Synopsis
He led a double life — so he could double up on love!
While recuperating in a hospital after he's hit by an automobile, a struggling shopowner dreams what his life might have been like if he'd made different choices twenty years earlier.
1933 Directed by Edgar Selwyn
While recuperating in a hospital after he's hit by an automobile, a struggling shopowner dreams what his life might have been like if he'd made different choices twenty years earlier.
Watched with the Golden Reel Gin Joint 🎞️ 🍹
Photoplay said:
HAVE you ever wondered what might have happened if you'd married the other girl—or boy—instead of the one you picked?
Well, Lee Tracy, plugging along happily in a little cigarstore, with wife Mae Clarke helping, has occasion to ask himself this when his boyhood friend, Otto Kruger, shows up. Otto had married the other girl (Peggy Shannon), and is rich—also expansive. He offers to take Lee’s savings and triple them—a proposition that, to Lee’s disgust, Mae Clarke can’t see.
So Lee gets himself a bun which is one of the finest bits of acting the screen ever has seen, collides with an automobile —and lo and behold, he gets…
Watched with the Golden Reel Gin Joint
A Pre-Code fantasy film on the theme “What if we could go back in time?” about a Depression-era man who does just that. He gets the chance to make different choices, in particular marrying the daughter of a wealthy man rather the poor girl he loves. He’s also able to predict major world events such as World War I, mass production of automobiles and the stock market crash, some which help him and some which hurt him. It’s interesting as scripted by Ben Hecht but a bit uneven in its balancing of moralistic drama and comedy.
It's also unusual as a starring vehicle for Lee Tracy who was mainly known for his roles…
Turn Back the Clock is a stiffly directed time travel movie that sends Joe Schmoe (not to be confused with the actual Moe in an unexplained Three Stooges cameo) back to a pivotal point in his past to try and get ahead of the rat race with knowledge of the future. The script is rather obvious and banks its merit on the concept of a guy going back in time with just enough knowledge to be dangerous but half-witted enough that he can't remember the dates of important events very well. Annoyingly, this leads to more scenes then are necessary of him making a fool of himself by referencing events that haven't happened yet or won't based on messing with…
“I gotta get to Athens.”
There’s a Time Travel Movie where the lead is knocked down by a car & bumps his head. When he awakes in the past, the first person he sees is his younger Mum. Shortly after, he tries to convince “Doc” that he is from the future. Anyway, enough of that movie...
Perhaps I’d hoped for something a bit beyond the capabilities & notions of the era. I liked this simple tale, but just wish it had been under the steerage of someone with a bit more of a vision for the material. Director Edgar Selwyn had a very short film CV however; in fact, this was the fourth of 5 films. Otherwise a playwright, which at least…
Every so often films catch me in a mood and they smack across the face saying hey bud lets think about where we are , films like The 400 Blows or my all time favorite no matter how many times I say its something else Donnie Darko. While at a first glance you’re probably looking at me and saying “does this guy actually know anything ?” And the answer is no no I do not and that’s what I’ve came here to admit. The 400 Blows made me accept the bullshit of where and how I got to this place I am in. Donnie represents the pain and anger I felt and still have at the world for cursing me…
Viewed with Golden Reel Gin Joint
I'm not sure if Paul picked this because of its likeness to Strawberry Blonde, but they really are set up similarly (at least initially). Much like the former, Turn Back the Clock is about Joe, a down-on-his-luck cigar store owner, who tires of his nagging wife Mary and reimagines his past with former fling Elvina. Unlike Biff, though, Joe doesn't have to use his noggin as much, because he wakes up from his drunken stupor suddenly transported into the 1910s, 20 years into the past. Gifted with foreknowledge about the future, he tries to make what he thinks are the "right" decisions, but at every step, slowly realizes that the life he envisioned might…
Rarely do my day to day reviews and my visits to Golden Reel Gin Joint get to intersect but my watch of Turn Back the Clock was very similar to my watch of She Cat. So far the constant through our groups’ reviews has been the sense of familiarity that we have felt between this weeks choice and the one previous. Somehow (at least in my mind) that seems to qualify this one as an immediate knock against it and I can’t for the life of me figure out why that should be so. I mean I’m also a big fan of kung-fu and opera and neither of them is known for their discreetness of plot or subject matter. I’m pretty sure…
No, this has nothing to do with tonight's resetting of the clock to end Daylight Saving Time. It is, rather, an intriguing and occasionally surprising twist on time-travel movies, with a touch of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE thrown in.
Lee Tracy is Joe Gimlet, an aging small-time store owner, married to his youthful sweetheart, Mary (Mae Clarke), but worn down by the drudgery of their lower-class lifestyle and a tendency to second-guess his choices. After he encounters an old friend, Ted Wright (Otto Kruger), who made all the choices Joe wishes he'd made and became wealthy as a result, Joe's anguish over the road not taken becomes acute. Arguing with Mary, Joe leaves the house and is struck by a…
First Watch - as part of the watchlist at Golden Reel Gin Joint
Viewed on the Internet somewhere
First Impressions
- I'd never heard of this one before, and went in watching without knowing much about the plot. That was a little bit jarring, but not in a bad way. I went in thinking it was going to be a routine melodrama about marriage, but it turned into a bit of an observation about life's choices and fate. It opens with a middle-class, depression-era couple who get offered a get-rich scheme. Lee Tracy plays a bit of a loser, prone to taking stupid risks, and Mae Clarke is seriously de-glammed to play the sensible wife who refuses to mess around…
Second movie in a row watched with the Golden Reel Gin Joint 🍸 wherein a man has to be convinced that he DID marry the right woman (and that he shouldn't feel bad about not marrying that hottie). Not sure how I feel about this lesson. Can we get a role-reversal where Olivia de Havilland/Mae Clark get to realize THEY made the right choice to marry these schlubs??
Anyway, this was charming enough. Some funny acting from Lee Tracy, and a few entertaining plot points, but overall fairly predictable.
I can't help thinking that a lot of people in 1933 were probably starting to get worried about the prospect of a second world war, and the wish to "turn back…
There is definitely an It’s a Wonderful Life vibe to this film, with Lee Tracy in a George Bailey like role, except that instead of imagining a world where he hasn’t existed, he imagines a world where he took a different path in life, pursuing wealth instead of true love. He goes back in his life from 1933 to 1910, with fate having apparently allowed him to make a different decision about an investment opportunity, as well as who he would marry. In a couple of other small parallels to Capra’s 1946 film, early on he’s a soda jerk in a pharmacy and the “sweet girl” in his life is named Mary (Mae Clarke). And of course, in a larger…