by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I settled in for a night of movie-watching,
including one of my quirky favorites, the 1934 Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round. This was one of Hollywood’s more appealing genre mashups of the period, a gangster movie/musical set
on an ocean liner, produced by Edward Small for Reliance Pictures, released by
United Artists, and so technically an “indie” but with a much bigger budget
than usual for a non-studio production. I first saw this in 1975 as part of a
tribute the local San Francisco UHF station Channel 44 (whose logo is
immortalized in the film The Candidate — it’s the one at which Robert Redford blows a media interview by
laughing uncontrollably at a malfunctioning boom mike) was mounting to Jack
Benny, who had just died. They showed five films of his in succession over the
week, including The Meanest Man in the World (a 20th Century-Fox “B” whose central
premise — an attorney with a high sense of ethics suddenly gets photographed in
a pose that looks like he’s literally taking candy from a baby, and his legal career zooms up as potential
clients think he’s an unscrupulous S.O.B. — and star deserved a better movie;
ah, if only Preston Sturges had directed it!), Charley’s Aunt, Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi masterpiece To
Be or Not to Be and The Horn
Blows at Midnight, the fascinating 1945
Warners farce that bombed so totally at the box office it killed Benny’s film
career and he made jokes about it on his show for years afterwards. (In one
episode of the Benny TV program he shows up at the studio gate to make a new
film, and tells the gateman, “Remember me? I once made a picture here called The
Horn Blows at Midnight.” “Remember it?”
says the gateman — “I directed
it!”)
On Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round Benny is billed third, after stars Gene Raymond and Nancy Carroll. He’s
called “Chad Denby” (I joked that the writers — Leon Gordon, Joseph Moncure
March and Harry W. Conn — must have worked their imaginations big-time to come
up with that name) and he’s the
radio host on board the S.S. Progress, an ocean liner traveling from New York to Paris that puts on a
nightly entertainment featuring the Boswell Sisters (who perform two songs,
“Rock and Roll” — almost certainly the first use of that phrase in a movie to
denote music — and “If I Had a Million Dollars”), Mitzi Green (who performs a
strange song called “Oh Leo, Oh Love,” first in her own voice and then in a
bizarre and surprisingly exact imitation of George Arliss) and a couple of
invented characters, Sally Marsh (Nancy Carroll) and her brother Ned (Carlyle
Marsh, Jr.). It seems that before the boat sailed Sally briefly dated gangster
Lex Luthor — oops, I mean Lee Lothar (Sidney Blackmer) — and while they were
going out her brother Ned started going to Lothar’s gambling casinos and lost a
lot of money. Lothar used this to blackmail Ned into working for him and
steering other potential victims his way, and Sally naturally wants to get her
brother out of Lothar’s clutches. She also wants to break up with Lothar but he
insists that she remain with him or else he’ll exact his revenge on her brother
by keeping him in what amounts to debt peonage forever. Sally goes on the boat
in disguise and appears in Denby’s program so her name won’t be listed on the
passenger manifest, but Lothar finds out she’s going on the Progress and buys a ticket for the boat himself.
Gene Raymond
is Jimmy Brett, gentleman thief, who’s after a valuable jeweled bracelet
belonging to Anya Rosson (Shirley Grey), a married woman whom Lothar is also
seeing — and who of course is having jealous hissy-fits over Lothar’s continued
attempts to get Sally even though Sally isn’t interested in him. Transatlantic
Merry-Go-Round actually begins with
Lothar’s murder on board the Progress in mid-cruise and then flashes back “Forty-Eight Hours Before — Back
in New York.” We’re introduced to this dizzying cast of characters, which also
includes Joe Saunders (William “Stage” Boyd), who escaped from prison and is
believed to be on the Progress
with a gun and a grudge against Lothar; Anya’s husband Herbert (Ralph Morgan,
brother of the Wizard of Oz and a frequent killer in these whodunits), who
stows away on the Progress by
hiding in a lifeboat; and Inspector “Mac” McKinney (Robert Elliott), who’s on
the Progress for a vacation but
ends up embroiled in the murder and also the presence of Jimmy Brett, who along
with his sidekick “Shorty” (Sid Silvers in a very Allen Jenkins-ish performance) is scoping out the
passengers looking for potential pigeons and gets into a crooked poker game —
one of those deals in which the con men will let the “mark” win the first few
hands and then take him for everything he’s got — which he outwits by having
“Shorty” come into the cabin where it’s taking place just at the point when
they’re going to start rigging the game against Brett to tell him that his
mother, presumably also on the Progress, has just been taken desperately ill. Transatlantic
Merry-Go-Round has its flaws — notably that
after the close of the big number, “It Was Sweet of You,” which we see at the
opening just before Lothar is shown getting shot, there isn’t any more music
until midway through the film, when first singer Jean Sargent and then the
Boswell Sisters perform “Rock and Roll” with Jimmie (misspelled “Jimmy” on his
credit) Grier and His Orchestra — the Boswells sing from a preposterous prop
boat being pulled along an equally blatantly faked sea.
Still, it’s an
appealing movie and a nice little bit of genre-mashing even though Benny gets surprisingly few
funny lines (his best line is when Sally, whom he has a decidedly unrequited
crush on, sees an old publicity photo of her on his mantel and asks why he’s
kept it — and Benny says, “I had
to. The frame cost five bucks” — so at least one part of Benny’s fabled radio and TV character, his
incredible cheapness, shows up in this film!) and Mitzi Green’s parody of
George Arliss is screamingly funny if you’ve seen an Arliss film but just
confusing if you haven’t. It’s also noteworthy for the big production number on
“It Was Sweet of You,” credited to dance directors Larry Ceballos and Sammy Lee
but so blatantly derivative of Busby Berkeley’s mega-numbers at Warner Bros. it
seems as if Ceballos, who’d actually sued Warners after he was taken off the
job of dance director for Footlight Parade and replaced by Berkeley, wanted to show he could do that sort of number just as well as the
Master! In the end, if you cared, Ralph Morgan’s character turns out to be the
killer — William K. Everson once joked that audiences that only cared whodunit and not why or how could leave the theatre
early if Morgan’s name appeared on the cast list, “confident that the Hollywood
typecasting system would not let them down” — he reveals himself when he shoots
his wife as she’s being interrogated by McKinney, getting himself arrested and
then confessing he killed Lothar too. But the perfunctoriness with which the
mystery is solved is a minor blemish on a quite stylish movie, well directed by
Benjamin Stoloff (who’s especially skilled at finding plenty of locations to
relieve what might otherwise have become boring, given that almost the whole
movie takes place on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic) and acted by
a skilled cast of players who ably complement each other.
