Hideaway (1937)
* (out of 4)
Insanely dumb "comedy" about a redneck family living in a home that they technically don't own. They are visited by three men, led by J. Carrol Naish, and the family thinks they have something to do with the house but what they don't know is that they're dangerous gangsters. HIDEAWAY is one of the most bizarre films I've ever seen on Turner Classic Movies and I knew I was in trouble when the opening credits misspelled Naish's name. At just 58-minutes this film moves along pretty well but the only thing that keeps you entertained is how bad everything is. Fred Stone plays the father of this clan who is just too dumb to ever realize what's going on around him. He can be shot at, beaten or set on fire and he still wouldn't know it (only one of those things actually happen in the film). For the life of me I had to look up the fact that this here was a "comedy" because there simply weren't enough laughs to make it clear while watching the picture. There's one sequence with a frog in a bathtub that made me laugh but outside of this there's simply dead silence. The majority of the film deals with people being stupid or not understanding what's going on around them. This here is never funny and sadly it gets quite annoying by the time the picture ends. The performances really aren't much better with some of them coming across pretty embarrassing. Even worse is the subplot dealing with the daughter wanting to run off to the big city and leave her country boy who loves her behind. HIDEAWAY is a pretty bad film from start to finish but it's bad enough to where fans of such films might want to check it out.
