The Booze Hangs High (1930)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Captivating movie !

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

. . . Hearst's Grandpappy, Willy Randy, is on full display in this animated short, THE BOOZE HANGS HIGH. Willy Randy, no doubt the financial backer of BOOZE, made his fortune by promoting the "Demon Rum" and demonizing the alleged REEFER MADNESS. The consensus of public policy think tank experts is that Willy Randy essentially MURDERED at least 48.4 MILLION Americans by bamboozling an easily fooled U.S. Public and Congress to switch the Government's blessing from Founding Father George Washington's Medicinal Pot to the drunken Lot's incest-promoting Booze. When social scientists tally up all the young daughters dying in childbirth from liquor-induced incest to more than a million DUI traffic deaths to thousands of wood alcohol fatalities among the desperate hooked Alkies "Down in the Hollers" to millions of Hootch-caused cardiovascular slayings not to mention hundreds of thousands of sauce-facilitated suicides and murders, the tally is Pretty Darn Near 50 million genocidal killings and counting. All of this so Willy Randy could replace high quality hemp newsprint for his scandal rags with cheap acidic self-destructing pages made from the Empire of Tree Plantations in exploited Third World Nations (giving rise to the so-called "Yellow Journalism"). Surely Willy Randy (the Real Life basis for director Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE) was one of the most evil, venal, crass criminal masterminds in human history, deserving to be dug up even Today and shot by firing squad posthumously!

The early star for the Looney Tunes cartoons from Warner Brothers was Bosco. I've seen a few of his films and still have no idea what the character is supposed to be--so I looked him up on Wikipedia. They indicate he's supposed to be a black young man. Regardless of who he is, these cartoons directed by the Harmon-Ising team tended to be rather cute and less edgy than many of their competitors. They weren't bad--they just weren't very good either. Not surprisingly, most folks today have never heard of the guy.In this installment, much of the film is pretty bland and cute. However, there is fortunately a bit of potty humor (believe me, it needed it) and a portion at the end involving pigs drinking booze. Otherwise, there just isn't a lot of plot here and the cartoon is pretty forgettable. If you care, the animation was done by Friz Freleng--a guy who later directed many of the classic Looney Tunes shorts.

Bosko, the very first Looney Tunes star, appeared in Warner Bros. cartoons from 1930 to 1933, when his creators moved to MGM (they continued making cartoons featuring him until 1938, after which he faded into obscurity). "The Booze Hangs High" was one outing for the high-voiced character, showing him dancing around with some farm animals and playing them like musical instruments. The menagerie includes some inebriated pigs (and this cartoon got released during Prohibition!).Drunkenness is quite often a source of humor. Cartoons occasionally depict a besotted stork delivering babies. "The Andy Griffith Show" had Otis. It seems like it's only been during the past twenty years (approximately) that alcoholism became socially unacceptable. I assume that most people would consider it such, despite its continued existence.Anyway, this is an OK cartoon, despite the limited plot line.

This is the fourth Bosko short and it has some engaging moments. Since I'll be discussing in a bit of detail one or two scenes, consider this a spoiler warning: Bosko continues to get music out of fairly atypical places, such as a horse's tail played like a violin and a pitchfork played like a guitar or banjo. Like most early Bosko shorts, this is very musical in nature and has one extended and fairly amusing bit centering around three pigs who take turns drinking from a bottle (the "Booze" of the title) and lurching around. First, two small pigs find the bottle and sample the contents and then a larger pig commandeers the bottle and takes a few liberal swigs before tossing the bottle. The bottle then comes into the possession of Bosko, who himself partakes of its contents and staggers over to join the pigs to join them in a spontaneous (and off-key) rendition of "Sweet Adeline". A low-rent barbershop quartet. There's one brief gag that's possibly a bit unsettling with an ear of corn making an unscheduled (and no doubt unexpected) reappearance, but it's really rather mild by today's standards.Entertaining, if rather pedestrian in tone and substance, it would definitely be worth watching at least once.