Rhapsodies

For this week’s entry for this year’s Christmas Marathon, I watched classic Christmas comedies featuring some of the old school comic actors.

First on my list was George Pal’s The Great Rupert, directed by Irving Pichel, tells the story of an animal trainer who is down on his luck and behind on his rent. When he can’t get anybody interested in his trained squirrel act, he releases the squirrel, Rupert in Central Park. On the way out of the park, he runs into his old friend, the Amendola family led by father Louie, Jimmy Durante, move into the abandoned apartment themselves. Meanwhile, the apartment owners had just gotten a windfall of an annual of a weekly dividend check. Not wanting to Have to pay taxes on it, he hides the money a hole in the wall. Meanwhile, Rupert has returned to the home and does not like the idea of somebody shoving green paper into his bedroom. He throws it out where it falls into the Amendola household. Since it happens when Mrs. Amemdola is praying. It is perceived as a Christmas miracle.

Growing up all I knew about Jimmy Durante from cartoon parodies, so I could recognize his voice. Later I saw him in a two-minute cameo in the film It’ as well as some of his radio shows and found him far better than the parodies. For the most part, he’s what makes the film worth watching. The rest of the film is mostly fluffy Hallmark card material, and hardly worth watching. After Durante the best thing about this film is Rupert. Rupert is done in Pal’s Puppetoon style animation, which is surprisingly convincing.

In the next film, Sidney Lanfield’s The Lemondrop Kid, based on a short story of the same name by Damon Runyon, Bob Hope plays the titular character a small-time conman who makes his living by touting horses at a Florida racetrack. When he accidentally screws up a mobster’s bet. He finds himself having to pay the mobster 10,000 dollars by Christmas. Can he come up with a scan good enough to make this work?

While Hope’s performance is mostly solid I really don’t have much to say about this film. Mostly what it can be remembered for is this is the origin of the Christmas song “Silver Bells.”