Dinner at 8

Lynne and I rent movies from an outfit called Netflix. It’s great. I order the movies – in DVD format – online. They’re delivered within a couple of days. We watch, then ship them back in prepaid envelopes. There’s no hassle at all.

The movie selection Netflix offers is fantastic. Last night, for instance, we watched "Dinner at 8," the comedy that hit movie screens in 1933, smack-dab in the middle of the depression. The cast included Marie Dressler, John and Lionel Barrymore, and Jean Harlow.

Much of the acting is dated. There are a lot of contrived poses, larger than life gestures, and exaggerated facial expressions. Still and all, it’s a wonderful movie.

The story centers around a couple’s plans to host a fancy dinner party for a visiting British Lord and Lady. Invited guests include an aging actress (Dressler), an alcoholic actor (John Barrymore), and Harlow as wanna-be socialite from the wrong side of the tracks. Nothing goes right, of course, hence the laughs. Dressler is outrageous.

What really makes the movie great, though, is its topicality. The rich have fallen on hard times, work is hard to get, the market is in the tank and it’s impossible to borrow. At the same time, the rich, the well-off, continue living as if there’s no such thing as a charge for services rendered.

In the film, Oliver Jordan (Lionel Barrymore) is the head of a bankrupt shipping company. Despite a heart condition and the threatened takeover of his company by a louse played by Wallace Beery, Oliver is able to don a tux and to entertain his guests at a party he can’t afford. His daughter, oblivious to dad’s needs, worries only about breaking up with her boyfriend so she can carry on with the alcoholic actor. His wife has all her focus on the guest list and the aspic centerpiece.

Sound familiar? It should. All the characters in Reagan's selfish America – made even more toxic by the worst president in the country’s history – were represented in this movie filmed 75 years ago, at the time of the nation’s last economic nightmare.

The movie had a happy ending – except for everybody but the actor who killed himself. Even his wasn’t too bad, since he had time after he turned on the gas to pose himself under a spotlight. Oliver didn’t die of a heart attack. The company was saved. Beery was thwarted. The wayward daughter went back to her boyfriend. All was well.

Of course, that’s a movie. Here’s hoping things work out as well in the real world.

In any event, watching Marie Dressler play Carlotta Vance took me out of myself, and that was welcome. At the movie’s end, Harlow’s character, an empty-headed beauty, tells Vance she’s reading a book that predicts that machines will soon replace working men and women. After a classic double take at the news that the blonde can read a book, Dressler looks her up and down and tells her that she’s sure that Harlow had no reason to fear being replaced by a machine. It’s worth watching the movie just for this one scene.