Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Half Shot at Sunrise
Two doughboys go absent without leave in 1918 Paris and spend the armistice dodging the military police.
Wheeler and Woolsey came to RKO from Ziegfeld's Rio Rita on Broadway, and this is the studio finding out whether the act worked without a stage under it. It does. Woolsey is the cigar and the glasses and the reasoning; Wheeler is the boy who agrees with it a beat too late. The war is a backdrop for borrowed uniforms, a colonel's daughter and a stack of orders nobody should be carrying. Edna May Oliver, as the colonel's wife, gets the film's best stare. Watch the door marked "U.S. Army G-2 · Paris Section": every time it opens, the plot is in worse shape than before.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Paul Sloane
- Photographed by
- Nicholas Musuraca
- With
- Edna May Oliver · Dorothy Lee
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Wheeler and Woolsey twice in 1930, both with Dorothy Lee: first in borrowed uniforms in Paris, then in borrowed rooms in a hotel nobody should own. The same double act, finding its pace.