As many of you may know, early in his career, the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote a novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, that became a worldwide sensation. The hero loves a woman who loves him back but is already engaged to another man. Werther’s suicide at the end of the novel provoked a rash of copycat suicides among educated young men all over Europe. But please forgive the bait and switch: Absolutely none of this has anything whatever to do with the movie under discussion here—with one minute exception: Well before the novel’s grim final chapter, when Werther and his Charlotte are just beginning to realize their affinity for one another, they find themselves alone together in a rich friend’s library just as a thunderstorm breaks out. Instantly, Charlotte puts her hand on Werther’s, and whispers, “Klopstock,” and he understands instantly what she means. As both their eyes fill with tears, he takes her hand and covers it with kisses.
The magic word Klopstock has caused some puzzlement among readers who, living long after Werther’s time and lacking a footnoted edition, are not privy to the reference; one unfortunate translator is said to have misrendered the word as “billiard cue.” But, as readers of Goethe’s own time knew, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803) was, in fact, a popular German poet of the era preceding Goethe’s. Mystical in his tendencies—he wrote an epic poem called The Messiah—he anticipated the Romantics in his innovative exploration of unconventional verse forms and, as the scene in Werther implies, in rhapsodizing about stormy weather. Nevertheless, for the past century, he has mainly been remembered as the man whose evocative name makes Charlotte and Werther realize that they are kindred spirits. And his name was probably all that the Mankiewicz brothers and their many collaborators knew about Klopstock when Herman J. Mankiewicz co-produced, and his younger brother, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, co-wrote the movie Million Dollar Legs for Paramount in 1932. And they were probably not thinking of Goethe, or of romantic thunderstorms, when they named the imaginary Balkan country where their film takes place Klopstokia.
Possibly, too, they and all the other artists involved were under the influence of some hallucinogen at the time, for Million Dollar Legs is the least rational movie ever produced by the American studio system. Its basic provenance is surrealism, with a heavy dollop of Dada on top and substantial helpings of vaudeville and silent-movie slapstick on the side. It is unlikely that Ionesco, or any other European playwright of the absurd, had seen Million Dollar Legs before taking up a literary career. Otherwise it would be studied in theater history classes as an astonishing precursor. In the Klopstokia that the Mankiewicz brothers and their fellow perpetrators created, all the women are named Angela and all the men are named George. And when a visiting American asks, dumbfounded, “Why?” his favorite Angela sweetly replies, “Why not?”
The American visitor has other problems. In the first place, his name is Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie); he’s a salesman for a large American brush company, trying to pitch his wares in Klopstokia, which is virtually bankrupt. And the Angela he’s fallen instantly in love with (Susan Fleming) turns out to be the daughter of Klopstokia’s president (W.C. Fields), who says Tweeny can marry Angela if he can save Klopstokia from bankruptcy. On top of all that, Angela demands that her suitor prove his devotion by learning to serenade her in Klopstokian with the national anthem—which turns out to be a Paramount hit of the previous year, the title song from Ernst Lubitsch’s Maurice Chevalier film One Hour With You, its lyrics reduced to gibberish. The helpless look on Oakie’s face as he strums a ukulele and strives to convey sincere passion while singing “Woof bloogle gik, mow gik bloogle moof” is one of the movie’s many induplicable treats.
Tweeny does think up a scheme for rescuing Klopstokia’s economy once he finds out that everyone in the country is a champion athlete from birth. (You get to be president of Klopstokia by being able to out-arm-wrestle everyone in the cabinet.) He will field a Klopstokian Olympic team—the 1932 summer Olympic Games were being held in Los Angeles, which was big news as the first time they had been held in the United States—and his boss at the brush company will put up a fat cash reward if the Klopstokians sweep the gold medals. But the president’s rivals in the cabinet, particularly his malevolent secretary of the treasury (Hugh Herbert), don’t want him to succeed. So they enlist the services of the notorious female spy who has just decided to settle in Klopstokia: Mata Machree (Lyda Roberti), “the woman no man can resist.”
A little explication may be in order here. Most of you will have recognized that the first half of Mata Machree’s name derives from Mata Hari, the famous female spy of World War I, whose reputation still lingers. But many, these days, will not recognize the second half—a Gaelic term of endearment that literally means “my heart” or “my beloved.” In 1932 it would have been universally recognized, thanks to the huge popularity of the sentimental Irish-American ballad “Mother Machree” (“Sure, I love the dear silver/ That shines in your hair”), written and first performed in 1910 by stage star Chauncey Olcott and later taken up by every other Irish tenor then at work—including the great John McCormack, who made it one of his signature tunes, and who was still going strong the year the film came out. (The news of Olcott’s death in 1932 probably brought the song an extra measure of recognition.)
