Diplomaniacs (1933)

Hey, it’s a pre-code comedy! With songs! And puns (“Why is he called Luke?” — “Because he’s not so hot!”)! Also, it all ends with a world war. What’s not to love?

The middle part of an unofficial trilogy of weirdo political comedies, together with Million-Dollar Legs (1932) and Duck Soup (1933). (Joseph L. Mankiewicz had his hands in the scripts of both Million-Dollar Legs and Diplomaniacs. Matthew Coniam, in The Annotated Marx Brothers, does a nice job of dressing down Duck Soup down to size.) This half-forgotten film may be the most vicious attack on, well, basically everything and everybody, until The Bed-Sitting Room (1969). That it’s actually a rather good-natured film, happily mocking itself, makes it even better.

As a rule of thumb, comedies are predictable, dependent as they are on plot mechanics and comedians’ film characters. Diplomaniacs circumvents these problems by showing the plot a sizeable middle finger, while the comedians in charge, Wheeler and Woolsey, rarely had much screen character anyway. (This is not to slight these gentlemen, nor the talented character actors around them. But Laurel & Hardy they weren’t.)

At any given time, Diplomaniacs may hit you with a groanworthy pun, a musical number, a naughty pre-code line, a bit of sledgehammer satire so obvious that it becomes its own spoof, or simply a moment of surrealism as lovely as anything. That this is a slyly self-aware film becomes clear as soon as it reveals that the villain’s Chinese henchman, Chow Chow, is played by none other but Hugh Herbert, probably the second-to-least Chinese-looking actor of the time.

Now, our two heroes are idiots. Their girlfriends look cute, but prove, by becoming and staying their girlfriends, that they are bonkers as well. The villains are incompetent. The only sensible characters in the film are the Native Indians. Oompah! Oops, should I not say that? In recent times, the film — like about everything from the Bronze Age upwards — has come under scrutiny for being unenlightened and racist. Cases in point: Ethnic characters are portrayed by Caucasians, females are objectified and a musical number has the cast performing in blackface. Should you find this insulting, I salute your talent to get offended by dead people. Make your way to the cemetery and scream at their graves so they will rise again: We need better comedies today than the ones provided by the news networks. Thank you.

Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, New York): Diplomaniacs is not like anything you’ve ever seen on the screen. We can call it crazy not touch on the substance of it. You may think it impossible, boobish, but you’ll have to admit it’s funny. Even if it doesn’t move you to personal hilarity, you’ll have to concede that it took some thinking to create the foolery that fashions it.

Hollywood Reporter: .. suffers terribly from bad writing and abounds in beautiful sets, excellent tunes and rather competent cast…
(When reporting the New York preview, the same paper admitted: “… the comedy went over with a bang. Laughs from one sequence ran into the next, with much of the dialogue being misses in the hilarity.”)

Harrison’s Report: It is doubtful if children will understand some of the vulgar things said; suitable for adolescents and Sundays.