The value in viewing When’s Your Birthday? (1937) may not lie in the content of the movie directly, but in what it tells us of the era in which it was made. Dustin Willoughby, mediocre boxer and would-be doctor of (and to) the stars, i.e., an astrologer, has just lost his girl (from a hoity-toity family) and his job, while acquiring a possibly deadly enemy when the man, a mobster, takes his astrological advice for betting on the dogs.
But when that works out but the mobster finds himself in unrelated financial straits, Dustin, who has now found his way to a manager and a new girl, takes a reluctant step up the career ladder to forecasting the results of boxing matches.
But, through the mixups endemic to this category of film, his own forecast is mistaken for that of the mobster’s boxer, and when this is discovered, he finds himself returned to his former occupation – but he’s in the ring 15 minutes early, according to his own forecast. He must only survive his opponent, but win the match or his mobster friend will have his head in revenge.
The pacing of this movie is very flat, very even, as is the delivery of the dialogue, mostly fast paced and a little over the top. The treatment of the women is very chauvinistic and gallant, two words of related background, and thus the whole venture feels quite dated. Throw in the silliness of astrology, and you more or less have to hope the dog, Zodiac, will steal the scenes, but his chances are too few to elevate this movie.
Which is not to say the movie is bad in any particular way. It just feels like, to use a phrase from another era, like a ‘penny-dreadful,’ tied to its era by is preconceptions, and not one of those rare stories which can rise above those ties and speak to humanity across the ages.
In other words, this ain’t The Odyssey.
