Despite their sterling reputations, some films and filmmakers just don’t do it for us here at The Pink Smoke. This series, Second Chances, explores our attempts to grasp greatness where we’ve previously failed to find it; to actively make an effort to appreciate esteemed artworks for which we currently have an antipathy.

We’ll give cult favorites like Escape From New York another shot and dig deep into the filmographies of beloved auteurs whose appeal eludes us (like Federico Fellini or Nicholas Ray.) With a little luck, maybe we’ll even come out at the other end of the process as newly-minted fans…

{the SECOND CHANCES index}

INiTiAL RESiSTANCE:

The Sin of Harold Diddlebock would’ve been one of the last films I saw by Preston Sturges years ago when he was becoming a cinematic hero of mine. All I really knew about Diddlebock was that it was one of the films Sturges had made during his troubled partnership with weirdo multimillionaire Howard Hughes. While films like The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels had instantly become some of my favorites immediately upon seeing them, I was aware that Sturges’ creative peak was notoriously brief and that a series of bad business decisions had brought his massive success crashing down almost as quickly as it had rocketed up into the orbit of other Golden Age Hollywood legends. I held off on seeing Diddlebock because I knew it was located somewhere along the trajectory of the crash, if not down in the crater itself.

After establishing his reputation as a screenwriter, Sturges made his directorial debut in 1940 with The Great McGinty (which won the first ever Academy Award for Original Screenplay) - a hot streak that followed with Christmas in July, Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, Palm Beach Story, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero made him one of the highest paid filmmakers in the history of Hollywood and the toast of the town. In 1944, he was nominated for two Oscars for screenwriting in the same year. By 1950, his career was more or less over.

I saw and loved in rapid succession all of those aforementioned classics - I can’t recall in what order or which I saw first, but I operated with the knowledge that most folks divided his films into two distinct categories: the good ones and the not-so-good-ones. His passion project The Great Moment (about the invention of anesthesia) marked the departures point: at the height of his power, Sturges forced the plainly ill-conceived film into production. It was then shelved, re-edited and generally fucked with by the money-men, a pattern that the work in his later career would usually follow. After languishing on the shelf for a couple years, The Great Moment was finally released in 1944. It flopped.

From that ignominious moment on, his films were screwed with by the Hays office, undermined by producing partners, re-cut and re-released or bad-mouthed by their stars if he wasn’t simply fired from them. His time with Hughes’ California Pictures has a special place in Sturges lore: his autobiography paints his various dust-ups with Hughes as a series of bizarre misunderstandings and his ultimate dismissal from the awful Western Vendetta as notably silly. His account does not ring entirely true but there’s little question the frequently self-destructive Sturges wasn’t entirely to blame: Max Ophüls had also been fired from the film - his experience with Hughes apparently awful enough that the German director’s depiction of a deranged multimillionaire in Caught is generally thought to be a bitter parody of the test pilot/germaphobe.

So when I finally got around to seeing Diddlebock (the first film Sturges had made for Hughes & California), I already had it in my mind that it was going to be not-so-good. I don’t think I knew much about its post-production troubles apart from the fact that Hughes had hated the title so much he had held a contest to re-name it and then re-released it under the winning alias, Mad Wednesday. I always thought it was kinda funny that he had hired the man behind The Miracle of Morgan's Creek and then gotten angry that his film’s title was too long. In any case, when I sat down to watch Diddlebock, I had low expectations for it.

It hurts any comedy to be compared to The Lady Eve, but within Sturges' body of work that of course ends up being an inevitability. Diddlebock felt to me like a bad impression of Sturges, a phony replica of the filmmaker’s rapid-fire, florid, goofy dialog, sentimental sense of romance, cacophonous orchestrations of chaos and pratfalls - the omnipresence of his reliable stock of character actors like Jimmy Conlin and Robert Greig only added to the sensation that someone had raided Sturges’ pantry for ingredients and then made something tasteless and slapdash out of them.

