Five of a Kind

Rarely do I say this in one of my reviews, but I hope you DON'T see "Five of a Kind". This is for two main reasons--it's a really bad film but also because it helped exploit the Dionne Quints. These quintuplets were exploited like crazy in the 30s and 40s and they grew up to be emotional basketcases. It's really a shameful movie...as well as being just awful.

This film appears as if the studio had a B-movie they'd just finished and decided to VERY clumsily insert some staged footage of the quints into the movie--even though it really had nothing to do with the rest of the film. And, I think we can assume this was the case. Why else would they take a minor Claire Trevor/Cesar Romero film about two reporters and insert very lengthy and completely non- cinematic clips of these five exploited girls doing nothing of any importance other than babble incessantly in French-Canadian?! They stuck Jean Hersholt* into some of these clips and he pretended to be a their doctor...but the clips are like crappy home movies stuck into the other film with no thought of the end result. The end result is a mess...and a sad stain on Hollywood.

*Hersholt was such a nice person and did so much to help others that AMPAS (the Oscar folks) decided to name the humanitarian award after him. Sadly, here Hersholt is an accessory to destroying the lives of five kids...not one of the more wonderful things the otherwise nice guy did during his career. Kind of ironic, huh?