The Race To Tackle Talkies

Once In A Lifetime (1932) Sticks It To The Movies

Down-and-out vaudevillians figure to scam Hollywood with a voice elocution school now that talkies have swept the industry. At times clever when not smug, this came off a play that skewered an art form that Easterners did not consider art. Carl Laemmle gave himself the back-pat for adapting the comedy and standing for ridicule of his bread-butter, though Once In A Lifetime is less acid than broadest of lampoon. Where it's Jack Oakie trying to breach studio walls manned by Gregory Ratoff, where is chance of filmland being seriously maligned? Funnier if you know the context, so it helps to be a dyed-in-wool old movie buff. Details are flavorful --- a train ride sees everyone, plus seats and baggage, caked with dust from open windows, but close them and you'll suffocate, so where was glamour in those cross-country treks? Once In A Lifetime posits that no one in studio power is competent, success always a product of dumb luck. To that goal, Oakie comes well-equipped.

Vaudeville is presented from an opening scene as deadest of formats, California an only option for performers who wanted to eat. Those who make the move are fakers to a man/woman, each reinventing themselves as something they're not. Interesting is this closed society knowing one another from way back, so pretense is dropped when reunions are had, as when Aline MacMahon of the bogus talk school meets self-styled columnist Louise Fazenda who used to work stock in the stix. All this rings of authenticity, as we assume anyone who was in variety long enough knew everyone else who trod the same boards. Star interviews would bear this out, many if not most biz friendships grown from years on the road before movies beckoned. Everyone who hits big, or not, is presumed to have come from humblest beginnings, eaten dust in the same rail cars. I doubt Hollywood was much bothered by class conflict, since most if not all populace knew the same scramble up from nothing.