by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I
watched a quite old but still entertaining movie, a sort of throwback to the
days of VCR’s when I would record off Turner Classic Movies literally by the
yard and we would often have evenings together in which we’d watch two or even
three movies in a row from the 1930’s or 1940’s, including acknowledged
classics as well as “B”-movies, some of which turned out to be minor gems. The
one we watched last night was definitely a major production: Whoopee! (the original title credit has the exclamation
point even though the original poster, reproduced on imdb.com’s header page for
the film as well as the DVD box and starter screen does not), a 1930 production
of a Florenz Ziegfeld stage hit, Whoopee!, starring Eddie Cantor and running from December 4, 1928 through
November 23, 1929 at Ziegfeld’s showcase, the New Amsterdam Theatre. The songs
were by Walter Donaldson (music) and Gus Kahn (lyrics), and Cantor’s original
co-star was Ruth Etting, who introduced the glorious ballad “Love Me or Leave
Me” in the stage production. According to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster, Whoopee! was still doing excellent business on Broadway and
could have run another year, but Ziegfeld had been hit hard by the stock-market
crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that it spawned and he needed
ready cash more than he did the steady income of a stage hit. So he either sold
the movie rights to producer Sam Goldwyn or went into partnership with him —
it’s not clear which, nor is it clear how much artistic involvement Ziegfeld
had in the ultimate film. The various Goldwyn biographies have accounts of this
film that sometimes cohere and sometimes clash; according to one story Ziegfeld
and Goldwyn both recruited the most beautiful girls they could find for the film’s
chorus line, and the people who saw both agreed that Goldwyn’s girls (who
included future stars Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable and Virginia Bruce) were
better-looking than Ziegfeld’s. (Lucille Ball would make her screen debut in a
later Cantor-Goldwyn vehicle, Roman Scandals, dressed in nothing but a very long wig, elaborately coiffed to cover all the
“naughty bits.”)
Whoopee! was one of two huge musical productions made entirely in the two-strip
Technicolor process in 1930 (Paul Whiteman’s King of Jazz, stunningly directed by John Murray Anderson, was the other); two-strip Technicolor had been
available since 1922 but it didn’t really catch on until the late 1920’s, when
a lot of people in Hollywood thought that color was going to be the new sound
and audiences who had just experienced a revolution in movie entertainment with
the rise of the talkies and the total annihilation of silent films would
welcome another one in which dazzling color images would replace the cool
black-and-white (often “tinted” or “toned” to simulate color) films audiences were used to. It didn’t
happen, partly because the Depression did — though it didn’t really hit the
movie business hard until 1931 — and partly because the original two-strip
Technicolor process had one glaring limitation: it could not photograph blue.
Blue is the shortest wavelength of visible light and early films in general had
a hard time with blue — silent star Mary Miles Minter had blue eyes and in a
lot of her early films they just photographed white, and cinematographer James
Wong Howe “made his bones” in Hollywood by figuring out a way to “bounce” light
off a black velvet curtain into Minter’s eyes so they would look normal on
screen. Two-strip Technicolor, as the name suggests, used two strips of film in
the camera — one to record red and one to record green — and the two strips
were “married” in the lab in a process similar to lithography to create a
single strip of film that could be shown in an ordinary projector. In 1932
Technicolor introduced a new process, three-strip Technicolor, which took advantage
of the faster, more sensitive films that had been developed by then to include
blue in their color mix along with red and green — and directors and
cinematographers on three-strip films often went hog wild, dressing all the men
in blue suits and all the women in blue gowns, showing lots of things (like sky and sea) one would expect to be blue, and having their set designers paint
just about all the interior walls blue. (Even the night skies in three-strip Technicolor films usually
were a deep, dark blue instead of the regulation black.)
