Free All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 by Ethan Mordden

with Lightnin’ than they do with the comic shows that succeeded them in the late 1920s and after, because of a pokey and even rustic quality that permeates even the titles treating lively urban folk. A good study for us might lie in a huge hit of 1922, George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s Merton of the Movies . Its public attended it better prepared than we, for apparently the entire American middle class read the Saturday Evening Post, in which Harry Leon Wilson’s novel of the same name had been serialized. Like Booth Tarkington and George Ade, Wilson was regarded as satirist, sociologist, and joke bag all together and now is so over he can’t even be called forgot. But Wilson did latch onto something of note in the appeal of the movies. They don’t just turn cynosures into stars: they turn nobodies into fantasies.
    Merton of the Movies is a spoof of Hollywood, with its mania for making nothing but love stories. A film based on Robinson Crusoe gives Friday a white sister to play opposite Crusoe (“so we can get the sex into it,” says a director), and a western original called The Little Shepherd of the Bar Z is released as I Want More Children . The first act establishes Merton Gill in Simsbury, Illinois, where he clerks in Amos Gashwiler’s general store. But comedies of the day often broke into four acts, and Merton ’s other three find the hero in California, where he seeks cowboy stardom as Clifford Armytage.
    It’s a lopsided name—the “y” tilts masculinity into the precious—and Merton is a lopsided actor. He turns everything into a joke just by showing up—for instance, in his western drag, correct from Stetson to boots but for chaps made not of leather but rather of what looks like the fluff of New Zealand’s entire sheep population. Glenn Hunter (of Clarence ) played Merton, opposite Florence Nash as his supporter, Miss Montague, who loves him even though she knows he’s a fool. For Merton ’s real subject is not Hollywood but how easily the unequipped fancy themselves potential stars.
    In fact, Merton does have potential: as a comic. Unbeknown to him, his first feature is a western spoof, and Clifford Armytage is the prize goofball. He learns this at the picture’s first screening, and is so crushed by the laughter that he stays out all night—a desperate act from a nice kid from Small Town, Illinois. Kaufman and Connelly were able to produce a movie studio before our eyes, with the fake little set, the lights, camera, and crew, the violinist to soothe and inspire the director. But they couldn’t show the all-important screening, leaving a typical early-twenties hole in the show: some turns of plot weren’t technically available for staging till the next decade. Instead, the authors jumped to the aftershock, in which poor Merton confronts himself. He has “a low-comedy face,” he tells Miss Montague, his dream crumpling as he speaks. Then, with no more self-esteem to lose, he throws himself at her feet and sobs in her lap. But she puts Humpty together again:
    NASH: There, there. Don’t you worry. Did he have his poor old mother going for a minute? Yes, he did. He had her going for a minute all right. But he didn’t fool her very long, not very long, because he can’t ever fool her very long. And he can bet a lot of money on that.
    We are but a moment or two from the happy ending, for Merton comes to see that Hollywood stardoms are interchangeable, and a comic can be as beloved of the public as a cowpoke. In fact, Merton immediately enjoys his first star interview (by telephone), with a fan magazine. He is asked if he has a girl friend, and he suddenly realizes that he does. He is proudly smiling at Miss Montague and praising her nurturing skills as the curtain falls.
    So Merton of the Movies, though one of the day’s outstanding comedies, is really more of a charm show than a comedy as we know the form today. It’s not gaggy: it’s sweet, with more of those homely chuckles and