Sweetie (Paramount, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Wednesday, December 24, Christmas eve, my husband Charles and I followed up The Selfish Giant with a quirky 1929 musical called Sweetie to which YouTube’s algorithm had directed me. The leads of Sweetie were Nancy Carroll, Helen Kane, and Jack Oakie, and it was directed by Frank Tuttle from a script by Lloyd Corrigan and George Marion, Jr. Marion also wrote the lyrics to all but one of the songs, with Richard Whiting as composer. (Whiting’s daughter Margaret became a singing star in her own right in the 1940’s, and when I did a CD compilation of Richard Whiting’s songs I deliberately included Margaret Whiting’s rendition of his “Ain’t We Got Fun?” in a 1950’s duet with Bob Hope.) I was interested in Sweetie mainly because of Helen Kane’s presence in the cast. She’d just been brought to my mind for a quirky reason: on an earlier YouTube run I’d stumbled on a record by the great singer Annette Hanshaw of a song called “Is There Anything Wrong with That?” which she sang in Kane’s boop-boop-a-doop style. Hanshaw’s record was originally issued on the cheap Diva label, a subsidiary of Columbia, under the pseudonym “Dot Dare.” Executives at Victor, Kane’s label, threatened to sue Kane because they were sure it was Kane using a pseudonym to break her contract with them, and Kane and Hanshaw, who were actually good friends, laughed about the lawsuit over a lunch date. (Maybe for that reason the record was reissued under Warren’s own name on another cheap subsidiary of Columbia, Velvetone, and that was the one posted to YouTube.)

Broadway star Barbara Pell (Nancy Carroll) is dating Pelham University’s football star, Biff Bentley (Stanley Smith, who’s pretty nondescript as singer, actor, and screen personality except for a couple of longshots in which he looks eerily like James Dean, who hadn’t been born yet when Sweetie was made). Pelham, located in the town of that name in North Carolina, is an all-male college located next to an all-female finishing school in which the one class we see is an outdoor session on the correct way to pour a cup of tea. Alas, on the eve of Pelham’s big football game against their cross-town rival, Oglethorpe University, Biff Bentley threatens to quit school to marry Barbara. Biff’s teammates, including Axel, talk him out of quitting the team, and Biff accordingly tells Barbara that he won’t be able to marry her for eight more months until the school term ends. Barbara isn’t happy about that, especially since she’s already quit her job and doesn’t think she’ll be able to get another one. (Sweetie was released November 2, 1929, just weeks after the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression, and the whole business of Barbara’s employment anxieties seems much more like a plot turn from a 1930’s than a 1920’s movie.) Fortunately she doesn’t have to worry about making a living because just then her uncle dies and she inherits Pelham University – Barbara’s original last name was “Pelham” but she shortened it to “Pell” as a stage name – and she determines to take over the college, run it directly, and use her control to get revenge on the football team for talking Biff out of marrying her. Barbara’s idea of revenge is to give the entire football team a snap quiz in English and disqualify anyone who fails it from the Big Game between Pelham and Oglethorpe. Her objective is to keep Biff from playing, though the team member who’s most concerned about failing the test is Axel. As for Helen Kane, she plays a local student at the women’s school called “Helen Fry” who has the hots for tackle Axel Bronstrup (Stuart Erwin, even more annoyingly whiny than he was as the nominal romantic lead in International House three years later). Her way of courting him is to aim a BB rifle and shoot pellets at him.

