Customer Reviews

Double Feature: Having Wonderful Time and Carnival Boat

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Please note that this review is on just Carnival Boat only.

Also please note that I saw this movie on TV, so I can't comment on the quality of the video transfer. From what I can see, it's not available yet on DVD.

This is a grand old movie from the mid-30s with a very young Ginger Rogers and a very charming William Boyd, who fall in love after coming from very different backgrounds. Rogers plays a lounge singer aboard a riverboat, and Boyd is a logging supervisor and worker. One of the fascinations of the movie is the detailed and realistic portrayal of life aboard a riverboat, and what it was like to work in an early 20th century logging camp, including some very spectacular stunts such as when Boyd rides the logging winch cables 50 feet in the air at high speed down the side of the mountain to try to save his father, who is in trouble. Then there was the dam scene with the dynamite to break up the log jam which looked very dangerous to do since the logs going over the dam just barely miss Boyd on one occasion.

There are several dramatic scenes showing the trees falling and crashing into the forest, and from the camera angle it looks like the camera man wasn't that far off angle from the direction the tree fell, or that far away. Wow. Unless they used a telephoto lens--but I don't know what telephoto lenses were like back in the 1930s--only the modern stuff.

Besides the serious side of life, there is quite a lot of comedy and even campiness. For example, the antics of the two logger friends, one of whom keeps scamming or sabotaging the other's cherished tobacco pipe, is an ongoing gag. The tension between Boyd's character and Hack, the unscrupulous employee who is scheming after Boyd's job, and between Boyd's father and Rogers, whom he disapproves of, provides much of the psychological tension in the movie.

Despite some high emotions and disagreements about how the work should be done in the loggers camp, and the father's disapproval of Rogers, the father and son are portrayed as two headstrong people who can still love and respect each other despite their opposing views, and can forgive and forget. In the train scene, the son risks his life to save his father.

Finally, the runaway train scene down the mountain is as dramatic and spectacular an action scene as anything in a modern movie, done decades before modern special effects. Overall a very entertaining move from another age with a surprisingly positive message about how families can have serious disagreements without tearing the family apart.