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- Categories:Inanimate, Movie
- (C) 1935, 73 mins, Magic, Comedy, Fantasy, pub Universal Pictures
Description
MAJOR SPOILER INCLUDED!!!
This light fantasy film, long thought to be lost, has, in fact,
survived in the archives of UCLA, and bootlegged copies of it are
now making the rounds of collectors. Alan Mowbray portrays a
wealthy and very eccentric inventor who devises a method of
changing living flesh into marble and vice versa, primarily to rid
himself of his greedy and annoying relatives. After transforming
them into statues, he takes up with the lovely daughter of one of
the "little people" (Florine McKinney) and goes about having madcap
adventures, including bringing to life eight Greek gods and
goddesses by flashing his ray on their statues in the New York
museum. These newcomers provide plenty of comic relief, and during
the run of the movie, Mowbray changes dozens of men and women to
marble while restoring very few of them. While in this state, a
person can still see, hear, think, and even make muffled sounds
close to speech. In the end, finding himself in dire straits with
the authorities for all of the havoc he has caused, Mowbray
re-statue-fies the gods and then turns the ray on himself and his
new love, so that they can enter eternity together. MAJOR SPOILER!!
It's all a dream. Mowbray awakens in an ambulance following an
explosion in his lab and finds that he's imagined it all, but the
daughter of his grounds-keeper, who's accompanying him to the
hospital, is also "Meg", the girl he's fallen in love with in his
dream, so all ends happily. Not the best adaptation of a Thorne
Smith lark (TOPPER would hold that distinction), but still a nice
way to kill 73 minutes.
originally posted by Macaroni on 2000-05-27, no edits, entryid=5409
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