Search - The Stand-In on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1937 DVD Release: 01/28/2003 Format: DVD - Black and White SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 31 mins Studio: Image Entertainment Members Wishing: 6 Genres: Comedy, Satire, Screwball Comedy, Showbiz Comedy

Bookish bank employee Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard) is ordered to investigate the near-bankrupt Colossal Studios in Hollywood, to see if the firm is any sort of good risk. Dodd's first brush with Tinseltown's cuckoo atmosphere occurs when he takes a room in a boarding house for extras, where all manner of eccentrics wander about as they wait for the phone to ring (Charles Middleton comports himself in an Abe Lincoln costume, on the off-chance that Hollywood will go back to making Civil War pictures soon). He befriends Lester Plum (Joan Blondell), a former child star now working as a stand-in for haughty movie queen Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton), and perpetually soused producer Douglas Quintain (Humphrey Bogart). Aware that the latest epic of autocratic director Koslofski (Alan Mowbray) will ruin the studio, Howard investigates further, discovering that a rival company has bribed Koslofski to pad the budget and thus bring about the foreclosure of Colossal. While his business sense tells him that this is the next logical move, Dodd has fallen in love with Plum; thus, he gives Quintain 48 hours to re-edit Koslofski's fiasco into something workable, and himself staves off the studio's shutdown by rallying all the Colossal employees to stand firm against being removed from the premises. Based on a Saturday Evening Post story by Clarence Buddington Kelland, this is a light-hearted satire of the movie industry, the sort of amiable farce in which everyone--even the most contentious of characters--is shown to be basically decent underneath. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Leslie Howard - Atterbury Dodd
Joan Blondell - Lester Plum
Humphrey Bogart - Douglas Quintain
Alan Mowbray - Koslofski
Marla Shelton - Thelma Cheri

Tay Garnett's Stand-In, produced by Walter Wanger, is one of the more enduring screen entertainments of the 1930's. Stand-In is refreshing as a satire of the business of the movie business, and also gives out a surprisingly collectivist slant on the industry and its problems. Sharp-tongued and often cynical, it was produced independently by Walter Wanger and distributed by United Artists. The film has mostly turned up on channels like AMC in recent years -- it was never on home video or laserdisc, and so this DVD is really the first opportunity that audiences have to find the film in a home viewing format. The transfer is good but unspectacular, drawn from a source that shows a certain limited degree of fading but which is otherwise clean and intact. It misses the mark set by Warner Bros.' releases of such 1930's titles as The Thin Man or 42nd Street, or Kino's issue of Counsellor-At-Law. There's detail in the picture but not a lot of richness in the image -- on the other hand, this is such a fast-moving film, that one doesn't have much of a tendency to dwell on shots or the details of images, as the screwball-style satire of Hollywood unfolds before us at a breakneck pace. The movie has been given 12 chapters with no extras of any kind, not even a trailer. The producers are evidently counting on the fact that Humphrey Bogart and Leslie Howard are the stars of the movie (along with Joan Blondell, who is very good but no longer a major marketing point) to sell it, and the two actors are appealing in their roles as well as their scenes together. Even if one didn't know that it, in fact, was the case, it is clear from their scenes together that Bogart and Howard were very good friends, and obviously enjoyed the chance to work with each other again, a year after The Pretrified Forest and in the wake of their work in the same piece on Broadway. Moreover, Bogart and Howard were sufficiently outsiders to the Hollywood system that they seem the revel in their roles, in this savage burlesque of the film mecca. It's that chemistry, along with the mix of Hollywood roman-a-clef and Capra-esque comedy/drama that makes this disc worthwhile and, indeed, special -- after all, how many really good Bogart or Howard titles are there out there that most of us haven't seen to death, much less any with unusual stories or subjects? On the technical side, the disc opens automatically to its menu, an extremely easy to maneuver single frame offering chapters and the "Play" option as a default setting. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide