The Villain Still Pursued Her (1940)

Directed by Edward F. Cline. Starring Alan Mowbray, Richard Cromwell, Anita Louise, Hugh Herbert, Joyce Compton, Buster Keaton, Margaret Hamilton.

Broad send-up of melodramas about a dastardly lawyer Mowbray (in black cape and top hat) who covets the Wilson family homestead, and plots to take possession of the property by driving the heir (Cromwell, looking uncannily like a manic Jude Law) to drink and debauchery. Some scattered laughs, but it fails on the level of parody; it’s more like a spoof of a novice’s interpretation of stage and movie mellers, missing the mark far more often than it finds a good angle of exaggeration on the format’s overripe clichés (where exactly does a pie fight fit into the equation?). And since jokes get repeated over and over again, the proverbial novice must not have had a lot of ideas to work with; the best of them is the rampant hammy overacting from the actors toward the camera, but it can only be taken so far, and the surrenders to juvenile slapstick (including that aforementioned pie business) suggest the writers were so hurting for inspiration, they just started recreating second-rate vaudevillian business. Buster Keaton appears in a relatively minor supporting role, and after the end of the silent era, his stonefaced routines often fell flat when dialogue was involved—this movie is no exception. Keaton’s old pal, Billy Gilbert, provides the introduction.

46/100