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12 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Amusing satire which could have done with sharper scripting and firmer control but is pleasantly remembered…, 6 September 2005
6/10
Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

"Stand-In" gave Bogart his first real chance to play comedy as it matched him once again with Leslie Howard, "The Petrified Forest" co-star, in a gentle and moderate tale of an efficiency expert (Howard) who is sent to Hollywood to save a stumbling studio from potential ruin…

Howard is appropriately stuffy as he enlisted the aid of former child star Joan Blondell to teach him the more practical side of movie-making…

Bogart drew his share of laughs... He plays a producer-editor who had taken to the bottle after an unsuccessful romance with one of the studio's stars, but moves to action when Howard uses him to rescue a movie "bomb" and turn it into a success big enough to save the studio…

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13 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :-
Hollywood spoof, 7 June 2004
Author: didi-5 from United Kingdom

From the moment you see an epic movie about gorillas, or performing seals in a boarding house, or horrendously untalented little kids with showbiz mommas, you know you have a marvellous Follywood spoof.

This little-mentioned or cited comedy pits snappy Joan Blondell against – of all people – versatile Leslie Howard, in a studio-set tale of corruption, change, and romance. You'll also find Humphrey Bogart in one of his climbing-up-the ladder roles as a crusty, hard-drinking backroom man.

Blondell plays the ‘stand-in' of the title, that is, the girl who burns under the lights while the leading lady gets pampered and the shot gets set up. Howard is an accountant, transported into a world he doesn't initially appreciated, to discover the reason for the studio's cash-flow problems.

Do you know how it ends yet? This was the film that persuaded me of Howard's incredible gift for getting laughs as well as his dramatic skills, and I've been a fan ever since. Blondell and Bogart are also terrific, and this is a minor, but hugely enjoyable, 30s gem.

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9 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Good fun, 11 April 2003
Author: Kalaman from Ottawa

A snappy, very funny spoof of the studio system by Tay Garnett, starring Leslie Howard as a rigid, conservative accountant who manages to take over a failing movie studio; Joan Blondell plays Howard's confidant and partner, a former child star now working as a stand-in for an overrated glamour queen Marla Shelton. Humphrey Bogart turns in a likable supporting role as the mean movie producer. Admittedly, some of the stuff are a bit weary and tiresome, but the camaraderie between Howard and Blondell and the brief spoof on Shirley Temple are enough to make "Stand-In" thoroughly enjoyable.

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7 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
You too can run a motion picture studio, 25 October 2005
7/10
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

Colossal studios is in the financial toilet. The bank that's holding the mortgage sends one of their top men, Leslie Howard, to figure out what to do to save the studio or sell it to C. Henry Gordon a rival movie mogul.

Howard may not know the first thing about making movies and his people skills leave something to be desired, but he's now wondering why Gordon is so anxious to acquire this property.

Howard supersedes Colossal studio head Humphrey Bogart as head of the company and gets a crash course in film making. Of course he's helped quite a bit by Joan Blondell who he meets accidentally while on the way to the studio. She's an extra and a stand-in and she gives him a few lessons in management and a few other things.

This was the second and last pairing of Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart. At Howard's insistence, Bogey was brought to Warner Brothers to repeat his stage role in The Petrified Forest which he and Howard co-starred in on Broadway.

Stand-in is not The Petrified Forest, but it's still an amusing comedy and good entertainment.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Hollywood spoofs Hollywood, 30 September 2006
8/10
Author: Pimpernel_Smith from London

Worth it for the boarding house and its inmates alone, this is a glorious satire on '30s Hollywood. Leslie Howard is at his comic best (see also 'It's Love I'm After'), vague and unworldly. The supporting cast is excellent. Joan Blondell is gorgeous and *funny*. Humphrey Bogart, Howard's good mate and progege - Howard insisted that Bogart got the convict role in Petrified Forest in the film, having appreciated acting with him in the play, and that was his big break in films. And Bogart acknowledged the friendship by calling his first child Lesley (she was a girl). Alan Mowbray and Jack Conway also add to the fun.

A sharp commentary on the wonderful world of B movies!

