LET’S GO NATIVE. Paramount, 1930. Jeanette MacDonald, Jack Oakie, “Skeets” Gallagher, Kay Francis, James Hall and William Austin. Written by Percy Heath and George Marion Jr. Directed by Leo McCarey.

   A silly thing, but outrageously enjoyable. Writers Heath and Marion start with a “putting on a show” story: Jeanette McDonald is a Costume Designer in dire straits whose show is about to launch… if she can just make ends meet till then. That’s adequate, but Director McCarey is more interested in using slap-shtick from his old silent days, while Eugene Pallette, charged with repossessing Jeanette’s belongings, drops and breaks whatever he touches, like a one-man Laurel & Hardy routine.

   Suddenly a title card informs us that the star of the show couldn’t make it, so Jeannette stepped in and is now the star! 10 minutes of show tunes ensue, including one with dancing bears that ends with the warbling lovers encased in snow. McCarey does what he can with a stationary camera, but basically this is just photographed dance routines, in the style of the Marx Brothers’ Coconuts (1929.) Still, those guys dancing in bear suits….

   About this time Jack Oakie shows up as a cab driver named Voltaire McGinnis, and the whole show sets off for South America(!) whereupon Native turns into a shipboard romance, with Jeanette up against Kay Francis (also the vamp in Coconuts) for the affections of bland leading man James Hall. With time out for some more L&H routines and a dance number of course.

   Then there’s a shipwreck and the players are stranded on a tropical island ruled by Skeets Gallagher, a band-leader marooned there years ago, who taught the native girls (there are no native men) to play swing music. So they dress up in Jeanette’s costumes and put on a show till the volcano erupts…. and NO, Jeanette does NOT wake up from a dream.

   Jack Oakie gets most of the comedy time, but the big laugh-getter is William Austin, a British comic I never heard of, who does physical & verbal comedy equally well, mixed with an off-hand manner that downplays his expertise and conversely shows it off. Austin had a mostly bit-part career but is remembered thusly in IMDB:

   So William Austin paved the way for Michael Gough, Alan Napier, Michael Caine and Jeremy Irons. In these posts I strive to be Educational as well as Entertaining.

BILL PRONZINI “Incident in a Neighborhood Tavern.” Short story. “Nameless” PI. First published in An Eye for Justice, edited by Robert J. Randisi (Mysterious Press, 1988). Collected in Small Felonies (St. Martin’s, 1988). [See comment #5 for other collections this story has appeared in.] Reprinted in Under the Gun, edited by Edward Gorman & Robert J. Randisi (Plume, 1990).

   Bill Pronzini’s “nameless” PI is sitting in a bar talking to the owner about a series of robberies local merchants have asked him to look into, the police having made no headway in the case. It’s that time of he evening, just before seven, when only two other customers are in the place, when in comes a hopped up kid with a gun. Object: robbery.

   The story’s only eight pages long, but not only does this turn out to be a pretty good detective story, but what makes this story all the more compelling is Pronzini’s ability to describe what it must feel like to be facing the wrong end pf a gun, the other end in the hand of someone who obviously doesn’t care if it goes off or not.

   You’ve got to keep your head in situations such this, and “Nameless” does just that, in more ways than one.