Sat 21 Apr 2012
Movie Review: MACHINE GUN MAMA (1944).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews[10] Comments
MACHINE GUN MAMA. PRC Pictures, 1944. Armida, El Brendel, Wallace Ford, Jack La Rue, Luis Alberni, Julian Rivero. Director: Harold Young.
I must have lived a sheltered life. I had never heard of El Brendel until I watched this movie. You’re never too old to learn more about the movies than you knew the day before. “El” is short for Elmer, and Brendel is pronounced “Bren-DELL.”
He was a vaudeville star, so I’m told, whose shtick was a comically funny Swedish accent. Most of the films he made through the 1940s were comedy shorts, in which he invariably played characters named Ole, Ollie, Oley, Knute or Axel Swenson, but by the 1950s he’d worked his way up to television, including an appearance on Perry Mason, among other quite prestigious shows.
In Machine Gun Mama he’s teamed up with Wallace Ford as two guys from Brooklyn who are in Mexico trying to deliver an elephant to someone whose address they’ve apparently lost. When their truck breaks down, a carnival nearby catches their eye, and that’s where the movie begins.
Let me back up for a moment. I thought when I bought this movie that maybe I was I was buying a movie about Ma Barker and her gang. Not so. Not at all. Not for a minute. The Mexican actress named Armida plays the title character, and where the machine gun comes in is a small story in itself. As it happens, Armida, the carnival owner’s daughter, is also the girl sitting in the dunking booth. Hit the bulls-eye with a baseball, and in she goes.
Three times in a row. All at the hands (or pitching arm) of Wallace Ford’s character. Armida, a miniature spitfire (just under five feet tall), takes offense at this, runs over to the booth opposite, turns the prop machine gun around and blasts away, destroying a lot of property but no lives, thank goodness.
She also falls in love with John O’Reilly, the famous “kibitzer” from Brooklyn (that’s Wallace Ford), but her father… Wait, wait, there’s an elephant in the room. Really. And there’s a bad guy (Jack Le Rue) to whom Armida’s father owes a lot of money to, but the elephant (really) is such a star attraction that…
I suppose that if you’re still with me, there’s a chance you’ll watch the movie, so I’ll say no more. It’s a lot of fun, not the silly, slapstick sort at all — or mostly not — but the kind of quiet fun that may make you smile a lot without ever cracking you up.
There are some songs and dance, too, but mostly (and strangely) not until the very end of the movie, which finishes up all of the story lines so quickly I had to back up the DVD to see what I’d missed. You can watch the entire 60 minutes for yourself online here on www.archive.org.
April 21st, 2012 at 9:48 pm
There is a blog more or less devoted to El Brendel called Give Me The Good Old Days. Not bad at all.
April 21st, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Please see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4ALpFMxzFU
This is the big finale of THE SHOW OF SHOWS (1929).
It has seemingly every dancer in California.
Armida shows up circa 2:40.
They don’t make movies like they used to!
April 22nd, 2012 at 1:21 am
Barry
That’s some blog all right. Fantastic, I’d say.
Here’s a link:
http://www.elbrendel.com
And here’s a direct link to last month’s celebration of what would have been El Brendel’s 120th birthday:
http://www.elbrendel.com/2012/03/happy-121st-b-day-el.html
Lots of photos in that post, including one of him with Raymond Burr on the set of PERRY MASON.
Terrific!
April 22nd, 2012 at 1:23 am
Mike
How did you find that YouTube video? I ended up watching all nine plus minutes. Hugely entertaining! There must have been more than 100 dancers on the floor, all at the same time. When’s the last time I saw anything like this at the movies or TV? The ED SULLIVAN SHOW?
