One of the pleasures of Leonard Maltin's "Movie Comedy Teams" is the space given to the more obscure duos and trios, teams previously unknown to me. One such team is Mitchell and Durant. Maltin doesn't linger in his capsule sketch of these two, and it's not hard to see why. He describes their M.O. as basically just coming out and performing their brand of "slapstick," i.e. whaling away on each other for a few minutes, to the extent that everyone who sees the act can talk only about how unpleasant and jarring it is.
But don't take Maltin's word for it. Read these testimonials I gathered in a quick bit of research:
Unfortunately, there's a lot of unfunny comedy relief from a pair of mugging actors who hog altogether too much screen time.
--DVD SAVANT
Less welcome are the comic relief efforts of the knockabout clowns Frank Mitchell and Jack Durant, who appeared in various Fox musicals of the period, and have lapsed into deserved obscurity in the generations since. Their shtick, which was mainly comprised of wrestling one another into the scenery at the drop of a hat, makes the Stooges look like Noel Coward, and gets old extremely fast.
--TCM.COM
Mitchell and Durant play two goofballs that are supposed to be a sort of Laurel and Hardy of the ice delivery world, but manage to not be funny and come across as just annoying.
--a commenter at IMDB
Well, naturally, I had to see these guys myself. How could I resist such a buildup? I rented two of their efforts, an Alice Faye musical and a Shirley Temple vehicle, and after seeing them, all I can say is...
Yeah, these guys are brutal. I just can't add much more to those insightful putdowns.
At least in the Alice Faye movie, "365 Nights in Hollywood," they are given characters to play. They're not great characters, nor are they even particularly likable, but they actually interact with others and advance the plot a little bit. Plus in addition to the terrible slapstick, they get to do terrible impersonations of stars like Cary Grant--you know, personalities who don't make Leonard Maltin reach for his Maalox.
It's "Stand Up and Cheer!" that truly shows off what this comedy team is all about. Warner Baxter plays a Broadway producer given the Presidential directive of FUNNING the country out of that bummer called the Great Depression by putting on a show! The movie itself is not all that special, but it's harmless...until you get to Mitchell and Durant.
No, they don't smack around Shirley Temple, thank goodness, but in their own way they sure as hell "upstage" her as two Senators who enter Baxter's office to--well, damn it, I forget what they were really supposed to be doing because all they did was make some lame verbal repartee and grapple with each other. I guess there's some kind of balletic component to their jousting, but it comes off about as graceful as a sumo match--and not nearly as amusing.
Really, neither I nor the above testimonials can do Mitchell and Durant justice. They're firmly in the "so bad it's good" category, at least to me, but your tolerance for them may be a lot weaker. Me, I'm hoping TCM shows them someday in "The Singing Kid," an Al Jolson picture with Allen Jenkins and Edward Everett Horton; or that Fox Movie Channel runs the wonderfully titled "She Learned About Sailors," another Faye vehicle. I can't resist!
At least in the Alice Faye movie, "365 Nights in Hollywood," they are given characters to play. They're not great characters, nor are they even particularly likable, but they actually interact with others and advance the plot a little bit. Plus in addition to the terrible slapstick, they get to do terrible impersonations of stars like Cary Grant--you know, personalities who don't make Leonard Maltin reach for his Maalox.
It's "Stand Up and Cheer!" that truly shows off what this comedy team is all about. Warner Baxter plays a Broadway producer given the Presidential directive of FUNNING the country out of that bummer called the Great Depression by putting on a show! The movie itself is not all that special, but it's harmless...until you get to Mitchell and Durant.
No, they don't smack around Shirley Temple, thank goodness, but in their own way they sure as hell "upstage" her as two Senators who enter Baxter's office to--well, damn it, I forget what they were really supposed to be doing because all they did was make some lame verbal repartee and grapple with each other. I guess there's some kind of balletic component to their jousting, but it comes off about as graceful as a sumo match--and not nearly as amusing.
Really, neither I nor the above testimonials can do Mitchell and Durant justice. They're firmly in the "so bad it's good" category, at least to me, but your tolerance for them may be a lot weaker. Me, I'm hoping TCM shows them someday in "The Singing Kid," an Al Jolson picture with Allen Jenkins and Edward Everett Horton; or that Fox Movie Channel runs the wonderfully titled "She Learned About Sailors," another Faye vehicle. I can't resist!
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I knew Frank Mitchell back in the 80s toward the end of his life. He lived in a crappy two room apartment in North Hollywood, CA. In his late 70s he supplemented his meager showbiz income by working as a Keystone Cop character at Universal Studios Tour. I interviewed him on camera for a documentary I made in 1982 about The Three Stooges. Mitchell had worked not only with stooge originator Ted Healy, but worked as a supporting player in several Three Stooges shorts at Columbia and was also a stuntman for Shemp who wasn't able to perform any of the physical gags himself. He came across like a lot of bitter old showbiz has beens who had a taste of the good life only to be spit out by a system that forgot about you if you didn't rise to the top. When his partner Jack Durant was groomed for stardom by Paramount they said goodbye to Mitchell who was relegated to occasional work in b-pictures. They wanted to make another Clark Gable out of Durant but it never happened. The two fell out and didn't speak to each other for many years. Mitchell was at work on a biography when he died. He'd only gotten the first chapter finished.
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