Q: Personal taste rules when it comes to talking about movies such as this treasured little gem. Way back in the eighties, the early eighties, i discovered this movie, like so many released at the time, "Night Patrol" "Bad Manners" or even "King Frat" the artwork and blurbs on the back of the covers tempted and teased you.

Of course being of an age, movies like that i have already mentioned as well as stuff like "Screwballs" and the many others, captured the imagination, and thankfully many years later i still remember some with fondness and some with disdain the many movies that help maintain my love of such genre as parodies or pastiches.

Made many years after the huge success of "Animal House" and having seen how it had fared down through the years, I now know that there would be no way this movie would ever eclipse the box office bucks obtain aforementioned nor would it linger in the memory, much like that of National Lampoon's Vacation.

To be honest, not everything that has carried the National Lampoon Logo has been a wild success, however to me Class Reunion remains one of my all time favourite movies, with instantly recognisable characters, such as the aloof Bob Spinnaker played to perfection by Gerrit Graham, so good in Charles Band's "Terrorvision" still lingering in the past glories of his youth. Or how about Stephen Furst's brash and ballsy turn as the high school lazy drunken sex crazed bum Hubert Downs.

Sweet as. Which makes me ponder. As i already said, personal taste not withstanding. People can be so cruel, so it will never win any awards or be compared to the like of its's peers within the comedy world. It does have some merit. Being one of the earlier scripts penned by John Hughes, who would later go on to do one of my own favourites of his work "Weird Science" as well as having a wonderful theme title sung by the great Gary U.S Bonds.

What more can i say, it's a movie just waiting to be rediscovered, time and time again.
A: positive
Q: H.G. Wells in 1936 was past his prime and the books of his that will survive were long gone by. He was coming to the end of his life and he was confronted to his dream gone sour. At the very beginning of the 20th century he defended the idea that the world was doomed because the evolution of species, natural biology, on one side, and Marxism, market economy on the other side, were necessarily leading to the victory of the weaker over the stronger due to the simple criterion of number. The weaker were the mass of humanity and the stronger were the minority elite. He defended then a strict eugenic policy with the elimination of all those who were in a way or another weakening the human race. First of all the non-Caucasian, with the only exception of the Jews who would disappear thanks to mixed marriages. Then, within the Caucasian community all those who were not healthy, the alcoholics, the mentally disabled, all those who were genetically disabled, etc. That was not Hitler. That was H.G. Wells and that was not after the first world war. That was more than ten years before. And twenty years before the first world war he had published The Time Machine that defended the idea that the human "race", left to its own means and due to the vaster cosmological evolution of life on earth, would see the differentiation of the human "race" into two "species": the working class would become a subterranean laborious species and the bourgeoisie would become an idle surface species. The point was in the novel that the surface sophisticated and weak idle species was the prey of the other species who were the predators. Wells was convinced humanity was in danger and politicians were supposed to stop this evolution by imposing a strict eugenic policy. The first countries to follow this injunction were the Scandinavian countries who were also the last to drop it only very recently for some of them. The film here proposes a vision of 2036 with a world government that is absolutely dictatorial in the fact that there is no election, no parliament, no really democratic institution, only peace imposed by military conquest, and the government is dominated by one man or at the most one man and his few councilors. And in that future world all, absolutely all human beings are Caucasians. Wells was able to imagine humanity being completely white by 2036. Amazing. Wells envisaged some kind of a rebellion but that would be short lived and lead to nothing at all. The last sentences are the vision of this white civilization conquering the whole universe when contemplating the sky and its stars and planets. Frightening. And that was produced in 1936. All the more frightening since nowhere the slightest mention of Hitlerism, fascism, Japanese imperialism or Stalinism can be found. But it is essential to have that film in a good restored edition because it is crucial to have a full vision of H.G. Wells. We are obviously very far away from the Brave New World of absolute "democratic" social selection, or the Animal Farm of the dictatorship of the porcine proletariat, or the 1984 of the abstract mediatic dictatorship of Big Brother. This vision is at least just as much frightening as the three others. And I only want to compare Wells with the British science fiction writers of his days. It would be unfair to go beyond. This reveals that in England in these first three decades of the 20th century there was a tremendous fear among intellectuals: the fear that the future would only be somber, bleak and in the form of an impasse of some kind.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
A: positive
Q: I've never found Charley Chase very funny, even though his on-screen character sometimes reminds me of John Cleese, whom I find VERY funny. (Charley Chase also reminds me of gowky Hen Broon from Scotland's 'Sunday Post' comics page.) In Chase's best films, I tend to admire his professionalism rather than laughing at him. I'll give Chase credit that his very best films -- such as 'Mighty Like a Moose' and 'His Wooden Wedding' -- have inspired a fandom who are fiercely loyal to him ... but I'm positive that even the most die-hard Chase fan will agree that the very early and very crude 'Married to Order' just isn't funny at all.

Chase -- eager, awkward, gormless, naff -- is a young swain hoping to court the fair Rose. Oliver Hardy gives the best performance in this film as her blowhard father, who disdains Chase as a 'mollycoddle'. Leo White, who did more notable work as a foil for Chaplin at Essanay, is on hand here as a rival.

There's some action involving an Ingersoll watch. I was intrigued that the brand name is mentioned in the dialogue titles: is this an early example of product-placement?

Sadly, a major flaw in 'Married to Order' is the casting of Rosemary Theby as Rose: she's meant to be a standard-issue ingenue, but Theby -- flat-chested, hawk-faced -- is physically wrong for the role. Theby (the wife of Harry Myers) had a successful career as a screen actress, but was never a believable ingenue. Film historian William K Everson dealt with her very dismissively in one of his film books.

I'll rate 'Married to Order' just 3 out of 10, and I'm being charitable ... because I keep suspecting that Charley Chase has got something that everyone else gets but I keep missing.
A: negative