Babes on Broadway (MGM, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Watching Babes on Broadway immediately after Strike Up the Band only reinforced how formulaic these movies were and how much they resembled each other, repeating not only Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland as stars but Busby Berkeley as director and Fred Finkelhoffe as co-writer. As in Babes in Arms (to which Babes on Broadway was not a sequel, though the similarity in their titles made it look like one) and Strike Up the Band, Mickey Rooney plays a typical live-wire character who’s willing to do anything to achieve success in show business. Judy Garland is his precious helpmeet, though at first he sees her only as a professional partner and not a romantic one – until he finally declares his love for her at the end of Strike Up the Band and two-thirds of the way through Babes on Broadway. Babes on Broadway casts Mickey Rooney as stage-struck Tommy Williams, who’s managed to move to New York but is genteelly starving as one of the similarly broke (financially) kids who hang out at a local coffeehouse when they’re not entertaining in the basement of an Italian restaurant. Tommy dances as one of the “Three Balls of Fire” – the slogan on their business card is, “Once we get going, you can’t put us out” (I was waiting for writers Fred Finklehoffe and Elaine Ryan to have one of the other characters make a nasty joke about that, but they didn’t) – along with Ray Lambert (future dancing star Ray McDonald) and Morton “Hammy” Hammond (future director Richard Quine). The owner of the restaurant where they’re playing for tips sadly tells them that he’s going to have to close the place for lack of business, but on their last night there they receive a $5 tip from Miss Jones (Fay Bainter), who despite the “Miss” in front of her name appears to be the wife of Broadway producer Thornton Reed (James Gleason). She arranges for the Three Balls of Fire to have a private audition for Reed, but Tommy brags about it at the coffeehouse and so all the out-of-work performers who hang out there crash the audition and it becomes a typical cattle call.

As for Judy Garland, she plays Penny Morris – a naïve girl who works at a local settlement house for poor kids – and the management has been promising the kids a trip to the country for years now but keeps reneging because they can’t afford it. Tommy hits on the idea of getting his out-of-work actor friends to stage a benefit for the settlement house, which means getting approval not only from Mr. Stone (Donald Meek), the settlement house’s manager, but a mysterious politician named Bush (whom we never see) whose support they need to close down a street for a block party, since the auditorium at the settlement house only seats 100 people and isn’t big enough for the audience they need. The auditorium is, however, big enough to rehearse the main number for the show, “Hoe Down,” staged as a typical Busby Berkeley extravaganza on the classic scale, with bits of fencing used the way he’d use giant bananas as props in The Gang’s All Here three years later. Meanwhile, Jones is getting frantic calls from Thurston Reed, who’s in Philadelphia staging out-of-town tryouts for a musical revue that’s bombing utterly. He’s pleading with her to send over some fresh new talent to perk up his show, and after futilely pleading with an established adult comedy team and getting nowhere, she thinks of Tommy Williams and offers him the gig. At first he’s tempted to take it even though it means walking out on the settlement kids and their dreams of a trip to the country, and Penny is naturally angry with him for putting his own interests first and becoming the latest bad guy to dash the kids’ hopes. (There was a similar scene in Strike Up the Band in which Paul Whiteman offers Rooney’s character a job in a band opening in a New York nightclub and at first he’s willing to take it, only Judy’s character talks sense into him and persuades him he can’t let down the members of his own band just because he has a prestigious job offer.)

Ultimately Jones hands Tommy the keys to an abandoned theatre she and Reed co-own called the Duchess, and there’s a fascinating segment in which Rooney and Garland do impressions of the famous names that performed there in the venue’s heyday. The scenes of them entering the abandoned theatre are shot by Berkeley and cinematographer Lester White as almost all-out noir (remember that just before leaving Warner Bros. for MGM, Busby Berkeley had directed a quite competent crime thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a John Garfield vehicle that was surprisingly well done). Among the past performers they pay tribute to are Richard Mansfield as Cyrano de Bergerac, Harry Lauder, Fay Templeton, Blanche Ring, Marie Dressler (Judy does her big hit song “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,” from her stage show Tillie’s Nightmare that was made into a film, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, by Mack Sennett with Dressler repeating her stage role and Charlie Chaplin as the villain!), and George M. Cohan. (Mickey Rooney does a rendition of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” that compares surprisingly well to James Cagney’s version in the 1942 Cohan biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which Cagney won an Academy Award.) The show is closed in mid-performance by an obnoxious fire marshal named Moriarity (Cliff Clark), who announces that the reason the Duchess Theatre hasn’t been used in 15 years is the city government condemned it as a firetrap. (I was expecting Mickey Rooney and the other kids in the show to lock him in a convenient closet and leave him there until the show ended, but the writers chose not to go there.) Before that we’ve seen Rooney in drag doing a quite amusing impersonation of Carmen Miranda, and afterwards the troupe gives the show as planned anyway, with Ross the only audience member, and he agrees to hire them to headline his new show Babes on Broadway.

Alas, the final scene representing this show and the grand finale of the movie is done as a tribute to minstrelsy, with all but one of the performers in blackface and a giant chorus line far bigger than any real minstrel show. This ending was no doubt A-O.K. with 1941 audiences but renders the whole movie pretty outdated and lame today, though Rooney’s banjo playing (really performed on a pre-recording by ace banjo master Eddie Peabody, though Rooney does a quite good job synchronizing to Peabody’s record and making it look like he’s really playing) is good and Judy Garland’s rendition of “F.D.R. Jones” (about a Black boy who’s been given the name of the then-current President – whom Judy Garland, a lifelong liberal politically, campaigned for in 1944 and returned to the hustings for John F. Kennedy in 1960) is O.K. even though it’s not that great a song and she rushes the tempo a bit. Babes on Broadway is a quite entertaining film, like Strike Up the Band at its best when Rooney and Garland are in an intimate scene together – in this case doing the song “How About You?,” written by Burton Lane with music by Ralph Freed very much along the lines of one of Cole Porter’s “list” songs. Rooney and Garland did 10 movies together, though in only the first (Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, 1937) was she billed ahead of him. They included three in the Hardy Family series – including one called Life Begins for Andy Hardy in which Judy was given four songs but all were left on the cutting-room floor – and their final film together was Words and Music (1948), a biopic of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart with Tom Drake as Rodgers, Rooney as Hart, and Garland doing little more than a guest appearance singing “Johnny One Note” and duetting with Rooney on “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”