Honeymoon Lane is a dusty relic, but it has heart

If you're the type of person who needs a fast-paced thriller to keep your eyes glued to the screen, skip this one. Honeymoon Lane is for the folks who like their movies a little dusty, a little sappy, and incredibly earnest. If you hate slow-burn musicals from the early sound era, you’ll probably want to turn it off within the first ten minutes.

It’s a strange little time capsule. Watching it feels like finding an old, stained postcard in a box of junk at a flea market.

Eddie Dowling is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. Sometimes he’s charming, and other times he’s just... exhausting. There’s a specific scene where he’s trying to rally the neighborhood spirit, and I couldn't help but think about how much more grounded the performances in Millie felt compared to this.

The pacing is a total mess, honestly. One minute we’re deep in some emotional drama, and the next we’re suddenly breaking into song for no apparent reason. It’s like the movie keeps forgetting what genre it’s supposed to be.

There’s this one bit with the set design—you can tell they were trying to make it look like a bustling street, but it just looks like a painted plywood box. It has that same oddly empty feeling I noticed in The Outcasts of Poker Flat. It makes the whole thing feel small, like a stage play that got lost on its way to a bigger production.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Honeymoon Lane (1931) through its definitive frames.

Noah Beery shows up, which is always a treat. He’s got that look on his face like he’d rather be literally anywhere else, which somehow makes his performance the most relatable thing in the whole film. 🤷‍♂️

Is it a masterpiece? Absolutely not. Does it have a certain sweetness that modern movies are too cool to attempt? Yeah, I guess so. It reminded me a little bit of the weird, disjointed energy you get in Radio Riot, where the music feels like a bandage for a story that isn't quite holding together.

There’s a part near the end that drags on for about two minutes too long. It’s just people smiling at each other while the camera lingers, and you can almost feel the movie trying to convince you this moment matters. It doesn't, really, but you’re already so deep in that you just let it happen.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just in a weird mood today. It’s not a movie you watch for the plot, that’s for sure. It’s a movie you watch because you’ve run out of other things to do and you want to see how they used to make people cry back in 1931.

Final thoughts for the curious:

• The lighting is surprisingly flat in the interior shots.
• Eddie Dowling's smile is terrifyingly wide.
• The music is fine, but don't expect to be humming it later.