improbable turn of events leading to the adventure portion, these kids manage to take command of the picture, assisted tremendously by Bruce Line charmingly portraying young King Max, who escapes with his new pals and finds 'forbidden adventure!' Definitely a product of more kid-friendly times, the film is never really going to frighten anyone beyond a sheltered fourth-grader, and yet it is the stunning acknowledgment of Green's character holding her own with the tough boys (perhaps tougher than most of them - she was a Vaudeville veteran, after all) which makes it so fabulous and worthy of watching today.