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
A great screwball comedy for an hour; a stinker for thirty minutes, 17 January 2007
7/10
Author: J. Spurlin from United States

I just watched a half-great movie. "Stand-in" is a spoof of Hollywood show biz with Leslie Howard and Joan Blondell in top form. The first hour is one of the best stretches of screwball comedy I've seen; the last half hour stinks. I thought, so what? I had my fun.

Atterbury Dodd (Howard), an employee of Pettypacker & Sons in New York, has numbers and figures flowing in his blood along with the corpuscles, to paraphrase a girl he's about to meet. He clashes with the eldest Pettypacker himself (Tully Marshall) over the sale of Colossal Studios out in California. Dodd argues against selling it, so Pettypacker sends him to Hollywood to find out why the movie factory is losing money. Back at Colossal, Koslofski (Alan Mowbray), a director with a cheap foreign accent, is making a jungle picture called "Sex and Satan" with Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton), a leading lady whose hips do all her acting.

That's according to her producer and former lover, Doug Quintain (Humphrey Bogart), a guy who always carries his Scottish terrier under his arm. Dodd finds himself schmoozed by the publicist Tom Potts (Jack Carson) and harassed by an aggressive stage mother (Ann O'Neal) the moment he arrives, sending him fleeing to somewhere no one can find him: Mrs. Mack's boarding house for broken-down actors, which includes the former child star Lester Plum, a.k.a. Sugar Plum (Blondell), who is now a stand-in for Thelma Cheri. Soon he discovers there's a plot to sabotage the studio and sell it to the unscrupulous Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon). Meanwhile, Plum becomes Dodd's secretary, falls in love with him, and is annoyed to find that he admires her—for her mind.

The joys of this film are many. The wheelchair-bound Marshall seems spry enough to compete in "Murderball." O'Neal plays harmonica as her repulsive young daughter brassily sings "Is It True What They Say About Dixie"—only to hear Dodd shout that the girl ought to be out playing in the sun. The boarders at Mrs. Mack's include Charles Middleton, who is perpetually dressed as Abraham Lincoln; Emerson Treacy (Spanky's dad in a couple of "Our Gang" shorts) as the stunt man who has his pride; and Mary MacLaren, who can't get work in a remake of a silent picture she had starred in. Blondell hilariously sings "On the Good Ship Lollypop" and later gives Howard jujitsu lessons. And scenes from "Sex and Satan" show the gorilla out-acting the leading lady.

In the first hour, hardly anything is bad. Jack Carson, in a very typical role, gives an oddly strained performance. The only significant defect is Bogart as the producer. Remember that great scene in "The Big Sleep" where Phillip Marlowe puts on glasses and pretends to be a snippy bookworm? It shows that Bogart ought to have been able to pull off screwball comedy, but here he bites off his lines like Sam Spade.

Anyway, after a uproarious first hour, the movie drops dead. Dodd loses his job and so does everyone else at the studio; and suddenly the tone of the movie becomes earnest, a paean to working class types and a would-be inspiring demonstration of what the little guy can do if he'll just organize against the fat cats. Frank Capra could pull this stuff off, but Tay Garnett directing a script based on a Clarence Budington Kelland novel, cannot. The last half-hour is so bad it can make you forget what you had just watched before.

But don't. How many movies are great entertainment for even an hour?

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3 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
"In matters of business one is forced to ignore human factors.", 23 October 2005
7/10
Author: classicsoncall from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The banking concern of Pettypacker and Sons is about to sell their interest in Colossal Film Studios, until accountant extraordinaire Atterbury Dodd (Leslie Howard) points out that the five million dollar deal is worth at least twice that much. Standing up to the senior Pettypacker, Dodd offers to head to Hollywood to head up his own internal investigation of the studio.

The characters Dodd meets in tinsel town are more like caricatures than real people. There's the blustering movie director Koslofski (Alan Mowbray), the alcoholic producer Quintain (Humphrey Bogart), the annoying publicist Potts (Jack Carson), and the prima donna of all time Thelma Cheri (Marla Shelton). Even Dodd himself is the consummate number cruncher, reducing meaningful personal relationships to "cogs" and "units". The only real heart and soul person that Dodd discovers is the delightful former child star Lester Plum (Joan Blondell), reduced to stand in roles that earn her a meager forty dollars a week when she can get the work.

