Twentieth Century

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Average Customer Rating:	4.5
Release Date:	2005-02-22
Publisher:	Sony Pictures
ISBN:	1404977732
Actors:	John Barrymore; Carole Lombard; Walter Connolly; Roscoe Karns; Ralph Forbes
Aspect ratio:	1.33:1
Audience rating:	Unrated
Format:	Black & White; Closed-captioned; DVD; Full Screen; Subtitled; NTSC
Language:	Original Language: English; Original Language: German;
Weight:	0.24 pounds

Product Categories

Classic Comedies; Barrymore, John; Barrymore, John Drew; Bing, Herman; Flaherty, Pat; Girardot, Etienne; Lombard, Carole; All Sony Pictures Titles; Comedy; ( T ); Movies & TV on DVD and Blu-ray Disc Trade-In; DVD; DVD Deals; Full Screen; Up to 1939; English; DVD

Product description

Carole Lombard and John Barrymore star in this all-time classic screwball comedy based on the Charles MacArthur-Ben Hecht Broadway hit and directed by Howard Hawks. It's the story of a maniacal Broadway director (Barrymore) who transforms shopgirl Carole Lombard from a talented amateur to a smashing Great White Way success adored by public and press.

Screwball comedy was practically invented by this classic Howard Hawks picture, a breathless farce with not an ounce of sentimentality. John Barrymore, in magnificent form, plays egomaniacal Broadway producer Oscar Jaffe, who molds his latest protégé, Mildred Plotka, into elegant thee-a-tuh star Lily Garland (Carole Lombard). The last hour of the picture has Oscar and Lily, now on the outs, battling each other on the Chicago-to-New York train. These two marvelous creatures are quintessential Hawks characters, figures of pure style who can't exist without the adrenaline and spark so amply supplied by the Hecht-MacArthur script. Hawks's giddyup pacing anticipates Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, and his deployment of character actors (notably Walter Connolly and Roscoe Karns, as Jaffe's long-suffering, oft-fired flunkies) is sublime. Barrymore and Lombard take it at full speed, grand and horrid and silly and probably meant for each other. --Robert Horton

Customer reviews

« Superb overacting »

There's a great Monty Python sketch where actors are taken to the hospital and treated for overacting. The cast of this movie certainly enjoy themselves delivering some of the most hammy, overdone, yet hilarious scenes ever committed to film.

John Barrymore is so far over the top as the theater producer Oscar Jaffe that he defines the pretentious, ultra-sensitive "artiste" for all time. My wife believes he inspired Kramer from the Seinfeld show with his wild hair, theatrical entrances and exits and his exaggerated hand movements and spasms.

Carole Lombard as Mildred Plotka, whom he reinvents as the golden star Lily Garland, almost matches him, blow for blow. The plot is unimportant and quickly becomes incoherent -- but it doesn't matter. This is an exercise in wit and satire that has lost none of its bite nearly 80 years after it was made.

Rating: (4 out of 5) @ 2010-08-31

« Ah, romance, old-school style. »

Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934)

Put an Oscar-nominated director responsible for eleven movies on They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?'s list of the thousand best movies of all time together with a legendary screenwriter with two Oscar wins and four more nominations and magic is bound to happen. Hawks and Ben Hecht collaborated nine times; it's no surprise that two of those collaborations, Scarface and His Girl Friday, are on the TSPDT list. It's also no surprise that the films that didn't make the list on which the two collaborated are some of the best-known work from either; The Thing from Another World, Barbary Coast, Monkey Business, etc. Oddly, however, Twentieth Century seems to have fallen through some sort of celluloid nook; despite Hawks, Hecht, and a top-notch cast, the movie has faded into the kind of obscurity usually reserved for Z-grade mysteries that lasted less than an hour. While this odd little attempt at a comedy-romance is wide of the mark more often than it hits the bullseye, it certainly deserves a better fate than that.

Lily Garland (the great Carole Lombard, nominated for an Oscar for My Man Godfrey two years later; she lost to Luise Rainer) is, as we open, a bad actress. A very bad actress, in fact, a Minnesota farm girl who came east to try her luck on Broadway and has failed miserably. Until, that is, she tries out for a production to be directed by Walter Jaffe (John Barrymore, one of the scions of acting's greatest family). Jaffe's no-nonsense directorial style turns Garland into a star, and the two of them begin a relationship. Fast forward a few years, and that relationship has gone sour; Jaffe is as controlling offstage as on, and Garland hops the first train to Hollywood to try her hand at film. Jaffe's career goes sour, while Garland soars to new heights. When they wind up on the same train, Jaffe's advisors hatch a plot to get the two of them back together. Hilarity ensues.

