Paramount’s catch-all comedy makes zero sense but has a great attitude. It showcases a number of eager funnymen from vaudeville and silent comedies: W.C. Fields, Andy Clyde, Ben Turpin, Hugh Herbert, Billy Gilbert. Top-billed Jack Oakie is in love with Klopstokian lass Angela; all of her fellow citizens are super-athletes, so he brings a bunch to Los Angeles to compete in the Olympic Games, Ice or no Ice. Silly shenanigans are the rule but everybody shines. Slinky songstress vamp Lyda Roberti gets away with a sizzling ‘cooch’ dance number with the lyrics, “It’s terrific when I get hot!”  The story is by none other than future writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Million Dollar Legs
Blu-ray
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
1932 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 62 min. / On Your Mark / Street Date April 21, 2026 / available through Universal / 21.98
Starring: Jack Oakie, W.C. Fields, Andy Clyde, Lyda Roberti, Susan Fleming, Ben Turpin, Hank Mann, Hugh Herbert, George Barbier, Dickie Moore, Bruce Bennett, Hobart Bosworth, Al Bridge, Billy Gilbert.
Cinematography: Arthur L. Todd
Song ‘It’s Terrific When I Get Hot’ music and lyrics by Ralph Rainger & Leo Robin
Screenplay by Henry Myers, Nicholas T. Barrows story by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and possibly Ben Hecht
Produced by Herman J. Mankiewicz, B.P. Schulberg both uncredited
Directed by Edward Cline

Before winning his Oscars and becoming a legend, writer-producer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz was a studio writer, filling in wherever he could on the Paramount lot. The year 1932 was a crazy one for movies, as the Depression gave studio heads the idea to cut staff salaries, and only be a little more stingy with the talent. Pre-Code laxity allowed comics room for more bawdy humor, but radio performers were moving in on the comedy slots once dominated by stars from vaudeville.

Last month we reviewed a new Universal disc of the wild Paramount comedy  International House, an eye-opener with plenty of semi-scandalous content. That movie stayed intact only because it was deemed unfit for the public when The Code was enforced — rather than being censored, it was simply withdrawn from release and locked up in the vault.

Several correspondents wrote to urge us to review this second Paramount pre-Code comedy. Although it seemed to be constantly screening on old broadcast TV, we’d somehow never caught up with it. Was it as strange as International House, or as censorable?

Can we presume that the aforementioned legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz had an ‘in’ at Paramount, because his older brother Herman J. was in charge of the story department?  The prolific screenwriter Herman was the one who sent the famous telegram to his buddy Ben Hecht, to hurry to Los Angeles because the pay was phenomenal and “your only competition is idiots.”

Joseph has screen credit on several Paramount films with star Jack Oakie, a former vaudevilian who was reportedly stone deaf yet had a perfectly good voice delivery. Oakie had become a master lip-reader at an early age. Audiences loved his a goofy, go-for-it everyman heroes; his clowning could be pretty basic and silly.

Jack Oakie was BIG in 1932, and receives top billing in this show, above W.C. Fields.

Nothing could be sillier than  Million Dollar Legs. It began as Joseph L.’s story On Your Mark, which failed to interest the Marx Brothers. Perhaps an executive declared, ‘the Olympics will be here in July, make a crazy comedy with an Olympics theme.’  Mankiewicz and possibly Ben Hecht could have cooked up with the concept in a few minutes. The jokes are centered on a foolish Ruritanian nation that participates in the sports competition; the only conflicts are the kind one might see in a college football movie. As the show is basically a parade of comics, the proceedings have an improvised quality, with corny old gags pulled in from old vaudeville routines. Director Eddie Cline was a Hal Roach silent comedy veteran with a knack for knowing how to let a gag play. The credited screenwriters Henry Myers and Nicholas T. Barrows had plenty of experience. Myers later turned out some respectable writing, in shows like  The Black Room and  Destry Rides Again.

Million Dollar Legs is a broad farce with plenty of mugging. The distant realm of Klopstokia uses a goat as its heraldic symbol. The place is so backward, all women are named Angela and all men are named George. But every citizen is a superb athlete, with fantastic powers. The ‘President’ (W.C. Fields) keeps his job by winning arm-wrestling bouts with his cabinet members, especially his devious Secretary of the Treasury (Hugh Herbert). That cabinet leader wants to usurp the Presidency, and so leads a subversive group that meets in a secret underground chamber. The country is broke, and The President is desperate. His daughter Angela (showgirl Susan Fleming) falls in love with the traveling American brush salesman Migg Tweeney (Jack Oakie). The Prez has Migg arrested and taken away for torture, until Angela proposes that the Yankee peddler is the ‘wizard’ who can come up with 8 million dollars.

After seeing ordinary Klopstokians in action, Migg knows how to balance the royal budget. The President himself is incredibly strong. His Major-Domo (Andy Clyde) has super running powers. Another citizen can leap high in the air. Migg’s boss at the brush company Mr. Baldwin (George Barbier) is a huge sports fan. Migg will select a Klopstokian Olympic Team, and when they win everything, Mr. Baldwin will underwrite Klopstokia’s national debt. Still scheming to be President, the pesky Secretary of the Treasury plots sabotage. He entreats Klopstokia’s most seductive woman, Mata Machree (Lyda Roberti) to distract and demoralize the entire Olympic team.

Million Dollar Legs tries its utmost not to make sense. Angela and Migg fall instantly in love at first sight, while Angela’s little brother Willie (little Dickie Moore) plays Cupid by shooting arrows into to Migg’s rear end … ouch. W.C. Fields augments his juggling work and hat-and-cane gags with extended slow-burns and double-takes at the antics of his duplicitous cabinet. The un-billed comic Billy Gilbert has an extended gag trying to suppress a sneeze.

