Laughter

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Steve D The story is good but the execution is lumbering. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/20/24 Full Review Audience Member first of the screwball comedies-they all started here in this pre-code early talkie. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/21/23 Full Review Audience Member The potential wittiness and sophistication of the script is undermined by the unnecessarily slow pace of the story, whose theme of the Carroll character's inability not to look for greener pastures is unsuccessfully interspersed with her stepdaughter's love affair. It is notable for how grown-up it feels compared to modern-day romances. Rated 2.5/5 Stars •  Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Audience Member This is your great-grandma's rom-com (with a less happy ending, because old films are way less apologetic than new films). A beautiful showgirl has married into money, but can't stand her older husband (he spends all his time tallying his stocks and bonds with his male secretary) and still carries the torch for a piano playing composer she knows from her dancehall days, while a sculptor friend, from the same bohemian crowd, still carries the torch for her. Her fun-loving, flapper stepdaughter is only a few years younger than she is, and over a madcap weekend, the flapper and sculptor fall in love (with the help of a bit of booze), while the showgirl and piano player are playing house in a shuttered summer home after getting caught in a rainstorm during a country drive in a convertible automobile that ran out of gas (this is the movie's best scene; in order to warm up, they strip to their skivvies and dress up in the white and brown bearskin rugs found on the living room floor—complete with heads, which they wear as hoods!). Things fall apart at a masquerade ball when the showgirl runs to stop her stepdaughter from eloping with the sculptor (who then kills himself), and the showgirl finally admits to her husband that she cannot, for all the diamonds in the world, remain married to him. She and the composer move to Paris, and we see them at a sidewalk cafe, happy at last, until the blinking diamonds on a wealthy woman's wrist catch the showgirl's eyes, and we see that she is beginning to bore of her composer, who is still reworking the same riff he was working back in New York. The grass, she reminds us, is always greener elsewhere. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/12/23 Full Review Audience Member Every now and then, good 35mm prints have been screened, but otherwise, this has never been made legitimately available on DVD or VOD. (Bootlegs tend to be of poor quality.) Frederic March as the composer is very charming and a major reason why "Laughter" is often described as a prototypical screwball comedy, but the film as a whole doesn't quite crystalize into one, partly because it's a profoundly melancholy film. It's thoroughly disillusioned by the emptiness of material wealth, and much of the film goes by with little, if any, attempt at humor. Even when it's there, it's usually brought down by a measure of sadness. Production design is classy and often wonderful to look at, and except for a few spots, the limitations of early sound films seem to have been overcome. (There's even a striking echo that occurs in one long shot when Frederic March walks into the background...perhaps the result of necessity than a planned effect, it does remind one of similar moments in "Citizen Kane.") Not quite a masterwork, it hasn't aged as well as, say, Ernst Lubitsch's work from the same era, but it's very good and certainly undeserving of its obscurity. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Audience Member This is more like it! A fizzing, funny romantic comedy with a darker undertone. Great dialogue and performances. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/02/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Laughter

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