Three Fun Things for Nov. 26, 2023
A pre-Code comedy, a paean to a Texas travel plaza, and a show canceled too soon.
1. Dinner at Eight
A late pre-code movie starring a onetime vaudeville comedienne, not one but two Barrymores, and Jean Harlow’s eyebrows, Dinner At Eight defies a simple plot summary (IMDB: “Affluent Millicent and Oliver Jordan throw a dinner for a handful of wealthy and/or well-born acquaintances, each of whom has much to reveal.”) Really, it’s five or six one-act plays united by a paper-thin plot device: The Ferncliffes of London are coming to dinner, and Millicent Jordan is simply beside herself!
The film’s vignettes include a tragedy (an out-of-work former film star whose only comforts are gin and an adoring 19-year-old who’s engaged to a stable but boring young man); a comedy (a nouveau riche Oklahoma-bred couple trying gain entree to New York high society), and tragicomedy (the Jordans, including clueless socialite Millicent and her dyspeptic shipping-magnate husband, who needs a loan to keep his business afloat but keeps getting nonstop bad news). Marie Dressler, who died the year after this movie was made, has a scene-stealing turn as a former stage doyenne who longs for the old New York of “pink lampshades, Inverness capes, dry champagne, and snow on the ground.”
It’s fun, silly, bittersweet, and full of peppery dialogue and low-stakes drama, with the kind of bizarre pacing (scenes that go on forever followed by frantic) that I personally can’t get enough of.
2. Ray Dubicki’s paean to Buc-ee’s at the Urbanist.
I grew up in Houston at a time when Stuckey’s, not Buc-ee’s, was the destination road stop, famous across the Southeast for its pecan logs, “fresh-made” fudge, and jars of pickled eggs. I discovered Buc-ee’s belatedly, after I had moved to Seattle, during road trips back home in Texas—the sight of the Buc-ee’s trademark beaver mascot a reassuring promise of ample brisket, customizable soda, and, of course, rows and rows of sparkling restrooms.
Ray isn’t, as far as I know, a Texan, but he perfectly captures the allure of this road-trip mainstay, which is, yes, a “symbol of capitalist excess, and cesspool of climate terrorism” with a footprint the size of Lumen Field, but also, he notes, a really good gas station and convenience store for those times when you find yourself between one place and another, far away from the 15-minute city, and in need of a place to fill up your tank.
For more on the history of Buc-ee’s and its “path to world domination,” check out this 2019 story in Texas Monthly.
3. Detroiters
A very stupid, very fun show about two best friends (Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson) who run a local ad firm in Detroit, this show is just as absurdist and cackle-out-loud funny as Robinson’s sketch show I Think You Should Leave but less mean-spirited. You never feel like these two goofs are punching down, even when they are literally running over a would-be client, shoving a chip bag on his head, and hiding him in “the woods” (a planting strip at a corporate office park.) This show was canceled after two seasons, but it’s available now on a bunch of streaming services.