Broadminded (1931)
Jack's father lowers the boom when his irresponsible rich-kid ends up in jail after a night of debauchery. The father appoints Ossie, Jack's cousin, as guardian, not realizing that Ossie is just as bad. They set off on a transcontinental trip with mischief on their minds.
https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/icons/letterboxd-decal-l-16px.a8f34e0d.svg
I've watched some pretty weird and disturbing pre-Code films over the years, but the opening of this Prohibition-era comedy, featuring an adult baby party starring Joe E. Brown stuffed into an oversized pram, shoving a baby bottle full of gin with a rubber nipple into his ginormous mouth, ranks right up there with Al Jolson's "Goin' to Heaven on a Mule" as 151-proof straight-up nightmare fuel. I know it's verboten to make fun of sexual kinks these days, but sheesh, that was creepy. I felt like I soiled my nappies after watching it and needed to be changed.

After that hallucinatory ordeal, where could this go but down? Even Bela Lugosi playing an South American Lothario named Pancho Arango, who's…

I recently returned from a brief sojourn in Pasadena — the main reason why I haven’t been very active on LB the past few weeks — and decided to watch this Joe E. Brown comedy, which was filmed in and around that city’s Langham Huntington Hotel. (I chose not to visit the hotel during my stay because the original building was demolished after sustaining structural damage during an earthquake, though the current building is a fairly faithful reconstruction of the original. Instead, I chose to visit Huntington’s museum, as well as the Norton Simon, the Gamble House, etc. during my free time.) It’s a better showcase of the hotel than of Brown’s variable skills as a comedian.

Brown’s uncle (Holmes…

Joe E. Brown was one of the most popular comedians of the early '30s, and is almost completely forgotten today -- remembered mostly for his role as Jack Lemmon's elderly suitor in SOME LIKE IT HOT. His main gimmick was that he had an enormous mouth. He also made funny faces. I find him vaguely unpleasant. Will Jim Carrey be as impenetrable to future generations as Joe E. Brown is to me?

This movie is most notable for its opening scene -- a baby-themed bootleg liquor party where everyone is dressed in baby clothes. Joe E. Brown, wearing a bonnet, is wheeled out in a stroller, and he goo-goos and gah-gahs while drinking milk from a bottle. An image that…

Broadminded opens with one of the most bizarre, fetishistic sequences in a pre-Code comedy—a high society party in which all the attendees are dressed as babies. The centerpiece involves Joe E. Brown riding in a crib, wearing a bonnet, and drinking from a milk bottle as a dozen or so attractive young women watch in suggestive admiration. From there, it’s a pretty standard road picture, but some of the particulars (including a threatening adversary played by Bela Lugosi) feel similarly unique. At this stage in his career, the studios didn’t seem to quite know how to best serve Brown’s persona—as with Going Wild, here he suggests the standard of the modern man, with his very stylishness clashing with his brash…