April 22nd, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Steve,
A few years back was researching singer Alexander Gray. He’s the guy singing at the start of the dance number in THE SHOW OF SHOWS. He also sings the Depression era standard Dusty Shoes in another film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYWQ4bJRPt4
A couple of years ago TCM had a program about films that only survive in fragments. One of them was an early musical GOLD DIGGERS OF BROADWAY (1929). It too has dance numbers, quite in the same style as THE SHOW OF SHOWS:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwuuqBVECkw
Old musicals are terrific.
April 22nd, 2012 at 7:32 pm
WOWOWOW !!!
What a crazy dancing show -and VERRRRY definitely prrre-Code !
One of my favourites was the little devil-girl at the beginning.
Makes you wonder into what direction Hollywood moviemaking might have moved WITHOUT that bloody, sick, Code.
The Doc
April 23rd, 2012 at 10:33 am
El Brendel was the comic relief in some very big movies of the late silent and early talkie era, notably WINGS and Raoul Walsh’s widescreen western flop THE BIG TRAIL, starring the young John Wayne with a exuberantly over the top Tyrone Power, Sr. in a villainous role. THE BIG TRAIL is actually available on DVD in a widescreen version, probably the only 1930s film with that distinction. Unless somebody can name another.
April 23rd, 2012 at 11:14 am
THE BAT WHISPERS still exists in wide screen form, but I think copies of any other movies produced in that format have long ago disappeared. You can see clips from BAT at https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkw5c_the-bat-whispers-1930-65mm_fun
Thanks for bringing the discussion back to El Brendel. I remember reading somewhere that MACHINE GUN MAMA was intended to be the first of a low budget series of comedies in which he and Wallace Ford were to teamed up together, modeled after the Abbott and Costello movies. If this was so, though, the idea didn’t go anywhere. The movie itself gets 4.1 stars out of 10 on IMDB. That’s about how I’d rate it, too.
April 23rd, 2012 at 4:25 pm
In re El Brendel:
Racket Squad aficionados will recall El’s performance in the episode “Sting Of Fate”, wherein he plays a hotel handyman who loses his ‘yob’ (he really says it that way) when a woman falls and injures herself in the hallway outside of their room. El goes to Captain Braddock (Reed Hadley) for help, but cannot prove that he didn’t leave a gap in the carpeting that cause the lady to trip.
Determined to clear his name, El stakes out the hotel, and soon discovers that the lady’s husband (sneaky Steve Brodie) has found a hornet’s nest not far away, from whih he procures a hornet which he then uses to cause swelling and discoloration on his wife’s leg, this in preparation for a suit against the hotel – that is, if the hotel doesn’t settle first. Armed with El’s intel about the hornets, Braddock discovers that Brodie and his Mrs. (Catherine McCleod) have been running this scam at other hotels, and busts the couple just in time to save the wife, who turns out to have gotten one sting too many.
And at the end, the full-of-himself hotel manager (who else but Tom Browne Henry) is forced to take El back in his old yob.
“And remember … it could happen to you.”
You can find this Racket Squad segment in the same Mill Creek set where we found the lone surviving Case of Eddie Drake that time. Apparently it’s one of the more popular RS shows around.
I also recall El Brendel from The She-Creature, wherein he and his wife Flo Bert play a butler and maid to … somebody (been a while since I saw this, can’t recall offhand).
El Brendel’s final role was in an episode of the short-lived Destry series with John Gavin, from 1964; TV Guide noted Brendel’s passing in the logline for the episode, which aired a couple of weeks after the event.
We all now solemnly await Sony’s inevitable decision to make Columbia’s non-3 Stooges comedy shorts available in MOD DVDs (their forthcoming Stooges megaset includes solo shorts from Shemp Howard, Joe DeRita and Joe Besser; can El Brendel be that far behind?).
April 23rd, 2012 at 5:24 pm
Thanks, Mike. I’ve heard so much about El Brendel now that I think I’ve heard about him all my life. And I haven’t. MACHINE GUN MAMA is still the first time I recall coming across either him or his name, and both his face and name are certainly ones you wouldn’t easily forget.