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Laughter

Released Sep 25, 1930 1h 25m Comedy Drama List
Tomatometer 1 Reviews 60% Popcornmeter 50+ Ratings
Zeigfeld Follies beauty Peggy (Nancy Carroll) marries an older man, C. Morton Gibson (Frank Morgan). Although she soon grows tired of their sedate life, she refuses the attentions of her longtime friend, the volatile sculptor Ralph Le Saint (Glenn Anders). When pianist Paul Lockridge (Fredric March) arrives from Paris, he begs Peggy to run away with him to France, where they can share adventure and a full life -- but complications arise for Peggy when Gibson's attractive daughter visits.

Critics Reviews

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Dan Callahan ToxicUniverse.com Laughter is a famous, though largely unseen film, that inaugurates the screwball comedies of the thirties. Rated: 4/5 Feb 4, 2005 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

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Steve D The story is good but the execution is lumbering. Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/20/24 Full Review Louisa E A delightful movie. I liked the story; there were some amusing moments and some tragic ones. My favourite scene was the bear rugs! There was great character development because I began hating the composer, Paul, but I liked him by the end. I thought Nancy Carroll, Glen Anders, and a pre-Wizard Frank Morgan were good in this movie. My favourite actor in this movie was Frederic March. I thought he did a great job, and I thought he was actually playing the piano at one point. The music was great. Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 05/08/23 Full Review Audience Member first of the screwball comedies-they all started here in this pre-code early talkie. 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 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 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 out of 5 stars 01/25/23 Full Review Read all reviews
Laughter

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Movie Info

Synopsis Zeigfeld Follies beauty Peggy (Nancy Carroll) marries an older man, C. Morton Gibson (Frank Morgan). Although she soon grows tired of their sedate life, she refuses the attentions of her longtime friend, the volatile sculptor Ralph Le Saint (Glenn Anders). When pianist Paul Lockridge (Fredric March) arrives from Paris, he begs Peggy to run away with him to France, where they can share adventure and a full life -- but complications arise for Peggy when Gibson's attractive daughter visits.
Director
Harry D'Abbadie D'Arrast
Genre
Comedy, Drama
Original Language
English
Release Date (Theaters)
Sep 25, 1930, Original
Runtime
1h 25m