The Wet Parade

Dorothy Jordan, Robert Young, and Walter Huston

Victor Fleming's The Wet Parade is a mediocre melodrama based on a then recent novel by Upton Sinclair. This 1932 MGM production cannot escape the limitations of its source material, a dashed off anti-alcohol screed that was one of over a hundred books Sinclair produced. Sinclair was the son of an alcoholic salesman and he obviously had an axe to grind. The novel and film both picture two families, one southern and one northern, who are brought to ruin by demon rum. First we meet the southern Chilcote family in 1916, presided over by pixilated paterfamilias Lewis Stone. Stone has a son, Rog (Neil Hamilton), who is following his besotted example and a disapproving daughter named Maggie May (Dorothy Jordan). Stone makes a half-hearted attempt to stay sober, but ends up dead face down in a pig pen; about as low as one can go in an MGM production.

Rog moves on to New York City where he moves into a tatty SRO hotel managed by Kip Tarleton (Robert Young). Kip is saddled with a drunken Dad played by Walter Huston. Huston's orotund and grandiose performance as a drunkard still stuck in the Gay 90s is the main reason to see the picture. Maggie May shows up in town, primarily to pair off with fellow teetotaler Kip. Kip's father's decline continues unabated by prohibition. In fact, the film makes plain how pernicious the effects of bathtub gin and the like were in those days. When Huston's hootch is destroyed by his wife (Clara Blandick), he becomes enraged and beats her to death. That's right, Auntie Em is clubbed to death. Huston is sentenced to life in prison and disappears from the picture. Kip sells his hotel and becomes a prohibition agent for the Treasury Department. His partner is Jimmy Durante, whose schtick seems out of place here but whose presence belies what an over stuffed production this is. The picture really climaxes with Blandick's murder at the 75 minute mark, but there are still 43 minutes to go. 

Rog is soon going to hell on a sled with the help of a party girl played by a peroxided Myrna Loy. Rog drinks too much cheap rotgut and is blinded, putting him on the road to redemption. In the novel, Kip is rubbed out by gangster, but, in the film, it is Durante's character who makes the ultimate sacrifice. The film is a tad bit more equivocal about Prohibition than Sinclair was. While alcohol is shown to be pernicious in the film, the unexpected effects of Prohibition are made so plain that even Kip is doubting its efficacy by film's end. MGM uses medleys of patriotic songs to paper over the political divide. 1932 was an election year with Franklin Delano Roosevelt upending Herbert Hoover in November. Though the Crash had been the central issue, Prohibition also had its impact. The Democrats ran as the Wet party.

The best scene in The Wet Parade has Walter Huston delivering a stemwinder stump speech for Woodrow Wilson in 1916. The film cross cuts to a contemporaneous Republican response 

which is a carbon copy presented for ironic effect. Huston gives one of the best performances of a drunk I've ever seen. Neil Hamilton is less convincing in his sodden moments, but is good at projecting his character's diffidence. Robert Young's sincerity jibes with his character in one of his finest performances. Dorothy Jordan barely registers, but that is probably because her character is a complete pill. Ms. Jordan appeared in over twenty films between 1929 and 1933 then retreated from the screen after marrying Merian C. Cooper. After a long hiatus, Jordan appeared in three of Cooper's productions for John Ford: The Sun Shines Bright, The Searchers, and The Wings of Eagles.

The Wet Parade suffers from the deficiencies of its source novel. The handling of class and race issues is particularly clumsy. Even Victor Fleming's biographer derides the project as "a barely viewable film made out of an unreadable book." 🎁 However, I think Fleming redeems the irredeemable somewhat with his boisterous handling of crown scenes: the salons, saloons, speakeasies, and political pow-wows of the film. Sometimes MGM's luxe production values pay off: I loved briefly spying a recreation of the St Regis Hotel's Old King Cole Bar. On the whole, though, The Wet Parade is recommended only to the hardiest of old time film buffs.

🎁 Michael Sragow, Victor Fleming, page 176.

Outcome

Keanu Reeves and Jonah Hill

Jonah Hill's Outcome is a toothless Hollywood satire destined for obscurity. Keanu Reeves stars as Reef Hawk, a top flight Tinseltown star returning to his career after a five year hiatus brought on by various addictions. As part of his rehabilitation, Hawk is making amends to figures from his past who he has let down, ranging from his mother (a game Susan Lucci) to his first manager (Martin Scorsese). However, his comeback is threatened when Hawk is blackmailed by someone who has got a hold of a compromising video from his past. 

