The following is a guest post by Jenny Paxson of the Packard Campus.
Friday, October 14 (7:30 p.m.)
The Mad Miss Manton (RKO, 1938)
Three years before Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda starred together in Preston Sturges’ screwball masterpiece The Lady Eve, they made this delightful and underappreciated entry in the comedy-mystery subgenre, called by some a dress rehearsal for that later classic. Stanwyck plays the vivacious Park Avenue socialite Melsa Manton who discovers a murdered body while walking her poodles. By the time the police arrive, the body has disappeared. When newspaper editor Peter Ames (Henry Fonda) reports it as yet another in a series of pranks that Manton and her debutante girlfriends pull to gain publicity, she threatens the paper with a libel suit and drags him into the investigation for the murderer. A cartoon and a comedy short will be shown before the feature: Porky in Egypt (1938) and the Vitaphone Technicolor musical comedy Swingtime in the Movies (1938).
Saturday, October 15 (7:30 p.m.)
The Missing Link (Warner Bros., 1927)
Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s older half-brother, may be best known as Charlie’s business manager, but he was also a well-known stage and screen comedian in his own rite. In this zany comedy directed by Charles Reisner, he plays Arthur Wells, a penniless poet who has consented to impersonate a big-game hunter on an African exploration headed by Lord Dryden and Colonel Braden who are keen to discover “the missing link,” in spite of the fact that Wells has an aversion to animals. Along the way, he falls in love with the Colonel’s daughter, Beatrice, and befriends a pet chimpanzee. New York Times