Some explication should be offered, too, regarding the actress who plays Mata Machree: Lyda Roberti, less well remembered these days than other musical-comedy stars of the period because she died tragically young. The daughter of a family of Hungarian circus acrobats, after emigrating to America, Roberti began in vaudeville, doing a double act with her sister Manya, who retired from the stage early and long outlived her. Lyda made her Broadway debut in a giddy musical comedy called You Said It (1931), in which she introduced a Harold Arlen song saluting the two kinds of popular music, “Sweet and Hot.” In Roberti’s all-purpose mittel-European stage accent, this came out as “svitt an’ khott,” after which songwriters vied to write her lyrics with w’s and h’s in them for her to mangle. Her sexy figure, supple movement, and skillful comic timing didn’t hurt either. She appeared on Broadway for Kern and Harbach in Roberta (singing “I’ll Be Khard to Khandle”) and for the Gershwins in the appropriately titled Pardon My English (introducing “The Lorelei” and “My Cousin in Milwaukee”). Ginger Rogers, who plays her role in the film version of Roberta (1935), briefly imitates her, which gives you some idea of how well-known Roberti’s vocal style and accent were. Her song in Million Dollar Legs, with the repeated phrase “When I Get Hot” (or more precisely, “Ven I Get Khott”), is alleged to boast lyrics by Lorenz Hart, apparently improvised while kibitzing on the set, perhaps playing hooky from the same studio’s Love Me Tonight, which was being shot at the same time. (Formal attribution credits the song to composer-lyricist Ralph Rainger and lyricist Leo Robin.) Perhaps not irrelevantly, Hart’s brother, Teddy, a well-liked comic actor, was playing a small role in Million Dollar Legs, as a member of Fields’ hostile cabinet.
Million Dollar Legs has reminded many later viewers of the early Marx Brothers films, particularly Duck Soup—also a Paramount production, released a year later, and also set in a comic-opera mittel-European country. Unverifiable anecdotage says that Joseph Mankiewicz initially developed the idea of Million Dollar Legs for the Marx Brothers, who turned it down. David Denby and other later critics have observed that, compared with Million Dollar Legs, the Marx Brothers films are more tidily organized in structure. The disconnections and abrupt shifts from scene to scene make Million Dollar Legs literally seem as though a madman has gotten loose in the cutting room while the film was being edited. It is not always easy to tell how the scene we’re watching follows the one before, and virtually impossible to guess where the film will go next.
In this respect, the film often adheres to the basic tenets of surrealism, which held that the best way to open up the human mind to experience was to jolt it out of the predictable patterns of rationality with a barrage of disconcerting images. How deliberately the creators intended this systematic disorientation is anyone’s guess. Paramount in the early sound era was apparently something of a chaos, particularly in the musical and comedy departments, with writers, mostly young imports from New York, coming and going. Herman Mankiewicz, who was in charge of the studio’s writer recruitment, had brought in a great many acquaintances from his days as a journalist, Broadway playwright, and member of the Algonquin Round Table. (Alexander Woollcott had once called Mankiewicz “the funniest man in New York.”) These were often raffish, hard-drinking, wisecracking types whose cynicism, cultivated in the big-city newsrooms and theater district speakeasies of the 1920s, infused Paramount’s comedies with an often uncontrolled Jazz Age spirit—dismaying to old-fashioned moralists but beloved by younger audiences anxious to shake off the last remnants of pre–World War I small-town morality.
Though this may make Paramount’s script department sound like party time at the studio, it wasn’t. The demand for product—particularly in the early sound era, when there were fewer big-budget attractions—was unremitting in its work schedules. In 1928, when Herman Mankiewicz recruited his younger brother, Joseph, to join the writing staff, as a lad not yet 20, Joe had already had several years’ experience at film writing: His first job, while a teenager in New York, had been to translate the titles of silent films imported from the Berlin-based UFA studios. (Franz, the boys’ father, had been born in Berlin, and the family spoke German at home.) At Paramount, Joe began by writing titles for part-talkies, but by late 1929 was already receiving screen credit as writer or co-writer of numerous screenplays in a variety of genres—though he seemed to specialize in the light comedies of Jack Oakie, who plays a key role in Million Dollar Legs. During 1931–32, Joe Mankiewicz worked on scripts for at least a dozen pictures; this makes it hard to assess the extent to which the craziness of Million Dollar Legs was preplanned, or merely tossed off in haste by people scrambling to get through a large pile of similar work.