Above all, Sturges pioneered smart-dumb comedy - there’s an incredible and obvious intelligence behind the shameless stupidity of his films - and a respect for the audience’s intelligence to never insult them. He has a carny’s enthusiasm for playing to the cheap seats, but an artist’s dignity to never treat anyone in his audience like rubes. Even the notorious sexual bluntness of his work that constantly ran him into trouble with the censors, as puerile and silly as it can be, is driven by Sturges’ sense of “come on, now, we all know what sex is, we all know what divorce is, we all know what it means to be tipsy and amorous!” Sturges’ work is defined by virtuoso displays of verbal dexterity and wit that can be understood by anyone, by its playful and un-serious treatment of adult themes.

My impression of Diddlebock was that it was just kinda noisy and dumb. Intended as a comeback for silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, I felt like it never figured out a way to use Lloyd to its advantage. Honestly, I have a hard time defining Lloyd’s appeal - he’s always been one of my least favorite of the famous silent comedy stars, well behind Buster Keaton, Our Gang and Laurel & Hardy. If I had to rate him, I’d probably go with “About as good as Charley Chase. Probably better than Max Davison.” It was always going to be tough for Sturges to figure out how to best utilize the 52 year-old semi-retired silent comedian whose most appealing quality was "boyishly handsome collegiate charm” - but “have him be a dispirited wage slave who gets fired for being too old” doesn’t seem even in the neighborhood of the right idea.

Pairing the rambunctious verbal giddiness of Sturges’ screenwriting with any silent film star doesn’t seem like much of a good idea and that’s where I left it: nothing about this film seems like a good idea and, in fact, it is not-so-good. Not having seen it for almost two decades, if you asked me about Diddlebock I would’ve said, “It’s loud, it strains for baroque gags that used to come naturally to Sturges and Lloyd can't keep up with the dialog.”

REASONiNGS FOR REASSESSMENTS:

The Turner Classic Movies cable television channel was showing it. I suppose it’s not more complicated than that: Sturges remains one of my favorite directors, The Lady Eve remains one of my 10 favorite films, I’ve seen all of “the good ones” a half dozen times (or more) each, Diddlebock was going to be on television so why not watch it again?

A few of these Second Chances have complicated and/or deeply personal reasons for me giving the films another shot. This is not one of those cases. I could barely remember anything about Diddlebock, so I figured as I might as well give it another go. I guess that’s the good thing about getting older: you get see films again for the first time, one more time.

The verdict: it’s pretty ok! If it doesn’t reach the level of a lesser “good one” like Hail the Conquering Hero or Christmas in July (and it probably doesn’t) it belongs on the rung right below them on The Great Ladder to Cinema Heaven. There’s a lot of stuff that cracked me up: Lloyd’s ridiculous suit and hat combo (“it’s the check within the check within the check that turns my stomach”) killed me every time he stepped onto screen wearing it. Plenty of throwaway lines equal vintage Sturges. On one of the hats he tries to buy to match the suit: “It kills the suit.” “They kill each other.” Or about an unlikely plan, “It’s like a chess-match, you see? Do you play chess?” “No.” “Well, neither do I.”

All of the character actors are so phenomenally good, it’s painful. Jimmy Conlin as Lloyd’s reluctant sidekick “Wormy” can make literally any line funny. And oh my goodness, the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Magaret Hamilton as Lloyd’s sister - her comedic chops are off the charts. It makes you wish she hadn’t gotten typecast as crones. Humorless crones, anyway. She’s only in a single scene and she almost steals the movie. While chastising her brother for something he said while drunk, there’s an exhcange where he expresses incredulity about her version of events: “I said that?” “Said it? You sang it!” She croaks out her lines with an unforced musicality that is just perfect for Sturges’ dialog.

But as much as I had fun with the film, this is a movie with some overt, intractable problemos. The story-structure is a mess. Watching it this time, I realized that I didn’t know if I had originally seen Sturges’ 89 minute version or Hughes’ 76 minute recut. Watching Sturges’ version, I was surprised by how much sympathy I had for Hughes in deciding to cut 1/6 of the running time out of it - it has no flow and it’s easy to spend the majority of the running time wondering “Where is any of this going?” At an hour in, I felt like the basic story hadn’t even made itself clear yet.

