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While drafting my capsule review of Shaka King’s Newlyweeds, a charming New York indie about a pot-smoking repo man opening this Friday at Facets Multimedia, I had to refrain from comparing the movie to such breezy, early-sound-era programmers as James Whale’s The Reluctant Maiden, Mervyn LeRoy’s Three on a Match, or William Wellman’s Night Nurse. I’ve invoked this comparison in my reviews of the recent low-budget features Gimme the Loot, Yes We’re Open, and The Crumbles, and I nearly did when writing about several others (e.g., The Happy Poet, the Spanish comedy Carmina, or Blow-Up). These films share numerous qualities with the 70-minute entertainments that Turner Classic Movies has collected in their wonderful Forbidden Hollywood DVD sets: a lived-in authenticity about workaday experience and neighborhood life in general; slender plotting that still allows for plenty of incident; a conversational (yet not quite tossed-off) quality to the storytelling; charismatic star performances and a sense of rapport among the supporting players that evokes blue-collar solidarity; short running times; and, perhaps most compellingly, an indifference to genre that results in tonal shifts from broad comedy to serious melodrama.
This sort of thing still happens in commercial cinema—Next Day Air and Magic Mike being two of the more convincing recent examples. It’s worth noting, though, that Steven Soderbergh told interviewers that he faced much difficulty getting Magic Mike made at Warner Brothers (ironically, the Hollywood studio that most excelled at workaday stories during the Depression). As Hollywood movies continue to neglect the subject of work, I suspect we’ll see more independent productions like Newlyweeds. Someone has to fill the gaps in American movies’ chronicle of American life.
