Stubs - A Night at the Movies

A Night At the Movies (1937) Starring Robert Benchley, Betty Ross Clarke, Gwen Lee. Directed by  Roy Rowland. Screenplay by Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo, Robert Benchley. Produced by Jack Chertok Run Time: 10 minutes. USA Comedy, Short

Following the success of How To Sleep (1935), MGM kept producing Robert Benchley Miniatures. While all featured Benchley, unfortunately not all of them were also written by the humorist. How to Behave (1936), How To Train a Dog (1936), How to Vote (1936), How to Be a Detective (1936), The Romance of Digestion (1937) and How to Start The Day (1937) followed, but with much less fanfare and accolades. That changed with A Night At The Movies (1937).

Robert Benchley and wife (Betty Ross Clarke) look for a movie to see.

The film opens with Robert Benchley and his wife (Betty Ross Clarke) looking at the newspaper looking for a movie to go see. The problem is that they’ve each seen one of the two movies that are playing at their neighborhood theater. The solution is that they go see a film he has already seen, Souls on a Tandem.

Trying to communicate with the girl in the box office.

Now, these are the days before online ticket buying and reserved seats, so they actually have to go to the theater's box office to purchase them. There are other differences between their experience and the modern moviegoer’s. The theater is having a drawing to give away a car and there are ushers in uniforms to help them, though they don’t help them actually find a seat. Rather, they ask for their ticket, which it turns out he has put in for the raffle.

The theater has a raffle. Benchley will accidentally put his theater tickets in the raffle box.

Their lack of tickets causes the Usher, one of several on duty, to call over her supervisor, Mr. Pennelly (Hal K. Dawson), who doesn’t believe Benchley, so he calls over the theater manager, Mr. Baum (Frank Sheridan). Mr. Baum makes the command decision and lets them go inside.

The agent calls Mr. Pennelly (Hal K. Dawson) and Pennelly calls for Mr. Baum (Frank Sheridan).

But once they find seats, all is not well. Benchley fumbles with what to do with his hat, but the real annoyance comes from a staring child (Ricardo Lord Cezon) who unnerves Benchley. 

Little boy stares at Benchley.

While he is busy being stared down, a rather large patron (Jack 'Tiny' Lipson) sits in front of him and totally blocks his view. Benchley’s fidgeting to see around ‘Tiny” irritates the man sitting behind them, so Benchley decides to move.

Jack "Tiny" Lipson sits down in front of Benchley and blocks his view.

His first choice of seats gets nabbed by a faster younger couple, forcing them to look for seats closer to the screen. But sitting so close and to the side causes the image to look distorted.

Sitting too close distorts the motion picture.

Feeling dry, Benchley pops a lozenge, probably a Lifesaver, into his mouth after offering one to the Mrs. But he begins to cough and despite his wife’s help, he seeks solace to recover. Accidentally, he ends up outside and locked out.

Benchley manages to get locked outside the theater.

His wife doesn’t seem to notice that Benchley is missing until the lights come on between features.

On stage, a live prelude with dancing girls starts their routine. Meanwhile, Benchley searches for a way in and finds an unlocked door. You can see it coming, so it is no surprise that Benchley walks out onto the stage in the middle of the dancer’s routine. A little embarrassed, Benchley exits the stage and the film ends.

At the end, Benchley walks out into the middle of the live prelude.

Released on November 6, 1937, A Night at the Movies was Benchley’s best-received miniature since his first one. The film was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (One-Reel), losing to The Private Life of the Gannets (1934), a British documentary about a colony of Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) on the small rocky island of Grassholm, off the coast of Wales produced by Alexander Korda.

The director, Roy Rowland, would helm many different types of films in his career. In addition to comedy, he also directed romance: Lost Angel (1943); film noir: Scene of the Crime (1949); musical fantasy: The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; suspense: Witness to Murder (1954); and even spaghetti Westerns: Gunfighters of Casa Grande (1964). Rowland would never get further than being considered a journeyman director, able to work in many genres, but a master of none.

Similar to How To Sleep, A Night At the Movies is all about Robert Benchley. The film relies on his presence because without it, it would verge on being unwatchable. And like his first miniature, it deals with a situation many people have experienced themselves. Who hasn’t had a bad experience at the movies?

But even the relatable premise and the presence of Benchley are not enough to save it. There seems to be something missing this time around. Less an instructional film, A Night At the Movies feels much less structured and almost seems to be ad-libbed in places.

Again, the short provides the modern viewer a look back at life in the 1930s. Films were the main out of the house entertainment and it wasn’t unusual for a couple to go out during the week to see a movie; there was no Netflix or DVDs or even TV. Also, there wasn’t necessarily a firm start time as people would enter the theater when they got there and not wait for the next showing. (You can thank Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 Psycho for changing that.)

All that said, A Night at the Movies was not quite as much fun to watch as How To Sleep and therefore I can’t recommend it.