Wrong Direction

Wrong Direction (1934)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Edgar Kennedy plays a movie director who is trying to get some sleep at home but his annoying wife (Florence Lake), mother-in-law (Dot Farley) and brother-in-law (William Eugene) won't allow that. Soon he's called to the set for his big break. He needs to get one scene done or else the studio will lose a lot of money. Edgar is up for the job but soon his family shows up and chaos follows.

WRONG DIRECTION is another entry in the "Average Guy" series from RKO where Kennedy played the husband constantly being tortured by his relatives. For the most part this series was rather annoying because the family itself was just so stupid, so hated and so mean that you couldn't really get any entertainment from them. I know the family was made stupid to make you feel bad for Edgar, which you do but at the same time there simply aren't any laughs to be had here. There are just two funny moments here and one comes from a murder gag at the start of the picture and then a fight towards the end.

Australian director Alf Goulding who made the wonderful Tip Tap Toe (1932) here has an amusing hit at Poverty Row producers whose only concern was making a movie with a minimum number of slates. Natty little Nat Carr is the perfect Poverty prototype who insists that Edgar shoot each set-up with a minimum of two takes. He doesn't mind if Edgar takes all day because the cast and crew are hired by the day, not the hour. His petty concerns are limited to the amount of raw film stock used. Hence, a maximum of two takes.

Bungling, impatient Edgar, of course, goes about his task the wrong way and starts shooting almost as soon as he sits in the chair, instead of rehearsing for hours and playing about with dummy camera runs. And the star, naturally, resents Edgar's elevation—a fact that is also delightfully true-to-life. On a movie set, the assistant director has nothing at all to do with the stars who receive instructions solely from the principal director. Stars despise assistant directors and here Miss Temperament has to be coaxed into accepting Edgar by the executive producer.

After mollifying his star, the executive producer hurries off and we don't see him again until near the end of the day—again true-to-life.

It's a pity we are not shown more of the mechanics of movie-making (we see loads of the clapper-boy but the hairdresser, the make-up man and even the photographer don't get a look-in, though we do glimpse a couple of the operators) but at 19 minutes there's not time for everything.

The comedy mostly revolves around the device of having Edgar's idiot family visit the set and continually disrupt shooting. This is most definitely not true-to-life, but, as these incidents induce more than a few laughs, I don't suppose many patrons will object.

Starting a couple years earlier, RKO began a long series of short films featuring Edgar Kennedy and his family--consisting of his wife (Florence Lake), mother-in-law and brother-in-law. And while Kennedy was quite good, the wife and family were over-written. In other words, the characters came on way too strong--making you hate them and wonder who would ever put up with such hateful and obnoxious people?! I mentioned Lake in particular because her shtick was defending her awful mother and brother no matter what they did AND laughing like a brain-addled idiot throughout the film. She was SO annoyingly unfunny I can't believe the series continued until Kennedy's death in 1948!

Like several of the other films in the series I've seen, this one is too difficult to watch because the family is so awful you just want to see them die--and you wonder why Edgar doesn't just kill them--I know I would have!! It begins with Edgar playing a guy much like himself--an actor and assistant director (yes, he actually directed some films). He gets his big break when the studio asks him to direct the final portion of the film by himself. However, his god-awful family invite themselves to the studio and repeatedly ruin the picture. Their antics might have been cute in smaller doses, but they were such uncaring and terrible people that I think it just went too far (once again) and the comedy got overwhelmed by the nastiness of these characters. Had they toned it down a bit, it might have worked--but here it just lacks any semblance of subtlety or grace. Loud and unpleasant much of the time. Kennedy does the best with what he's got, but even Laurel & Hardy would have had a hard time making this one work.