The surrealist-style disorientation that sometimes seems to be Million Dollar Legs’ essential method exists side by side with—and sometimes blends into—a somewhat different approach: that of classic silent-film comedy. The film is populated with figures from the old days, including Andy Clyde and Ben Turpin. (The latter makes hilarious repeated appearances as a mute spy, though we never learn for whom.) Hank Mann, one of the original Keystone Cops, was intended to have a cameo as a persnickety customs inspector; he appears in publicity stills and is listed in prerelease press material, but his scenes have vanished from the film itself. Nicholas T. Barrows, who apparently co-wrote the script with Joseph Mankiewicz, was an old hand at silent comedy; most of his sound-film credits are two-reel comedy shorts, which kept up the silent slapstick tradition. And Million Dollar Legs’ director, Edward F. “Eddie” Cline, was the silent-film comedy expert par excellence: He had begun as a teenage assistant with Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios (in later life he claimed to have invented the concept of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties), and quickly established himself as a master of gag construction, working on Chaplin’s early two-reelers. He later moved from Keystone to a long fruitful period with Buster Keaton, on many of whose best two-reelers Cline is credited as co-screenwriter and/or co-director. In later years, Herman Mankiewicz suggested that Cline didn’t know what much of the material in Million Dollar Legs was all about, but was happy because he had so many accomplished old-school comedians to work with. Most important of the latter, of course, was W.C. Fields, who also had a long backlog of experience in silent-film comedy, as well as in vaudeville and on Broadway. Million Dollar Legs was the beginning of a beautiful artistic friendship between Fields and Cline, who directed a succession of Fields’ later features for Universal, including what is usually thought of as the comedian’s masterpiece, The Bank Dick (1940), as well as his pairing with Mae West in My Little Chickadee (1940). He also directed Fields’ last feature, which, like Million Dollar Legs, veers into an Americanized surrealism, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), in which Fields and his old Ziegfeld Follies crony Leon Errol play rivals wooing a young girl named Ouliotta Hemogloben.
Million Dollar Legs does not exactly rank as an aberration in the lives of its makers, its performers, or even of Paramount. The studio’s tone, in the comedies of the pre-Code period, always tended toward the manic; in the years just before this film, Herman Mankiewicz’s writing tasks there had included uncredited work on the Marx Brothers’ Monkey Business and Horse Feathers. The expertise of Fields, Oakie, and Hugh Herbert in handling vaudeville-style non sequiturs was an established cinematic fact, while Roberti’s ability to exploit the disconcerting combination of her supple physical allure and her impenetrable accent would quickly become another such fact. Yet the insanity of Million Dollar Legs has something special about it. It marks a distinctive moment of American madness, there in the middle of the Depression’s darkest days, when all its comic sources—vaudeville, silent-film slapstick, comic opera, Broadway wisecracking, echoes of European surrealism, and Dada—all came together in lunatic confluence to produce a dose of pure hilarious dementia. One wonders how the studio executives reacted to it. The production schedule being so hectic, maybe they simply scratched their heads and let it pass. No time to fit any lame attempts at sanity into such a determined piece of madness.
Certainly no one involved ever tried anything quite so extreme again, with the exception of Fields in his later features for Universal (where he called in Cline to direct, as someone who understood how to film his brand of comedy). One can only wonder what B.P. Schulberg, the studio executive who was Mankiewicz’s co-producer on the film, made of it all; comic anarchy was certainly not his stock in trade. But he was in the process of being forced out by his fellow executives and perhaps had other things on his mind. Mankiewicz himself soon migrated to MGM, where his credits included co-authorship of the screenplay for Dinner at Eight and the original treatment for The Wizard of Oz. Even in his later years, as an ailing and increasingly alcoholic freelancer, he could summon the skill to create the screenplay for Citizen Kane jointly with Orson Welles, for which both men won Oscars.
Mankiewicz’s younger brother, Joe, likewise moved to MGM, putting in long stints as a screenwriter and then as a producer before finally getting a chance to direct, after which he established himself as one of the industry’s most notable filmmakers, carving out twin specialties in edgy dramas such as No Way Out (1950) and sharp-tongued, ironic urban comedies including All About Eve (1950). Virtually nothing in his later filmography, or in his older brother’s, evokes the unhinged spirit of Million Dollar Legs. Where it came from in the makeup of its oddly assembled creative team and cast cannot be assessed—only marveled at as a madness of the historical moment. Whether they seized it or it seized them is impossible to gauge in retrospect from this distance.
While Million Dollar Legs ranks high on many aficionados’ lists, the demand for it is comparatively small. Currently, it can only be downloaded or instantly viewed (for free) at Archive.org. It can also be purchased on DVD from Amazon and elsewhere. As far as the mass market is concerned, it seems to have slipped through the cracks. However, the story of its not-quite-disappearance has a sweetly ironic epilogue. In 1939, Paramount reused the title for a comedy showcasing their glamorous new star, the leggy Betty Grable. This later film has no connection whatever to the wacky Klopstokian wonderland of its predecessor. It would be a bitter irony if it had saturated the market and wholly overshadowed the 1932 film. But the happy ending is that it hasn’t. While “our” Million Dollar Legs is loved and cherished by its select audience, the 1939 film has almost totally vanished from sight. It is listed on Amazon but does not seem to be available in any format. W.C. Fields has triumphed over Betty Grable. Now, I somehow feel if I can just learn to sing “One Hour With You” in Klopstokian, everything will be all right. Even Klopstock himself might smile.
Read more Feingold on Old Movies for Theater Lovers.
