(1937)

Starring Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell, Humphrey Bogart, Jack Carson; dir: Tay Garnett

The Stand In comes from the long tradition of Hollywood satires as made by Hollywood. Far less caustic than Robert Altman’s The Player, this 1937 comedy comes to roast Hollywood, not bury it. A brisk collection of insider barbs, it’s actually pretty funny and succeeds as a comedy: Sturges-lite, perhaps.

After the initial, New York-based setup, it opens with lotsa location footage from the 1930s heyday of surreal Hollywood architecture – the giant hot dog takeaway (the ‘Tail o’the Pup’), Grauman’s Chinese Theatre - you know the drill – inescapably reminding us, with Leslie Howard’s Englishness recording the reaction shots, of the strikingly similar way - Anglophilic Easterner peering out of his limo after arriving at the station - British novelist Aldous Huxley used architecture as metaphor in his Hollywood satire, After Many a Summer Dies The Swan.

Howard embodies the Fordism then prevalent. As an upscale Time-And-Motion man he’s too Ivy League for the white lab coat and stopwatches, but you get the idea. And of course, this being an insider roast, he succumbs totally to the cheerful corruption of those around him.  As they all say, "That’s Hollywood".

Bogie’s tough guy producer – more Maltese Falcon than In A Lonely Place – is so inappropriate that he’s obliged to carry around a toy dog in most scenes – no doubt heavily sedated (the pooch, that is) – to signify his artistic nature.

Blondell exudes girl-next-door charm, but The Stand In is let down at the end by its populist people-power conclusion (which today we shorthand as ‘Capraesque’, but really shows The New Deal as a very unusual period indeed) and even less believable betrothal, which the leads can’t even consummate with a kiss – so much for chemistry!!

-    Roger Westcombe