Crashing Hollywood (1938) is an amusing B programmer made by RKO -- sixty-one minutes in length, funny, and entertaining, especially to those who enjoy seeing Hollywood depicted on screen. Fast-talking Lee Tracy plays an aspiring screenwriter on his way to Los Angeles by train. En route he meets an ex-con (Paul Guilfoyle), and after some comic mix-ups the two agree to collaborate on a screenplay, using a bank robbery that Guilfoyle was actually involved in -- and framed for -- as the subject matter. Their film not only gets made but becomes a hit, prompting police to re-open the case and sending Guilfoyle's cohorts to Hollywood themselves to get even. Things culminate with an extended comic suspense sequence filmed on the actual RKO lot.

This Hollywood satire was based on a 1922 play by Paul Dickey and Mann Page called Lights Out, which was adapted into a 1923 film of the same name directed by Alfred Santell. For this remake, RKO assigned Lew Landers, one of Hollywood's most prolific directors. In fact, Crashing Hollywood was the first of eight movies he directed for release in 1938 alone. It's also smartly cast, with enjoyable character actors like Richard Lane, George Irving and Lee Patrick joining Tracy, Guilfoyle and Joan Woodbury to make for a snappy time. Lee Tracy's first film, incidentally, had been one of the very first talkies with a Hollywood subject matter: Big Time (1929).

Movies about Hollywood are as old as movies themselves, and audiences always seem to be fascinated by them, whether they are A-level classics like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) or cheap quickies like Crashing Hollywood. Oftentimes the less glittery films are the more revealing. As film scholar William K. Everson has written, "Crashing Hollywood contains a lot more honesty about day-to-day Hollywood than many of the much more ambitious pictures that were always striving for effect, carefully dropping a name here or a pseudo-documentary 'fact' there. The B's had no time for that -- they just got on with their story-telling, using undisguised studio sets and offices for their background. Crashing Hollywood is a particularly slick little picture, combining an amusing story-premise with good action and fast-paced dialogue, the Lee Tracy personality keeping everything hanging together rather nicely."

By Jeremy Arnold