The structural problems are there right from the start: it opens with an extended recap of the climax of Harold Lloyd’s 1925 silent hit The Freshman. We spend a long 6 minutes watching Lloyd’s famous football field shenanigans, lightly rebuilt with some sound effects like crowd noise and a referees’ whistle. It’s weird to spend so much time on a well-known sequence from a different film and then take up immediately where that film ended, Karate Kid 2 style… with a 52 year-old Lloyd playing a college freshman. His hi-lar-e-ous on-field heroics lead to a job offer (the film shifts to full sound and dialog as soon as it leaves the football field) and then the film dawdles some more catching Lloyd up to modern times (i.e. 1945), now a broken man who frittered his life away in a soul-crushing desk job.

There’s no justification for The Freshman prologue, it plays like a feeble and somewhat embarrassing attempt to remind audiences of why they should love Lloyd. The story doesn’t begin to reveal itself until Lloyd’s “Harold Diddlebock” (which is not the name of his character in The Freshman, incidentally)* loses his job. But even that’s overstating how quickly the narrative engine begins to chug into motion. The story first meanders a bit more, following Diddlebock as he meets a pathetic gambling addict begging for money to bet on the horses (Conlin’s “Wormy”) and then, down in the dumps, going with the grubby plunger to have his first ever drink.

From there, Diddlebock gets ripped, goes on a bender, and wins big betting on the ponies. Wagering his meager savings ($2,946.12), he scores enough money to sample the high-life and, get this!, buy a circus while still in the midst of the drunken bender. The joke of the film is that he wakes up with no memory of what he did on the previous Wednesday (hence the re-titling Mad Wednesday) and in a bit of proto-Hangover hi-jinx spends a big chunk of the film retracing his steps and discovering all the crazy shit he did while shit-faced. With all his money tied up in the circus, he spends the final third of the film trying to find a way to sell it, despite the Wall Street investment community’s complete disinterest in buying a circus from some guy.

He finally settles on the idea of scaring bankers with a lion while, I guess, threatening Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ business model by suggesting he’s going to make his circus free for kids? It all leads to a long sequence of Diddlebock, Wormy and the lion trapped out on the ledge of skyscraper in downtown NYC, hanging on for dear life; this climax deliberately recalls Safety Last and Lloyd’s other most famous cinematic activity: clinging to shit and trying not to fall to his death. The lion/ledge sequence is pretty funny, but it goes on forever. It’s very easy to imagine Hughes watching this cut of the film and thinking, “Christ, enough with the lion.” It’s a film that feels like it will never get to its point, a “shaggy-dog story” quality that seeps into even some of Sturges’ best work.

That’s one of the ironies of “controlled chaos” in art - too much orchestration of the anarchy and it begins to feel more exhausting than if it were given space to breathe and truly run wild. Trying too hard to control the tumult makes it feel more like a flailing ataxia. It’s a tough needle to thread, there’s very little room for error; by letting the lion-on-the-ledge sequence run wild, you can feel Sturges working to achieve some measure of the delightful discord that characterizes his most lovably noisy and disordered films like Palm Beach Story and The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. The natural unruliness of life is one of Sturges’ most consistent themes, the existential fact of free-for-all topsy-turviness that waylays the best laid plans. His best work finds a way to give that theme its due, to pay artistic respect to the pandemonium of existence, while still crafting a satisfying story. Too often in Diddlebock, there’s strain behind the chaos - you can feel Sturges gripping it too tightly, too self-consciously playing the maestro behind the mayhem, so the film perversely feels like more of a mess than if Sturges allowed it to be truly messy. When the mess finally begins to play in the ledge sequence, it's natural that Sturges is inclined to really let it go.

It’s hard to pinpoint the difference between Diddlebock and, say, the erratically plotted and frequently cacophonous Palm Beach Story but unlike his better films, Diddlebock doesn’t have a strong inciting incident and despite the fun of many individual sequences, it never forms a coherent thought. His best films have clear stories: “Con artist seduces a millionaire” or “Man mistakenly thinks he’s won $25,000 in a contest” so they can meander in terms of individual sequences - there’s a “boom!” you can see coming in the distance, a reckoning unquestionably in the offing. You can clearly see in the distance where the plot is inevitably headed. By contrast, Diddilebock is a film that feels like it never gets going and then is suddenly over. It often gets described in this way: “Fired after decades of white-collar drudgery, Harold Diddlebock gets drunk for the first time and buys a circus.” But that description gives the false impressions that his white collar job isn’t an after-thought and that the film will meaningfully feature a circus. The film would be better described as “A square gets drunk for the first time and then tries to sell the circus he acquired during his blackout.” But in any case, he doesn’t even get drunk until the film is almost halfway over.

