When I watched Captain Blood a couple of weeks back, I discovered my recorded-off-air DVD had the ending missing. No big deal — I’ve seen it enough times to remember how it turns out — but when I discovered my library had the authorized DVD I checked it out to catch the ending anyway.
I got a pleasant surprise: the special features included a “Warner Brothers Night at the Movies” designed to give viewers the feeling for what they might have seen if they’d caught Captain Blood in the theaters. Back in those days, as Leonard Maltin explains in the introduction, you got much more entertainment than just the film and the previews, though the collection does start out with a preview for Warner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“James Cagney in the role of his career!”).
Then came the newsreel; back in the 1930s, this was the only way to see live news footage of current events. And if you think “if it bleeds, it leads” is new, this led off with Bruno Hauptmann being sentenced to death for kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh’s baby; Helena Montana has been hammered by an earthquake; “dust storms bury Kansas and Colorado farms” as the Dust Bowl grows; and beloved humorist Will Rogers dies in a plane crash. We also have FDR assuring America the US will continue staying out of European affairs. I notice this shows FDR standing at the podium, which seems to confirm what I’ve read about the White House making him look less disabled than he was.
Then comes a short, All-American Drawback, with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy, Charley McCarthy. Bergen, playing a football coach, learns Charley’s going to be pulled from his starring role on the team unless he can raise his grades; while having Charley play sports seems like an odd premise for a film centered on a ventriloquist’s dummy, this was entertaining enough. “I think it’s a shame they piled on Charley like that — if they wanted the ball so bad, why didn’t they ask for it?”
Johnny Green and his Orchestra was a musical short in which a spontaneous jam session not only inspires Young Love but sets three local farmhands to dancing and singing some hillbilly music. TYG, catching this in passing, was much amused by how overdone the conductor’s baton movements were; I’m guessing they were exaggerated for the camera, much as sword fights require larger blade movements than a real fencing match.
The final entertainment was Billboard Frolics, a cartoon in which various billboard advertising characters come to life: a Cuban dancer on a travel poster, penguins on a cigarette ad and a chicken who then has to run from a real-life cat. As Maltin says, more cute and whimsical than the zany cartoons best remembered from the era.
All they needed was a movie serial chapter to finish it off.
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