There’s a big campus dance on the eve of the Big Game, at which Helen Kane performs songs called “I Think You’ll LIke It” and “Prep Step” and the King’s Men male vocal group (whom we’d just heard in a Fibber McGee and Molly Christmas episode from December 6, 1949, 20 years after the film was made) do the Pelham school song, following which a member of the cast of Barbara’s Broadway show, “Tip-Tap” Thompson (Jack Oakie, who’s actually not bad-looking and pretty good), does a jazz improv on it that turns into a song called “Alma Mammy” in which Oakie does a quite good impression of Al Jolson. (Fortunately, the filmmakers did not have him do it in blackface.) For inexplicable reasons, Thompson has enrolled at Pelham as a student, maybe to date Helen, though she ends up with Axel at the end. Barbara is so disgusted by the whole business of running a men’s college that she agrees to sell the campus to the head of its hated rival, Dr. Oglethorpe (Charles Sellon), who intends to close Pelham and tear it down. Impulsively Barbara makes a bet with Oglethorpe, who insists that she can’t back out of the deal once she’s agreed to it, that the future of the college will rest on the big game’s outcome: if Pelham wins it stays independent and if it loses Oglethorpe will take it over and destroy it. Unfortunately Biff Bentley, who requalified for the team by passing a makeup exam the morning of the Big Game, learns of Barbara’s bet and he’s so demoralized he deliberately plays wretchedly during the first half. During halftime Barbara gives him a pep talk and it energizes him to play well and ultimately win the game for Pelham. I know that a late-1920’s musical is hardly the place you should look for plot or character consistency, but Sweetie is unusually lame in those departments even for the genre and the time. The writers never explain to us just why Barbara is so bitter about Biff’s betrayal (at least as she sees it) that she’s willing to destroy her whole inheritance just to get back at him. Nor do they explain why Biff is so bitter about Barbara’s wager that he deliberately plays badly to throw the game to Oglethorpe.

Watching Sweetie I couldn’t help but think of better movies involving the principals and these plot devices – including the Marx Brothers’ screamingly funny Horse Feathers (1932), also about a college which is in danger of going out of business because its football team hasn’t won a game in decades (and which I think was shot on some of the same college sets as Sweetie), but has it all over this film for thrills as well as comedy. As I noted above, Stuart Erwin got to be in International House, though his whininess wasn’t as oppressive in that movie because of the rest of the cast: W. C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Bela Lugosi in an unexpectedly fine comic performance as a Russian general determined to buy a new TV invention. There’s also a surprise scene of the Broadway show being rehearsed in which Charles noticed that the proscenium wasn’t centered in the frame (a dead giveaway that Sweetie was originally shot in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was redone for sound-on-film, instead of letterboxing the image the people at the film lab just sliced off one-ninth of the image from the side to make room for a film soundtrack), and a great scene in which Helen Kane sings the song “He’s So Unusual.” This was not written by Richard Whiting and George Marion, Jr., like the other songs in the film, but by Abner Silver and Al Sherman (music) and Al Lewis (lyrics). It’s an odd song in that Cyndi Lauper did a cover of it on her first album, and even tweaked the song’s title for the name of her album: She’s So Unusual.

It was also done on Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, one of the Columbia “Art Deco” series of CD’s devoted to the unwitting genderfuck committed by music publishers, who insisted that the pronouns in a lyric could not be changed even if a woman was singing a song clearly written for a man, or vice versa. (That’s one reason why Irving Berlin advised aspiring songwriters not to use the words “he” and “she,” but use “you” and “I” instead, so the songs could be sung by either mainstream gender without change.) On Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man “He’s So Unusual” is performed by Fred Rich and His Orchestra, with an all-male group called The Rollickers doing the vocal. But the big “plug” song from this movie was “My Sweeter Than Sweet,” which I’d heard before on Frank Trumbauer’s recording from 1929 with Smith Ballew on vocal. It’s performed here by Nancy Carroll (who for some reason doesn’t get to dance in this film even though dancing was one of her strengths as a performer), as well as by Stanley Smith and a chorus. As a film, Sweetie has a certain charm, and there’s less of the usual early-sound clunkiness than usual (though the actors are still pausing between hearing their cue lines and delivering their own), but though the songs are generally good for the time the overall plot is even more meaningless than usual and Nancy Carroll has a few quite powerful closeups (she’d been a star in late silents and had got to work with Gary Cooper in the part-talkie The Shopworn Angel, later remade in 1940 with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) but for the most part she’s pretty blah, albeit in an underwritten role playing a character who does a lot of scummy things for very unclear motivations.