Customer Reviews

Eddie Cantor: Kid Boots

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Finally! After 80 years here is the Cantor you've been waiting for! The silent film adaptation of his 1923 musical KID BOOTS is now released with a wonderful musical background score by the late Broadway composer, Arthur Siegel. This hour long feature also stars the incredible Clara Bow!

EXTRAS! The 1924 Lee deForest Phonofilm A FEW MOMENTS WITH EDDIE CANTOR. This is old Banjo Eyes performing a short sample of his vaudeville act and singing two songs!

A ZIEGFELD MIDNIGHT FROLIC (1928) is an extremely rare short that features Cantor in blackface simulating what he did on the rooftop of the New Amsterdam. Here you get three songs from his Victor period!

PHOTO GALLERY! Hear Cantor impersonator, Rick Rogers, recall (in Cantor's own words!) the making of KID BOOTS while looking at rare stills.

Eddie Cantor's KID BOOTS (1923) is one of the rarest films in my DVD collection. It has been lost for eighty years and makes its home video debut now from an independent DVD company called Big House. The 60 minute print is quite good--it may be the only copy in existence. Cantor is an unwilling witness to a not-yet divorce that involves a large amount of money if the couple can reconcile. This fast and fun movie co-stars Clara Bow and Billie Dove. On a separate sound short, Eddie recalls how Clara taught him to tone down his vaudeville personality and he taught her how to be funny.

Speaking of which, there are another hour of priceless shorts on this DVD besides KID BOOTS. They include a 1929 sound short, filmed at Astoria Studios on Long Island, showing us Cantor's blackface song and joke routine as done on the New Amsterdam Theatre roof at midnight. This is the only print in existence and was just recently found in a New Jersey garage. We also get a 1924 Lee deForest Phonofilm sound short with Eddie doing his Ziegfeld routine, without the blackface. We get a few jokes and a couple of songs in a truly nostalgic short.

The whole DVD is a must-own curio for Eddie Cantor and Florenz Ziegfeld fans, and it includes regular mail and e-mail addresses for the Eddie Cantor Appreciation Society. A certain older audience will truly cherish this precious Jazz Age DVD. You know who you are.

The quality of this one is pretty good considering the age-- though the Phonofilm short is video field reversed (probably fixable with the right software tools but you'd have to rip it to your computer).

Times were pretty different back in those days, this is a very interesting window to the past-- and I got quite a few chuckles out of Kid Boots. Wish they would release Whoopee and Palmy Days-- Cantor was an interesting guy and there doesn't appear to be much of him available. I'm not sure what the point of his doing Midnight Frolic in blackface was, as none of the routines or songs seemed to be connected with it in any way-- no doubt a historical oddity that now seems just bizarre, along with some of the jokes in the Phonofilm segment which would probably not be received favorably in todays world. A nice little curio of bygone days...

-- Followup:
After writing this review I got around to reading his autobiography. Turns out, blackface came about in a time where acting along with the rest of society was segregated. Black actors were not allowed to appear on stage with white actors. But there were characters in the plays of the time that were black, for example, waiters and bellboys. So, white characters were "made up" to be black. Cantor cut his acting teeth on some of these parts, and tried to make the most of them in order to get more on-stage time. He was entertaining at it, and consequently became known as a blackface comic in the early days. Later in his career, he had established a carefully designed comedy repertoire which did not include blackface, but at one gig was told that he could come back next week providing he had different material because many of the same patrons would be attending. But since he didn't have any more "A" material and what he had took a long time to develop, he got the idea of just doing the same set but in blackface, and apparently pulled it off-- again making a name for himself as a blackface comic. So the gags weren't necessarily supposed to be related to the blackface... At any rate, that's the story paraphrased from his autobiography, for what it's worth...

I kept wondering, WHY is the music for Kid Boots ALMOST good, but always annoying and never fits the action? Finally I realized, it is not a bad score, and the pianist actually did emphasis action... but the soundtrack has been laid against the picture almost 2 seconds late. What shame!

Also, picture needs restoring--it's pretty bad at times.

What fun to romp through a really funny silent movie and then be treated to the bonuses.

