The Heart of New York

Back in the day, Smith and Dale were a very famous stage act. However, they never made it in films--mostly because their very, very ethnic humor had very limited appeal. It might have played well in New York and with Jewish audiences, but the rest of America most likely had no interest in heavily accented Jewish-American humor. In fact, I'm surprised Warner Brothers even made the film. Most of their film appearances were in Vitaphone shorts but here with "Heart of New York" they were in one of their few starring full-length movies.

So is any of this any good? Well, at least for me the answer is NO. Much of the problem is that the film (as shown on Turner Classic Movies) isn't captioned and understanding the heavy accents was difficult--especially since I am hard of hearing. Additionally, and much more important, is that most of the humor just isn't funny. This isn't to say Jewish humor couldn't be funny. After all, I love the films of Max Davidson and his humor was very, very Jewish...but it also relied much more on funny situations as opposed to hearing Smith and Dale butcher the English language (which gets old VERY fast).

The bottom line is that I am glad this film exists as it's one of the few that feature a bygone sort of borsht humor--but I really prefer them in smaller doses (like in their shorts).