The main running joke gives us the cross-eyed comic Ben Turpin, also a veteran of Hal Roach silents. Dressed in black and eavesdropping on conversations, Turpin’s spy shows up in every other scene like punctuation, writing things down in a notebook. It’s a recognition joke: Turpin just poses for the camera and waggles his crossed eyes. As a holdover from silent Keystone Kops shorts, he apparently got laughs whenever he appeared.  ^*

Million Dollar Legs’ idiotic but well-paced comic hijinks soon win us over — we’re halfway down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, but without the satire or poetry. The simple comedy doesn’t even depend on contemporary cultural references. There are no giant sets or huge musical numbers. The most elaborate construction is an entire tree that sinks into the ground, down to the lair of the secret conspiracy. Was that special effect elevator inherited from another production?  A good ‘flying’ effect gag shows Klopstokia’s long jumper leaping through the air. When confronted by Angela’s unwanted boyfriend, The President consults a long row of buttons before pushing the final one, reading ‘Daughter’s Suitor.’  Guards promptly arrive to arrest Migg.

With Eddie Cline’s comic pacing, the non-sequitur jokes never become as manic as in the Marx Bros.  Duck Soup. But there are some gems. The best off-the-wall bit simply has the Los Angeles-bound express train unaccountably show up in San Francisco. The conductor and several dispatchers haven’t a clue as to how such a thing could happen, and their only response is a shrug. Luis Buñuel would approve. It’s a nice slap-down of boring movie logic.

As if cutting corners, the show has only one musical number, a solo. Dressed in a sexy gown, specialty performer Lyda Roberti appears on a Dracula-like staircase to show off her seductive talent to the cabinet conspirators, with the song ‘It’s Terrific When I Get Hot’. Slinking and winking, Roberti puts it across well. The only other song is a traditional Klopstokian love ballad. Angela produces a copy for Migg to perform … which she says is written on the songwriter’s hide!  The lyrics are nonsense:  “Woof Bloogle Gik – Mow – Gik Bloogle Woof – Poof Oggle Ik – Quee Pok Pok Pok.”   The song is said to follow the melody of the Paramount song  “One Hour with You”, but we didn’t make the connection.

Angela makes a high dive into a reservoir to recover the parchment, proving that she’s another Olympic Gold shoo-in. This movie is the source of the film stills we’ve seen showing W.C. Fields in old-fashioned athletic tights, lifting weights. That clears up that mystery for this viewer.

Where does Million Dollar Legs fit in the grand scheme of Hollywood comedy?  It reminds us most of Mel Brooks’ comedies of the ’70s and’80s — letting performers do their thing, with a loose commitment to just be funny and keep things popping. Brooks tended to riff on film genres, but the ‘party atmosphere’ is the same: if you love the performers, you’ll like the movie.

The AFI usually doesn’t goof, but its statement that newsreel scenes showing the stadium were filmed during the ’32 Olympics seems suspect, as the film was released before the games began. Our Olympic Colosseum is right next to the University of Southern California, so we’re probably seeing shots of track and field events from some other competition.

Jack Oakie’s starring heyday lasted several more years. We recommend seeing his late-career performance in Robert Parrish’s 1959 western  The Wonderful Country. He still has the pep and enthusiasm. Among the Klopstockian athletes is a young Bruce Bennett, himself an athlete trying to break into moving pictures. And one of the disloyal conspirators in a black cape is Al Bridge, looking younger and thinner than he would in several Preston Sturges classics, a decade later. Al even gets a couple of lines. But our favorite un-billed player is still Billy Gilbert, doing his extended I-have-to-sneeze act.

We’re told that Joseph L. Mankiewicz may have originally written Million Dollar Legs for the Marx Brothers. Leading lady Susan Fleming later married Harpo Marx, and they stayed together until Harpo’s death 28 years later. It was Ms. Fleming’s legs that were insured for a million as part of a publicity campaign for the movie. The movie’s only ‘million dollar legs’ must be those of Andy Clyde’s Major-Domo, the super-fast runner.

The Universal Pictures Home Entertainment Blu-ray of Million Dollar Legs is a good encoding, not fully restored, of this oddball Paramount comedy. A few scratches aside, it looks in prime condition for both picture and sound. Lyda Roberti’s song comes across particularly well — she seems a very specific sexy siren of the day, pushing her hip movements and come-hither expressions as far as taste will allow.

The disc is plain-wrap, with no extras. The 62-minute running time is two minutes shorter than the film’s official duration in older records, although that discrepancy doesn’t necessarily indicate that the film was censored. As we said above, Million Dollar Legs was not ‘condemned’ by the Production Code and locked away, but was reissued in 1935. At maybe 4 moments in the picture we can see very clean jump cuts, neatly spliced, that may indicate where offensive material was taken out to allow for the reissue. Paramount’s Marx Brothers comedy  Horse Feathers has several similar jump cuts, which make us wonder if the negatives of both films suffered damage, or if we’re seeing evidence of dialogue removed.

To account for two missing minutes, perhaps a whole scene or two was pulled out by the Code Office. Either that or the longer running time was a simple typo, repeated down the line. Do Marx Bros. and W.C. Fields experts have the answer to these questions?  Original continuity scripts must still exist.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Million Dollar Legs
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good +
Video: Very Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: none
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 14, 2026
(7494legs)

^*  I love the (apparently true) stories told about Ben Turpin. Some silent movie performers came from hardscrabble show biz backgrounds with no financial security; like many who did well in Hollywood, the pragmatic Turpin invested heavily in apartment buildings, some of them reportedly in my neighborhood here near Paramount. The big stars lived lavishly, but Turpin stayed basic, walking to work. In between calls to perform, he’d do maintenance chores in his apartments near the studio. The good times may not last forever, you know.

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