Three-strip was first
used in Walt Disney’s cartoons (in 1932 he cut a deal with Technicolor under
which Disney was the only producer able to use it in animated films), then in
shorts and in film sequences, and in 1935 Rouben Mamoulian directed Becky Sharp, an adaptation of Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair that was the first film shot entirely in
three-strip. There’s a nagging assumption among some film buffs that two-strip
wasn’t “really” color — Becky Sharp is all too often cited in reference books as “the first color film,”
which it wasn’t — which I think is being really unfair to it. At its best (and
if well-preserved, something you can’t always count on with old films),
two-strip has a beautiful, painterly elegance that I often find more appealing
than the often shrieking, clashing hues of the three-strip films that succeeded
it. Someone not knowing the limitations of the process might watch a two-strip
film and wonder why just about everyone’s wearing either salmon or turquoise,
why the rooms are decorated similarly, and why the daytime skies are either
beige or, at best, teal. But it delivered pleasing skin tones and a quite
beautiful overall look. One thing about color is that in the 1930’s and 1940’s
using it doubled the cost of making a film — which is why so few films used
color and they were generally big historical spectacles like Gone with the
Wind or The Adventures of
Robin Hood, or musical fantasies like
The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t until the
1960’s, when Technicolor invented something called “denatured color,” that the
association of color films with fantasy and black-and-white with realism was
finally broken, and color at last became the standard — only now directors and
cinematographers have gone the other way, shooting film after film in muted,
dingy browns and greens and often leaving me wondering, “If you’re going to use
so little of the visible spectrum anyway, why don’t you just shoot in
black-and-white?”
Whoopee! is generally one of the best-preserved examples of three-strip
Technicolor — thanks largely to Sam Goldwyn’s attitude towards his own films:
he didn’t think of them as here-today-gone-tomorrow commodities but as lasting
works of art and entertainment, and his son Samuel Goldwyn, Jr. remembers dad taking
him through the Goldwyn Studio vault, showing him the cans of film resting on
their racks, and saying, “Son, this is your legacy.” In fact, the version
currently available on DVD may have been tweaked as well as preserved: the
opening musical number show the chorus, dressed as cowgirls, wearing
powder-blue scarves, and while the skies are mostly the turquoise-teal shade we
expect from a two-strip exterior, sometimes they look downright blue. (Some
two-strip films — notably Warner Bros.’ 1933 production Mystery of the Wax
Museum — look considerably bluer
than they did when new because the yellow components of the green dyes have
faded more than the blue components have, but I doubt that was the case here.) Whoopee! began life as a non-musical play by Owen Davis
(also the author who adapted F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby into a Broadway hit in 1926, starring James Rennie
— Michael Rennie’s father — as Gatsby) called The Nervous Wreck, about a milquetoast hypochondriac named Eddie
Williams whose doctors recommend he go out to a dude ranch in Arizona, where
the fresh desert air will presumably cure him of his maladies, real or
imagined. Whoopee! got a top-flight
production from Ziegfeld, including Eddie Cantor and Ruth Etting as stars,
Walter Donaldson (writer of some of the most harmonically interesting songs of
the 1920’s, including such memorable items in the Paul Whiteman-Bix Beiderbecke
joint repertoire as “Changes,” “(What Are You Waiting For) Mary,” “Because My
Baby Don’t Mean ‘Maybe’ Now” and “Out-of-Town Gal,” as well as composer of “My
Blue Heaven,” which Gene Austin recorded in 1927 and became the best-selling
record of all time until Bing Crosby recorded Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas”
15 years later) as composer and Gus Kahn as lyricist.
To write the script
Goldwyn insisted on using William Anthony McGuire, who’d also written the
original stage book, and he lavished additional talent on the film: the editor
was future director Stuart Heisler, the art director was Richard Day, and
Goldwyn hired one of the top bands in the country, George Olsen and His Music,
to play Donaldson’s songs. At Cantor’s recommendation he also hired a dance
director named Busby Berkeley, who hadn’t worked in films before but had
created a sensation with his dances for the 1927 Rodgers and Hart musical A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In his first film, Berkeley made it clear early on that he wasn’t
going to be guided by the convention of the time that musical numbers should be
filmed as you would see them in a particularly good seat in a theatre — which
sometimes led to preposterous scenes in which chorus dancers were so dwarfed by
the huge sets they looked like ants on a wedding cake. In Whoopee! Berkeley shot the first chorus or so of the film’s
opening number, “Today’s the Day,” Berkeley takes his camera up on a boom and
shoots the chorus dancers from above, then keeps going until he’s aimed his
camera straight down at them and has them move in a kaleidoscope-like
formation. Contrary to popular belief, Berkeley was not the first director to do that — at least three
others had done it in 1929 (Luther Reed in Rio Rita, Joseph Santley in The Cocoanuts and Albertina Rasch in Lord Byron of Broadway) — but it would become one of his trademarks, and
in a later number in Whoopee! Berkeley would do his other one: he had the chorus girls spread their
legs apart to form a long tunnel of legs, then would have the camera track
through the tunnel of legs to form a long line of girls, legs spread apart,
shown only from the waist down.
