Is It Butterworth it?

SIDE SHOW-1931-Serio-comedy love triangle set against a traveling circus. It was made a year before Tod Browning’s FREAKS. Do It All performer Pat (the homely Winnie Lightner) has troubles with her boyfriend when her younger sister comes for a visit.

This is a typical early talker that’s only worth seeing for the performance of comedian Charles Butterworth who was a big star at the time. It’s bizarre! He seems to be on another plane of existence, disconnected from the actual goings on! He kind of acts like Stan Laurel if he was on some type of drug! Guy Kibbee (about the only actor I actually was familiar with in the cast) plays the drunken owner.

Lightner later married SIDE SHOW’s director Roy del Ruth (who made the first version of THE MALTESE FALCON the same year) and retired from films. Butterworth wound up making films for low budget studios like Monogram. He died in a car crash in 1946.

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