Happy Days (Fox Film Corporation, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

With all the gloom and doom in the news last night, when my husband Charles asked if we could watch a movie I looked for pure escapism and found it in Happy Days, a 1930 musical from William Fox’s studio before it was absorbed by 20th Century in 1935 and more recently by Disney. The date is listed as 1929 on imdb.com, but the film itself clearly bears the copyright date of 1930. It was directed by Benjamin Stoloff from a script by Sidney Lanfield (later a director himself) and Edwin J. Burke, and its plot consists of a half-hour of setup in which Margie (Marjorie White), ward of show-boat owner Col. Billy Batcher (Charles E. Evans) abd sort-of girlfriend of Batcher’s grandson Dick (Richard Keene), learns that Batcher’s show boat is stranded in Mobile because a county sheriff there has attached the boat for a bill of $700 and change the captain owes. Having heard that a number of the world’s greatest stars, including Will Rogers, Walter Catlett, Victor McLaglen and El Brendel, got their starts on Col. Batcher’s show boat, Margie hits on the bright idea of going to New York, telling them that Col. Batcher needs their help, and bringing them down to Memphis, Tennessee for a major benefit that will save the show boat.

There’;s a great scene in which Margie disguises herself as a page boy to crash the all-male environs of the Stage & Screen Club, where the big stars (the male ones, anyway) hang out. Though it’s hard to believe Marjorie White’s FTM drag would have fooled anybody (the rear shots make her womanly hips all too obvious), and she keeps forgetting to drop her voice into a convincing male register, but in the end she’s only “outed” when, as a prank, one of the actors tells her to interrupt Tom Patricula (playing himself, like most of the rest of the cast) while he’s playing pool. The real Patricola gives the supposedly male “page” a back-handed slap, and while she escapes relatively uninjured, the blow knocks her page-boy’s cap off her head and reveals her true gender. There are also some cute bits of some of the Fox stars at the time, including Will Rogers trying to get some of the others to spend the weekend at his ranch and Warner Baxter doing card tricks. Eventually Margie is able to round up the big stars to come to Memphis for the benefit, and the rest of the film – about an hour’s worth – is a revue during which the stars perform their turns. Oddly they’re presented in the form of a minstrel show, and the performers wear blackface while they’re sitting in the chorus but suddenly appear white when they actually start their songs and/or dances – an effect I’m presuming was done with the same mix of colored lights,gels and filters with which Cecil B. DeMille made Moses’ sister Miriam develop leprosy on screen in the 1923 silent version of The Ten Commandments and Rouben Mamoulian did Fredric March’s transitions from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde in his 1932 version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic.

The show is even introduced by a song called “Minstrel Memories” sung by George MacFarlane, one of the two interlocutors (whiteface performers who MC’d a minstrel show and introduced the blackface acts, many of whom got laughs from their mangling of the word “interlocutor”). The other interlocutor was, of all people, former boxer James J. Corbett, who’s decent-looking enough but I don’t think anyone seeing him here would think that 12 years later Errol Flynn would play him in a biopic. The featured performers include overwrought baritone J. Harold Murray and such non-singers as Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, as well as semi-singers like George Jessel (who’s a whiteface MC as part of the big benefit but isn’t part of the minstrel show – ironic since Jessel had starred in the strage version of The Jazz Singer, playing the part Al Jolson famously took over in the movie). The show has the lumbering quality of a lot of pre-42nd Street musicals (King of Jazz and Whoopee definitely excepted), with the camera at a discreet distance from the performers, who look like ants dancing on a wedding cake. (One of the songs is actually called “Dream on a Piece of Wedding Cake.”) There are a couple of shots in which the camera rises a bit and we get some slightly overhead shots of the chorus line, but nothing like the effects Busby Berkeley became famous for (which had already been done by Joseph Santley in The Cocoanuts, Luther Reed in Rio Rita and Albertina Rasch in Lord Byron of Broadway in 1929). The show is accompanied by George Olsen’s band, though it seems rather raucous here, a far cry from its reputation for sweet dance-pop.

At the end Margie is supposed to do her big number, “I’m On a Diet of Love” (whose lyric is as silly as you’d guess from the title), with Frank Albertson, but her on-again, off-again boyfriend Dave (ya remember Dave?) beats up Albertson, steals his costume and goes on instead. He and Margie have an argument and Jessel rather unfunnily jokes that they’re not supposed to fight like that until after they’re married. The show is a hit, the show boat is saved, and all ends more or less happily even though it’s hard to hold out much hope for the future of Marjorie White and her ill-tempered on-screen boyfriend Richard Keene! Happy Days was the second film shot by Fox in the short-lived 70 mm “Grandeur Screen” process (theatre owners balked, especially when the Depression hit, of spending the money for new projectors and screens just after they’d already absorbed the expense of retooling for sound films!), though unlike tie first – The Big Trail, an epic cross-country Western which gave John Wayne his first featured role (and was a giant commercial flop, delaying Wayne’s emergence into stardom for nine years) – no Grandeur Screen prints of Happy Days are known to exist. I also found myself wondering if any sequences for Happy Days were shot in Multicolor, the short-lived rival to Technicolor backed by William Fox and Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes), but so far as I know no Multicolor films exist at all and the biggest sequence ever shot in the process, the “Turn On the Heat” from Fox’s 1929 mega-hit musical Sunnyside Up, survives only in black-and-white.