Mr. Hill, who wrote the screenplay along with Ezra Woods, also appears as Hawk's lawyer. Unfortunately, Jonah Hill the director indulges Jonah Hill the actor in a number of scenery chewing scenes that reek of self-indulgence. There is some smart repartee in the film. I did enjoy Ivy Wolk's wry asides and David Spade is well cast as a weasel. However, Hill has little visual imagination and most of the cast, especially Cameron Diaz and Matt Bomer, are stranded in rote roles. Outcome is not funny enough to be an effective farce and not insightful enough for any dramatic payoff. The fact that Hawk can't remember the incident that he is being blackmailed about makes one wonder what the big deal is. If it was established early on that Hawk was enjoying sexual congress with a dog on the video or something of that nature, then his panic would be understandable. As it is, it is hard for the audience to maintain sympathy for a handsome and rich character who is not really under siege. Once the nature of the video is revealed, the somewhat less than shocking nature of it renders much of what has gone on before as superfluous. A description that would fit the entirety of Outcome to a tee.                                    

Little Trouble Girls

Jara Sofija Ostan

Urška Djukić's Little Trouble Girls is one of the most promising feature debuts of 2025. This compact Slovenian film tells the story of shy and sheltered Lucija and her sexual and psychological awakening during a summer choir retreat at a convent. A short scene of Lucija riding in a car with her mother displays her repressed background, as her mother expresses her disapproval of girls Lucija age, sixteen, wearing lipstick. Once at the convent retreat, Lucija falls under the spell of the choir's queen bee, the more mature and sophisticated Ana Maria (Mina Svajger). Ana Maria, who would qualify in the US as a mean girl, leads Lucija astray with sapphic come-ons and by urging Lucija to join her in ogling the construction workers toiling at the convent.

Lucija is, at first, intrigued by Ana Maria, but, ultimately, becomes justifiably repulsed by her manipulations. She makes the mistake of tattling on Ana Maria to her choir master (a suitably spineless Saša Tabaković). The conductor treats her not with understanding, but disdain. He reacts by humiliating Lucija in front of the choir, criticizing her, admittedly pinched and hesitant, singing. Lucija becomes persona non grata within her peer group. Director Djukić manages to elicit marvelously unaffected performances from her young cast. She crowds the frame in the interior sequences to suggest the dual nature of adolescent intimacy: both alluring and suffocating. She gives the film a palpable feel of sensuality, foregrounding the throb and heave of bodies. When Lucija masturbates in a bathroom stall, Djukić provides a close-up of her thorax, writhing with forbidden pleasure. When Lucija spies on a particularly hunky worker, Djurkić provides a point of view shot from her perspective of the man's muscular arm, shimmeringly beautifully in the sun. The outdoor sequences in the film, workers toiling at the construction site or bathing in a stream revel in the plein air beauty of natural light.

Jara Sofija Ostan and Mina Svajger: intimacy that is both alluring and suffocating

The role of music in the film also is a clue to the ambivalence with which Djurkić regards beauty, both sacred and profane. Nearly all of the choir's songs are paeans to the Almighty. They are beautiful, yet practiced and rote. True aural beauty is experienced only once in the film by Lucija when she happens upon a sextet of nuns singing in glory to God. The open hearted beauty of their singing reflects the nuns' inner devotion, something the members of the choir cannot approach. This sequence also sets up the extraordinary last shot of the film in which Lucija feeds upon grapes as Sonic Youth perform the gleefully blasphemous song that provides the film's title. Earlier, Ana Maria tells Lucija that they must eat sour grapes as expiation for their sins, but, by film's end, she has been revealed as a false prophet. Lucija, now outside of the web of her sinister peers, can enjoy the fruit and her solitude for their own sake. She may not adhere to the strictures of a holy order, but she has learned that the world is awash in sin. This is something Sonic Youth, no strangers to Catholic guilt, convey also. The key line in the song Little Trouble Girls is "...I'm really bad." Once an individual has accepted that man is born in sin, that knowledge is liberating whether one is seeking expiation or not.