My Friend from India

This is a low budget but fun 1920s comedy. No real stars but many who would become familiar and loved character actors in the sound era. Just starting with the nominal star, Franklin Pangborn. The quintessential gay stereotype of the 1930s and 40s, sound added a great deal to his persona. Here, in a straight leading role, he comes off very comic in the style of a Harry Langdon. Audiences then probably didn't know he was gay and just found him funny. Although not funny enough to ever star in a film again! And this film maximizes his gay persona by even putting him in dresses and pretending to be a woman a number of times.

And other stereotypes abound too. After all isn't that what many early films are about. The "Hindoo", a rakish brother, and a social climbing aunt all make elements for breezy fun in this lightweight comedy. An interesting way to spend 70 minutes from DeMille's company.

Whoever decided that Franklin Pangborn would make a good leading comedian in this workaday romantic comedy made a sizable mistake. Here, without his prissy voice, his movements still convey most of his usual 'nance' character and the script, which concerns how Ben Hendricks Jr. wishes to keep sponging off his social-climbing aunt by convincing her that Pangborn is an Indian potentate, whose presence in her household will lend her social prestige.... well, it just doesn't work very well.

This material, barely enough for a two-reeler, is eked out by a love story for Pangborn, who has been searching for the aptly-named Elinor Fair, who is Hendricks' sister. There are also two sets of cross-dressing sequences. One involves Pangborn, Hendricks and a bevy of young girls at a gym, including Babe London. The other has Pangborn dressing up exactly like Hendricks' aunt, being proposed to by her nearsighted lawyer/suitor and doing a bit of the mirror gag that is best known nowadays from the Marx Brothers' DUCK SOUP -- it was actually a well-known gag, performed by such people as Max Linder in the movies and dates from at least the middle of the 19th Century.

The miscasting of Pangborn, the general unlikeability of most of the characters -- except for Miss Fair, whose role calls for her to simply look beautiful -- result in a generally dissatisfying comedy. You can miss this one.