The film has a lot of bizarre scenes that produce double takes, such as the Shirley Temple wanna be that performs on the spot auditions, and the seal and penguin act that share a room in the boarding house where Miss Plum resides. Blondell's character earns Dodd's interest when she uses a judo flip to throw him on his keester; that move will be repeated more than once as the film progresses.

At the center of Dodd's investigation is the production of a guaranteed to flop movie that will put Colossal over the financial edge and insure a bargain basement sale to big shot businessman Ivor Nassau (C. Henry Gordon), who will then lay off virtually the entire studio. The name of the film, and you better sit tight, is "Sex and Satan" - it's a jungle movie! With lines like "Goodbye little jungle goddess", the movie is guaranteed to be dead out of the water. Making lemonade out of this lemon will take some doing, but Dodd puts on his best human face and organizes the masses for a final rally to save the day. And all of this after being fired by Pettypacker!

I would probably never have seen this film had I not been such a loyal Humphrey Bogart fan. Though he's third billed behind Howard and Blondell, his screen time is nominal, alternating between one of the studio heavies and his later conversion to a Dodd ally. It's a rare comic role for Bogey in which he appears somewhat uncomfortable, but ultimately satisfying once he decides to ditch gold digger Thelma Cheri and edit a gorilla into her jungle scenes.

The movie closes on the hint of a romance between Dodd and Miss Plum, just about when she's run out of options and hope of pinning him down. Fortunately the number cruncher decides to have a heart, as unlikely as that may have seemed at the outset. It's a well deserved finale for Joan Blondell's character, her good natured warmth and sincerity deserved to win out in the end.

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4 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Fast and snappy spoof, 10 December 1999
Author: Robert Keser (rfkeser@ix.netcom.com) from Chicago, IL

Fast and snappy spoof of the studio system from the bottom looking up, as stand-in Joan Blondell guides a newcomer to "who's through in Hollywood". Bogart has a good supporting role as a boozing producer who has to salvage an unwatchable gorilla epic. Not a classic, but very enjoyable for its energy.

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A golden oldie for our times!, 27 March 2009
8/10
Author: Jessica-656 from Montreal, Quebec, Canada

This is a satire on big business types who let a perfectly viable business (in this case, a film studio) fail for their own profit, leaving all the "little people" in the lurch. The words "capital" and "labor" even get bandied around! A few years ago modern viewers might have found this boring, but with today's economy, people may find that they can relate to it better than they expected! Besides that, it's an interesting "behind the camera" look at Hollywood, 1930s style.

Leslie Howard is great as the sheltered accountant who comes to Hollywood to see what's up with his bank's film studio, Joan Blondell is also great in her usual breezy, funny style as the former child star now working as a stand-in for a famous actress. There's also a youngish Humphrey Bogart as a film producer. I really wonder if Howard and Blondell did those ju-jitsu throws themselves, and if those outdoor scenes really were shot in downtown Los Angeles! Quite funny and definitely recommended!

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3 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Leslie Howard in Top Comic Form, 1 July 2006
9/10
Author: drednm

Leslie Howard is a surprisingly good comic lead in "Stand-In," as a human counting machine sent to Hollywood to oversee a failing movie studio and the crooks running it.

This is a spoof of Hollywood as well as "big business" as Howard tries to learn the movie business with the help of a pretty has-been child star now working as a double (Joan Blondell) and an oddly effete Humphrey Bogart as a director battling an overblown star (Marla Shelton) and hack director (Alan Mowbray).

Howard, Blondell, and Boagrt all give terrific performances, but if someone like Preston Sturges had been involved this would have been a classic. As it is, it's a small but funny film, but rather minor.

Jack Carson is the blowhard press agent, Tully Marshall the ancient board chairman, C. Henry Gordon as the head crook, Esther Howard is the landlady, Anne O'Neal is the stage mother, Charles Middleton is Abe Lincoln, and then there's that gorilla....

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