There’s no consistency to the character, either, no reason to care about anything he does, no coherent kernel of an idea to Diddlebock as a comic creation. A big part of that is on Lloyd, who starts out the film in his “The Boy” persona from his silent film days, shifts to an uptight sad sack, becomes a fast-living heel, tackles his new problems like a clever and fearless go-getter, then caps the film as a googly-eyed romantic in a long unearned scene of sentimental confessioneering. Lloyd does nothing to bring these disparate pieces together and finds himself continually overmatched by both his onscreen comedic partners and a shaky script that needs a star to save it.

A fine example of weakness of the role and the performance is in the running gag about the crazy yelp Diddlebock lets out when drunk. Sturges enjoys deploying a certain kind of outlandish comic affect for running gags in his films, weird tics that go way over the top - Eddie Bracken seeing spots in Morgan’s Creek, for example. In Diddlebock, the titular character lets out a weird yelp, something halfway between a donkey braying and hiccup, after sampling a strong cocktail. The joke is he doesn’t realize that he himself is making the noise and is irked by not being able to identify the source of it. It’s a broad, silly gag and Lloyd just can’t bring it back to earth or take it far enough into outer space to make it truly hilarious. It’s not terrible, it’s just kinda dumb - with no “smart.” Again, contrast it to Bracken’s Morgan’s Creek “spot-seeing” which makes concrete the character’s neuroses and fragility, essential characteristics of Bracken’s coward whose arc is all about him stepping up for the gal he loves in spite of those faults.

And while he’s not a disaster in the dialog department, Lloyd simply can’t keep up with the actors around him - that’s a point on which my hazy memories were 100% clear. By this stage in his career, Sturges had developed a repertory stable of “mugs” and each one of them is able to handle Sturges’ burdensome dialog without breaking a sweat. The intentionally tangled and circuitous rhythms of his writing are delivered flawlessly by a host of actors who had worked with Sturges plenty of times - but Lloyd continually shows the strain of juggling the words. He’s not terrible, he’s just the weak link. And he paints himself into a corner by trying to keep pace; he doesn’t seem to understand that Sturges’ best male stars like Joel McCrea and Henry Fonda used their slowness, their change-of-pace deliberateness to their advantage, set themselves apart from the manic surroundings and made their comedic presence felt in the contrast; their legato cadences containing a richness felt in counterpoint to the staccato chatter around them. But Lloyd also can't summon the frayed, live-wire energy of Eddie Bracken or Betty Hutton that set their characters apart from the crowd by cresting the crescendo-nutso-bananas-mania in films awash in hyperventilating enthusiasm.

At its most basic, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock is a film that can’t figure out what to do with Harold Lloyd so it cycles through a slew of unsatisfying options. The physical comedy of the ledge-dangling climax unsurprisingly works the best, so I’m sympathetic to the film’s mistake of running a pretty good sequence into the ground. Nothing has worked exactly right during the film, so it’s hard to begrudge it leaning into Lloyd in a goofy suit clinging to a lion’s leash while swinging from the edge of a skyscraper. It’s not the best the film has to offer, but it’s the one moment where there’s a feeling of synchronicity between Lloyd and Sturges.

Lloyd was known for a certain kind of good-natured charm and Sturges’ best work is defined by its romantic elements, so it makes sense that Diddlebock refuses to give up on its fruitless romantic subplot - but as I mentioned, the lovey-dovey elements of Diddlebock are a disaster. Sturges has always had a fondness for absurd deus ex machina resolutions to his free-wheeling plots - the dopplegangers of The Palm Beach Story, the sextuplets of The Miracle of Morgan's Creek - but Diddlebock unwittingly marrying the seventh daughter in a long line of sisters that he’s unsuccessfully tried to romance might be the worst misstep of Sturges’ career.

