Programme notes CH 04 — The Matinee
Hook, Line and Sinker
Two salesmen talk an heiress into running a derelict country hotel, and two gangs check in.
Wheeler and Woolsey again, one season after Half Shot at Sunrise and quicker on their feet. Dorothy Lee is again the girl Wheeler sings to; Jobyna Howland is her mother, a dowager of dangerous size, and Hugh Herbert is the house detective, fluttering. The hotel is the gag: the boys promise it guests, then get the wrong kind. Its last reel plays out in the dark, guns going off between the potted palms, and it is lit like a thriller rather than a comedy. The cameraman was Nicholas Musuraca, who twelve years later shot Cat People for the same studio.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Edward F. Cline
- Photographed by
- Nicholas Musuraca
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.