It must have been 1935, give or take a year or two, that my grandmother took me on the trolley car to see an Eddie Cantor film. A "Talkie" in the argot of that era. At that time, Cantor was at his career peak: among the top box office draws in films, still a sellout in the changing vaudeville scene, a sure favorite in Broadway and touring reviews, while he was just beginning to be succeeded on radio comedy by his old friend of the same age, Jack Benny.He remained a popular radio star while his popularity in the other media began to fade, never entirely disappearing until poor health forced him off his successful TV show (which faced the mega-competition of Ed Sullivan's star laden variety show).
Through all of this, to me and to most of his fans, silent film would have appeared only a way to cash in on his popularity by showing him do a dance or two, perhaps gesture his way through a dialogue involving broad gestures by both performers in a Weber and Fields type of set-up.
Imagine my surprise at seeing this comedy, the first of the "kid" films (Kid from Spain, Kid Millions, etc.) and the only silent one to the best of my knowledge. Imagine my even greater surprise to find it so good as to warrant inclusion in the usual Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, etc., selections which mark the nostalgia comedy film assemblage. His actions mesh smoothly with the written gag lines and, he appears quite at ease, without the stiffness that often marked the first appearances of live performers in film (note the stiffness of his "buddy" in the film, Lawrence Gray, which is typical.
As others have pointed out, Clara Bow is fine, while the other "girls" fit their roles quite well.
Highly recommended for those who seek a view of one of the very big show business names of his day in a most entertaining silent appearance.
I agree with the others that the additional material does add materially to the experience.
Happily there are no black face routines in this film as there are in several of his talkies. Without raising the question of their appropriateness in our day, it is good to be able to recommend the film without concern that some of the viewers would be offended by what, in the performers lifetime, was simply a routine character to be played by an actor as were other stereotypes which would be distasteful to many in a potential audience for films (and other media) made in the past.

This DVD actually contains an abundance of extras for the price. First, of course, is the 1926 silent film starring Eddie Cantor in the title role and costarring Clara Bow. This film is a great treat because we get to see how the musical comedy "Kid Boots" was turned into an effective silent film. Kid Boots works in a tailor's shop and is about to get a beating from the beau of Clara McCoy (Clara Bow) when he is saved from harm by Tom Sterling (Lawrence Gray). Likewise, when Tom's soon-to-be ex-wife tries to prove that they have been reunited so she can anull their divorce decree and get in on Tom's recent large inheritance, Kid Boots comes to the rescue and claims the two have not been alone together. I know this sounds strange, but chalk it up to divorce law in the early 20th century. Tom then runs off with Kid Boots - his witness - to a mountain resort until the time for his final divorce decree to become final has come and gone to evade his ex-wife's trickery. At the resort Tom meets a girl that he falls for, and Kid Boots runs into Clara McCoy again, still accompanied by her brutish boyfriend. Clara prefers Kid Boots because she "prefers reliable men to good-looking ones" a title card tells us. At the resort Tom's ex-wife and her lawyers soon follow, along with all of the comic routines and mix-ups that you're accustomed to seeing in Cantor's sound films, if you've been fortunate enough to view those rarely seen comic gems. The film is quite good and it didn't surprise me that it was a Paramount silent that someone else had restored and presented. There are a few scratches here and there in the video and there are a few frames missing here and there, but overall it is a pretty good restoration job.

The extras include 1924's "A Few Minutes with Eddie Cantor", which was one of Lee DeForrest's Phonofilms. DeForrest used them to demonstrate his method of producing talking pictures via a sound on film method that was later an industry standard. The short film shows Eddie joking around and singing a couple of songs.

The other short is entitled "A Midnight Frolic" and is supposed to be a duplicate of the rooftop show at the Amsterdam Theater back when Ziegfeld had several Broadway shows running at once, including "Whoopee". Shot in 1929 on Long Island, it features Eddie doing his musical comedy act before an audience that includes several celebrities including Mary Eaton of "Glorifying the American Girl" and Richard Dix, an actor in both the silent and sound era.

There are text notes included for both shorts, and there are also a couple of text notes extras that include short biographies of Eddie Cantor and Clara Bow. There is also an audio portion of Eddie Cantor's autobiography that talks about the making of "Kid Boots" including how the sensational and harrowing mountaintop scenes were done.

Highly recommended for the Eddie Cantor fan who is interested in how the great musical comedian transitioned to film and then to sound.

I echo what the others have said about this video. I found the feature to be highly entertaining. Cantor was a fine silent film actor - who knew? The quality of the DVD is much higher than I expected. The extras are a wonderful addition to my collection. Though I had the phonofilm short on VHS taken from TCM a few years back, the Ziegfeld Midnight Frolics short was such an extra special treat, in spite of Cantor in blackface. For those unfamiliar with Cantor's act, he did a lot of blackface routines. This preserves the act he did after hours at the rooftop gardens at the New Amsterdam Theatre. The racism inherent in such acts is always difficult to watch, but the timing and the music are worth noting, as well as having a rare record of this event. The cost when I purchased it in 2008 was low - a total bargain and more than just a collector's item. Kudos to Original Cast Productions and Big House - a fine job!