Imagine a Marx Brothers movie where they took the plot seriously. That's pretty much Rain or Shine, a revue to highlight the vaudeville talents of Joe Cook and a few others but matched with this lightly melodramatic take on the troubles of a financing a traveling circus. It's such a weird combination that only ever really works in one moment, perhaps by accident, creating this dichotomy that clashes more than anything else.
Frankie (Louise Fazenda) has inherited her father's circus upon his death, and the first season with her in charge is coming to a ruinous close. Her circus manager Smiley (Cook), a jokey fellow who always has a line to try and cheer her up, is optimistic about the future, an optimism shared by Bud (William Collier, Jr.), Frankie's beau (though there seems to be a conflict between the two men for Frankie's heart, though it comes to nothing) because they are coming upon his hometown of Shrewsberry where they'll get great crowds and turn things around. At the same time, the star horse rider, Dalton (Alan Roscoe), and band leader, Foltz (Adolph Milar), conspire to pool their resources and ideas to buy the circus out from Frankie when she hits a bad moment.
You see, this story is surprisingly serious, and I bring up the Marx Brothers because they were being introduced to the world in the early sound era through adaptations of their stage plays that were relentless applications of vaudeville comedy. We get that in sections mainly through the interactions of Smiley with the local Amos K. Shrewsberry (Tom Howard) with whom he develops a twisted little relationship based on Smiley's fast talking style to con him out of thousands of dollars while Shrewsberry just sticks around in befuddled style. However, that gets intercut with this stuff around Frankie dealing with the finances, her relationship with Bud, and her attempt to enter high society of Shrewsberry that Smiley completely ruins.
What helps the film is that it allows Cook to do his thing for long stretches. He really does remind me of some combination of Groucho and Harpo Marx (mainly because he does the hat in the foot thing once). He's a fast talker that has his own bits that he plays all the way through, mostly to Howard who works so well with Cook that I assumed they were a team. How Smiley talks Shrewsberry into handing over $5,000 is just a wonderful display of rhetorical excess. How Shrewsberry tries to mimic it later is the work of a talented performer as well. This movie rises and falls on its comedy, and I just wish there was more of it.
Because when the plot reappears with Frankie getting all angry at Smiley for ruining the big dinner, it just feels so out of place. I was thinking of how Margaret Dumont always reacted to Groucho, just kind of accepting his manic behavior as largely normal and continuing on with the action of the plot, and how much that worked as opposed to these starts and stops of earnestness in the face of ridiculousness.
However, I will give the film credit for the scale of its ending. Dalton and Foltz execute their plan to get Frankie desperate and sell the circus to them (considering the crowds, it doesn't make the most sense, but okay), and all chaos erupts, reminding me of the ending to Capra's first film, the Harry Langdon starring The Strong Man. There's something to be said about the sheer amount of chaos unleashed. It's kind of fun to watch.
There's also a very late moment when, in the detritus of the chaos, Smiley and Shrewsberry calmly sit together and go through one of their routines in a quiet manner, which seems to be the one point in the film where the two diametrically opposing tonal forces of the film actually meet. It doesn't lead to anything, but it's a surprisingly nice moment.
So, the dramatic elements are not that good, never really go anywhere, and kind of half-formed at best. However, the comedy is generally pretty good and fun to watch. I just wish that Capra had changed the source material (a musical play by James Gleason and Maurice Marks) more than by cutting out the musical numbers to make it an outright comedy. But, what do I know? It was apparently a box office success.
