Sitting Pretty (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night Charles and I watched Godzilla vs. Kong the movie ended soon enough that I was able to run something else for us afterwards, a grey-label DVD of a quite engaging 1933 Paramount musical called Sitting Pretty. Not to be confused with the 1948 20th Century-Fox Sitting Pretty, which was the first film to introduce Clifton Webb’s “Mr. Belvedere” character, this Sitting Pretty was a comedy-musical starring Jack Oakie and Jack Haley as Chick Parker and Pete Pendleton. They work at a song-publishing company on New York’s famous Tin Pan Alley (which got that name from the joke that the sound of all those aspiring songwriters and song demonstrators playing all those out-of-tune pianos at once sounded like a whole bunch of people pounding on tin), and in his spare time Chick is constantly borrowing money from his co-workers and losing it on crap games. (Today he’d be considered a gambling addict.) With Chick as the composer and Pete as the lyricist, they come up with a song that’s an actual hit, “I Want to Meander with Miranda” (the real-life songwriting team of Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, who wrote the score for this film, must have had a lot of fun with their tongues firmly in their cheeks to write the dorky and awkward but appealing ditties this film is full of). They get $300, which Pete wants to use for the two to travel to Hollywood where they’ve been told the big money is, but of course Chick loses all but $15 of it in his latest dice game and they have to hitchhike to L.A. on what they have left.

Along the way they meet several characters, including a middle-aged couple who throw them out of their car when “I Wanna Meander with Miranda” comes on the radio and Chick and Pete boast that they wrote it – it turns out they always hated that song – and a lunch-wagon owner named Dorothy (Ginger Rogers in the last film of her apprenticeship; in her next movie, Flying Down to Rio, she’d dance for the first time with Fred Astaire … and the rest, as they say, is history) who comes to Hollywood with Chick, Pete and Dorothy’s kid brother Buzz (Jerry Tucker, who gets to take advantage of being able to play a child character as a tough-minded brat before Shirley Temple’s great success a year later forced every movie kid of either gender into her gooey-sweet mold). They’ve got it made – or at least they think they do – when a movie producer named Jules Clark writes them a check for $100 and promises them a contract, but then he turns out to be a nut who’d been furloughed from a mental institution and was pretending to be a rich man and to run a studio. (The imdb.com cast list for this film credits old silent-era star Lew Cody with playing Jules Clark, but it’s not clear whether he’s the crazy guy or the real Jules Clark of Acme Studios,who appears later in the action.) They end up living in what would then have been called a “tourist camp” but would now be a “motel” run by Tannenbaum (Gregory Ratoff), who doubles as an agent. At this point there’s a great number set in and around the neighborhood that features women with women, men with men, and two naked ladies taking a shower – they were probably wearing body stockings but you could still see their nipples, definitely marking this as part of the so-called “pre-Code” period of relatively loose enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code.

By impersonating Tannenbaum, Chick and Pete bluff their way into a job at Acme – the sight of the real Jules Clark trying to have five different conversations at once is an appealing gag – and they get the assignment to write songs for Acme’s biggest (and predictably diva-esque) star, Gloria Duval (Thelma Todd). Our grey-label DVD glitched here and we missed a few minutes of the movie, but we didn’t have any trouble figuring out what happened next: Chick “goes Hollywood” in a big way, buying a huge house and a fancy car, and starting an affair with Duval even though it’s plain old Dorothy at home whom he really loves. Then Chick starts missing deadlines and showing up late for work, and the real Jules Clark fires him. There’s a nice grim scene in which Pete visits Chick just as the repossessors show up at his fancy house and take every stick of furniture inside it, ending up by taking his piano and thereby leaving Chick no way to finish his new song. They go out to a speakeasy (Sitting Pretty was made during the last dregs of Prohibition) and order various drinks, leaving different amounts of liquid in each one so it will sound the right notes to play Chick’s song. As they get more and more drunk they meet an equally sloshed fellow customer who turns out to be Morris Vinton (Hale Hamilton), the biggest director at the rival Superba Studios. With all three sloshed to the gills, Chick and Pete end up at the lavish mansion of the Superba head, where Morris is being given a party in his honor, complete with a harpist playing an instrumental version of Oscar Rasbach’s setting of Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” – and yes, that’s as ghastly and pretentious as it sounds.

Ultimately it ends as you’d expect it to, with Morris hiring Chick and Pete to write songs for his next big movie and Dorothy (ya remember Dorothy?) to star. The film is represented by a big production number directed by Larry Ceballos in full Busby Berkeley style – Ceballos had actually come out to Hollywood before Berkeley did and had done dance numbers for big early Warner Bros. musicals like On With the Show and the now mostly-lost Gold Diggers on Broadway, but once Berkeley himself switched from Goldwyn to Warners, the Warner brothers lost interest in Ceballos. He actually sued them when they took him off the job of dance direction for Footlight Parade and put Berkeley on it, though my source didn’t give the outcome of his lawsuit, and he turned up here with an apparent chip on his shoulder and a determination to show he could do this sort of big number just as well as Berkeley could. It’s set to the song “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?,” the one song from this film that has become a standard (and I suspect the Paramount executives were aware it was the best song in the film and the one most likely to become a hit, since they used an instrumental version under the opening credits) – though given that I learned this song from Bing Crosby’s hit record I’d always assumed it was from one of his films. We get a stentorian Irish tenor singing the song to Ginger Rogers, who does a few nondescript dance moves, before the camera takes us into the rafters and the chorus girls are filmed from overhead doing interesting things with fans. (Charles was surprised that they could get away with showing a fan dance on film even in the relative freedom of the “pre-Code” era, though a year after this – just under the wire before the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic pressure group whose name says it all, forced Hollywood to get serious about enforcing the Code – Paramount put Sally Rand as a guest star in the film Bolero and billed her as “doing her famous Fan Dance.”) There’s a bit of a surprise at the end, after the big number, when Chick tells Dorothy she’d be better off marrying Pete than him – and Dorothy agrees and tells him she and Pete already got married two weeks earlier.

Directed by Harry Joe Brown – who got the rare honor of having his name appear on the credits in cursive script – from a script by a writing committee (Nina Wilcox Putnam and an uncredited Harry Stoddard, story; Jack McGowan, Lou Breslow and the redoubtable S. J. Perelman, screenplay) Sitting Pretty is one of those movies that simultaneously exploits typical movie clichés and makes fun of them. It’s a movie that’s pretty predictable but still a lot of fun, even though during the final number Fred Astaire could have come in, whirled Ginger Rogers into his arms and made this already fine movie even better. But then this was Paramount, which had famously tested Fred Astaire in 1928 and said of him, “Can’t sing. Can’t act. Balding. Can dance a little.”