When I last saw Whoopee! 20 years or so ago I thought it was a marvelous
movie, but I found myself liking it a bit less this time around even though
it’s got a lot to recommend it. Among the pluses are great Walter Donaldson
songs (mostly freshly written for the film: “Makin’ Whoopee,” a satirically
bitter comment on marriage, infidelity and divorce, was apparently the only
stage song that carried over into the film); superb use of two-strip technology
by cinematographers Ray Rennahan, Lee Garmes and Gregg Toland (a decade later
Toland would shoot Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and create what is probably the most dramatic use
of high-contrast black-and-white in Hollywood’s classic era); and a personable
cast including Eddie Cantor (though his Jewish schtick gets a bit oppressive at times), Ethel Shutta as
his long-time nurse Mary Custer who has a crush on him and gets to play the
sexual aggressor, and Paul Gregory as the hunky Native American (at least we
think he is until the end of the film) Wanenis, whom the ingénue, Sally Morgan (Eleanor Hunt), has the hots for
even though her dad has promised her hand to Sheriff Bob Wells (John
Rutherford), who even though he’s officially a representative of law
enforcement is really the villain of the piece. Cantor gets a few great
one-liners and responses — my favorite line was when Wanenis announces to Henry
that he left the reservation to get a white man’s education, and Henry,
mistaking it for his sort of
white men’s education, says, “Oh, so you went to Hebrew school, too?” Among the
minuses are a typically plodding Ziegfeld plot and the typical 1920’s musical
alternation between big production numbers, intimate romantic duets (like “When
the Sun Is Low,” in which Wanenis and Sally sing of their mutual love and Whoopee! starts to look and sound like the beta version of
a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film), comedy scenes and bits of exposition to
advance the plot.
The plot, such as it is, deals with Henry loading Sally into
the mountains to get her away from having to marry creepy Sheriff Bob Wells and
hiding her in the Indian reservation, disguising himself in blackface
(supposedly he hides in an oven and it explodes, ejecting him and charring his
face and hands so he looks Black, but he’s in perfect burnt-cork makeup as he
does one of the best songs in the film, “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” later
covered by Nina Simone in the late 1950’s: she turned Gus Kahn’s line “even
Chevalier’s smile” to, of all people, “even Liberace’s smile”). Eventually all
the principals converge on the reservation and Wanenis reluctantly agrees to
give up Sally even though the two of them are deeply in love on the ground that
they won’t be happy in a mixed marriage between a white woman and an American
Indian man — only Wanenis’s supposed father, Chief Black Eagle (Chief
Caupolitan), tells him in a line McGuire probably copied from the script for
the Valentino vehicle The Sheik, whose makers probably in turn copied it from W. S. Gilbert’s libretto
for H.M.S. Pinafore that
he’s not really native at all: he’s white, a foundling Black Eagle discovered
on the desert with his dying mother after dad had fled and left them both to
die (the rotter!). Of course I’d have rather had a more specifically
anti-racist ending in which Sally proclaims her determination to love and marry
Wanenis no matter what his
racial ancestry or the discrimination that might get thrown their way because
of it, but the end we have is an O.K. resolution of a good but wildly uneven
movie which is absolutely beautiful to look at (especially the haunting outdoor
scenes on the reservation which Berkeley uses to stage the legendary parade of
chorus beauties obligatory in a Ziegfeld production) and occasionally, in Berkeley’s numbers as well as Cantor’s
solo stints, especially the song “A Girlfriend of a Boyfriend of Mine,” which
like a lot of the rest of the movie comes off today as far more homoerotic than
their creators no doubt intended!