It’s a creepy concept to begin with: Lloyd’s Diddlebock has been in love with and attempted to marry each of the seven sisters who happened to come and work at the same office as him. The film’s “haha - he finally married the youngest one, a girl several decades his junior, during a blackout bender!” seems to want to imitate the harried, provocative reversals of The Lady Eve’s famous ending but lacks any that film’s savvy and, most importantly, lacks Barbara Stanwyck. Both gags rely on lampooning the romantic expectations men place on women, but Diddlebock's seventh sister is such a cipher that any subversive ideas disappear into the void of her non-performance. The flop-sweat drenched final scene of Diddlebock ends up all being in service of a lame “So that’s what I doing on Wednesday!” gag that punctuates the film, but the whole scene is cloying and weird and causes the already unsteady film to sputter to the finish line.

The problem is that “the youngest Miss Otis” (as the utterly forgettable Frances Ramsden is billed in the credits) disappears from the film for almost the entirety of its running time only to reappear briefly to bail Diddlebock out of jail - the climax ends up hinging on a character we’ve barely seen, one who has a weird relationship to our ill-defined protagonist. The final six minutes of the movie drops every character that has heretofore mattered to the story in order to follow this unlovable duo in a static two-shot as they ride in a horse-drawn carriage misunderstanding each other, rehashing what happened during another blackout (this time because the bankers offered him so much money for his circus he fainted dead away) and confessing their love for each other. This movie is a mess.

But it’s pretty ok. I feel sympathy for Hughes’ desire to re-edit it because it feels like it's right on the precipice of being a classic Sturges screwball spectacular. So many of the pieces are in place and the screenplay is loaded with great gags, ridiculous banter, beautifully ridiculous reversals of fortune and even a bit of the populist outrage that Sturges enjoyed playfully stoking. It’s a movie I like and a movie I forgive its flaws - sometimes things just get away from you, even if you’re the best at what you do.

In the spirit of positivity in which this series of Second Chances is intended, I’ll end this piece on a positive note. It’s a minor, maybe even inconsequential and obvious observation, but an example of what made Sturges so special: Nobody did blowhards like Sturges an the ad executive in Diddlebock who swoops in to offer the Freshman a job after his football antics might be Sturges’ best creation along these lines. The blowhard in a Sturges film, usually our hapless hero’s boss or superior, is a creature of verbally pulverizing duplicitousness disguised as extreme rationality. In one-sided debates, they steamroll our heros with rationales that cannot be argued with even as they overtly make no sense and serve only the blowhard’s interest.

Their logic is unassailable and idiotic.

Diddlebock’s boss, E. J. Waggleberry,** can’t even remember what sport his recruit was playing when the exec stormed the field to offer him a job. But he refuses to relinquish his affect of “Yes, you are important and impressive to me!” even as the red flags pile up that maybe this job offer isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. When Diddlebock proudly announces he has many ideas to help the firm, Waggleberry replies with an encouraging enthusiasm, “Contain them, save them, doooon’t squirt them all out at once, the ideas department is a little congested at the moment, it always is for that matter.” What arguing is there with that?

The early sequences of Diddlebock being hired and fired recall the brilliant opening of Sullivan’s Travels where someone sincere and thoughtful keeps trying to wrangle the slippery disingenuousness of Important Men who are all too adept at exploiting sincerity and thoughtfulness to their advantage. These characters are defined by their ability to disregard good ideas in favor of bad with rhetorical deftness and unreasonable appeals to reason. Sturges understands that there’s nothing to be done about a blowhard. They somehow retain their fortunes when the stock market crash wipes out our savings. All of your best ideas become their property while their failures become your fault. There’s nothing to be done about them. Except make fun of them.

One of the sly ideas of Diddlebock is that life is wild and unpredictable and that rationality is only a canard used to dupe suckers. The surest way to end up a mark is in insisting on making sense of things that will never make sense. Only when Diddlebock accepts irrationality into his life and gets carried off in the whirlwind of fate does his existence take on the slightest meaning. Diddlebock explores Sturges’ favorite theme, the implication behind his reams of flamboyant dialog: you’re not ever going to be able to talk your way into happiness. You have to get out there and live it, consequences be damned. The wisdom of that theme remains an open question - it probably explains how a guy goes from being nominated for two Oscars in 1944 to having your films taken away from you in 1947.