Hecht's screenplay is strewn with silly subplots, some of which work, some of which don't, and sillier characters, most of whom work. The oddest note here, though, is that for a comedy, especially a Depression-era comedy, this is a dark, dark movie. We're used to that nowadays; few contemporary comedies are released that don't have some sort of tearjerker factor. But back then, in the days when Chaplin and Keaton were still kings, comedy was all about, well, laughing. Here, you cringe on a fairly regular basis. While the academic part of me wants to praise Haws and Hecht to the heavens for being so forward-thinking, the emotional part of me says that there were scenes here that simply didn't feel like they fit. Not to say they weren't good, naturally. Have you ever seen a single scene in a Howard Hawks flick that wasn't directed to perfection? No, and you never will. The man was one of Hollywood's masters. But sometimes they felt as if there was another movie they should have been dropped into.

Still, it's a good picture, and you'll get the requisite number of chuckles out of it. And any chance to see Carole Lombard onscreen is to be treasured, since she died far younger than she should have. Well worth checking out if you have a soft spot for Depression-era romance, and maybe even if you don't. *** ½

Rating: (4 out of 5) @ 2009-12-01

« Too much ham provided by John Barrymore (Jaffe) & Carole »

Lombard(Lily). They outrageosly overact their way thru this disappointing 1934 comedy. It's a battle of wits as Lily tries to escape the clutches of her director the great Jaffe. He has made her a big success on Broadway. But he is sufficating her with his controlling of her every waking moment. She rebels & flees to Hollywood & becomes a star. Jaffe is a flop after her. Several years pass & they happen to both be traveling on the 20th Century. It is the train traveling between Chicago & New York City in the 30's. The hysteronics commence. I know Lombard is the queen of the screwball comedy genre but the dialogue becomes rather tedious. He plots & schemes to do everything he can to get her to sign a contract. She does everything to evade him. But they are on fast moving train that rarely stops. They are, of course, in love. Neither is a likeable character & they deserve each other.

Rating: (2 out of 5) @ 2009-08-02

« A Sparkling Collaboration of 1930's Luminaries »

Charles MacArthur and Ben Hecht wrote the script for this movie. Howard Hawkes directed. It stars Carole Lombard and John Barrymore as a sort of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne couple. These Hollywood glitterati and literati collaborated to make this sparkling champagne freshet of a movie that should be brought back into wide circulation. Much of it comes across as crisp, modern, and even technologically ahead of its time - as when Barrymore orders a phone tap in an attempt to catch his wife in what he believes are her frequent infidelities.

There might not be many belly laughs here, although I did literally LOL at least once. Barrymore boards the Twentieth Century train in heavy disguise in an attempt to evade his creditors. Once sequestered aboard in his compartment, he laments his dismal situation, meanwhile tugging at the putty on his nose. He pulls the putty into a longer and longer taffy extension, until he's unwittingly achieved a veritable Pinocchio proboscis. Finally, when neither nose nor man is able to sustain any further prolongation of their misery - they droop in unison. It's a hilarious scene.

Barrymore is in top form here. He generally disdained movies, believing they were beneath him. He regarded the legitimate theater as the only medium for the true actor. As a result, he usually chewed up the scenery in his movie rolls, leaving his characters mercilessly shredded. Here though, he strikes just the right note of hamminess. He stops short of being over-the-top in any scene, but retains the kind of antic energy that this sort of madcap comedy calls for.

Barrymore is also at his most handsome in this film. The viewer can readily see how he got the cognomen "The Great Profile." It's a pleasure to go back to a time when there were, not "media figures," but "matinee idols." The latter rarified creatures radiated unattainably from the silver screen - beyond the trivializations of paparazzi or talk shows. This movie allows that sort of transport.

"Twentieth Century" allows another kind of transport though. It might be of special interest to train buffs. Since the real Twentieth Century train made its last run a few years ago, it left many train club members especially eager to collect memorabilia from those old glory days of cross-country luxury travel. It's unlikely that any of the interior train shots in this movie are authentic. Those are probably all just studio lot sets. However there are a few shots of what I took to be the actual Twentieth Century train pulling into New York's Grand Central Station in the early 1930's. Train enthusiasts might like to check out "Twentieth Century" for these shots alone.

Anyone else who would just like to roll along with some breezy, fast-paced dialogue in the company of Hollywood legends - will also want to get on-board.

Rating: (5 out of 5) @ 2009-07-23

« beg to differ--disappointing »

I had high hopes for this film. I love Carole Lombard--Barrymore, Connolly and Hawkes too. But for me, this screwball comedy/farce seems dull and dated.

Lombard is well below par, certainly nothing compared to her work in My Man Godfrey. And unlike Lombard's chemistry with William Powell (her ex-husband in real life)in that film, here she seems to have none with Barrymore.

Barrymore has some good ham moments, as do Connolly and the other sidekick. As a whole, a long 90 minutes, with lots of painfully obvious "humor".

For all the positive reviews here, I think smarter comedies of the period--like My Man Godfrey, The Lady Eve and Philadelphia Story--hold up better today than this one.

Rating: (2 out of 5) @ 2009-07-15

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