by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Gold Diggers in Paris, a 1938 Warner Bros. release (actually as Warner Bros., not First National!) that closed out
the Gold Diggers series and
turned out to be unexpectedly good — the most entertaining series entry since Gold
Diggers of 1933. The early signs weren’t
good; Dick Powell was replaced in the male lead by Rudy Vallée, an odd choice
because by 1938 his vocal style was considered incredibly dated (though within
two years he’d make a comeback appearing in Preston Sturges’ The Palm
Beach Story and in 1943 he’d have the
biggest hit record in the country with “As Time Goes By,” a 1931 song by Herman
Hupfeld that had been used as the recurring theme in the film Casablanca — with the Musicians’ Union striking the record
companies, no new records could be made of “As Time Goes By” so Vallée’s old
one from 1931 was reissued by RCA Victor and was an enormous hit) and he’d been
such an obnoxious presence both on- and off-screen in his previous films that
when he appeared in the 1929 film Glorifying the American Girl and presented his fellow cast and crew members with
autographed pictures of himself, some of them were so put off by his egomania
they posted the pictures in the studio urinals and literally pissed on them. As things turned out, Vallée’s voice
turned out to be a good deal mellower than Powell’s — not entirely a good thing
since some of the songs in this movie actually could have used the higher but more “butch” sound of
Powell’s voice — and he’s an acceptable if not exactly scintillating presence
on screen in a pretty ordinary musical juvenile lead. The presence of no fewer
than seven credited screenwriters
— Jerry Horwin and James Seymour, “idea”; Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and
Maurice Leo, “story”; Earl Baldwin and Warren Duff, “script” — wasn’t a good
sign (regular readers of this blog will be aware that one of my general-field
theories of cinema is that the quality of a film is inversely proportional to its number of writers), but somehow
the writing committee and director Ray Enright (also not exactly a name to
conjure with in movie history) managed to come up with a genuinely entertaining
and even zany comedy to keep us occupied during the long stretch between Busby
Berkeley’s two big numbers, one at the beginning (“I Wanna Go Back to Bali”)
and one at the end (“Stranger in Paree” with a reprise of “I Wanna Go Back to
Bali” at the end). Indeed, Gold Diggers in Paris at times seems like the beta version of a Preston
Sturges movie, not only because Vallée is in it but because it features a
marvelous gag — gangster Mike Coogan (Ed Brophy) is using his ill-gotten gains
to subsidize the Academy Ballet company of maniacal dancer Padrinsky (Curt
Bois) because he’s developed a love of high culture — Sturges later used in the
original version of Unfaithfully Yours. The main plot of Gold Diggers in Paris centers around an international exposition being
held in Paris and a committee assigned to recruit the world’s finest ballet
companies for a competition.
Maurice Giraud (Hugh Herbert) — who’s so ditzy one
expects he was the great-granduncle of Inspector Clouseau (a pretty standard
woo-woo role for Herbert without the balls he seemed to acquire in Million
Dollar Legs, where he was teamed with W. C.
Fields as the principal rivals for the Klopstokian Presidency) — is assigned to
go to New York and sign the Academy Ballet for the dance contest, only through
a mix-up with a taxi driver he ends up at the Club Bally (spelled “Bali” in the
American Film Institute Catalog
but “Bally” on screen), whose owners Terry Moore (Rudy Vallée) and Duke Dennis
(Allen Jenkins) are about to go out of business because, like some of the
Internet startups in the late 1990’s (remember Kazaa?), they’re spending more
money per customer than they’re getting back in the form of income. (There’s a
funny bit in which their doorman, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, overhears their
accountant tell them this — whereupon Eddie decides to help out by actively discouraging people from entering the club, telling them
the food is terrible, the drinks are watered and everything is overpriced and
they’d have a much better time at some of the other nightclubs down the
street.) Terry and Duke seize on Giraud’s invitation as a way out not only from
their club’s bankruptcy but from Terry’s ex-wife Mona (Gloria Dickson) who’s
hounding him for back alimony and threatening to have him arrested if he
doesn’t pay up. In order to turn their gold-digging chorus line into a
reasonable simulacrum of a ballet company, Terry and Duke hire ballet teacher
Luis Leoni (Fritz Feld, another example of one-accent-is-as-good-as-another
casting), who in turn brings along his only remaining student, Kay Morrow
(Rosemary Lane), with whom Terry does a meet-cute (he encounters her trapped in
a trapeze that was supposed to allow her to dance upside-down on the ceiling
but has only got her stuck, and she demands that he get her down — which he
does, the hard way) that establishes the hate-at-first-sight that tells any
hardened moviegoer that they belong together. Glitches occur on the way over as
Mona wangles a way into the show and into Kay’s stateroom as her roommate, and
even more glitches occur once they make it to Paris and LeBrec (Melville
Cooper), the organizer of the contest, demands to see the Academy Ballet’s
rehearsal. Also in the dramatis personae is the Schnickelfritz Band, who are part of Terry’s troupe and are
half a fairly good Dixieland band and half the beta version of Spike Jones and
His City Slickers, complete with noisemakers and an overall approach to their music
that’s not as funny as they clearly thought it was but is still amusing. (Given
how good the musicians are — especially the trumpet player — when they’re
playing “straight” I suspect that some of the Schnickelfritzes had musician
doubles on the soundstage playing the more difficult parts for them.)
The real Padrinsky and his backer, Mike Coogan — who in a
pretty incredible turn of events ends up befriending Duke Dennis and agreeing
to club LeBrec for him to keep him away from the rehearsals, only by a mistake
he clubs Leoni instead — show up and demand that the French government deport
the impostors, but thanks to a stratagem from Mona (who inexplicably turns into
a good sport by the end) Padrinsky and his company get deported instead, the Bally dancers go on at the festival
and win the grand prize (well, with Busby Berkeley choreographing for them and
seemingly moving the finals to Le Bourget airport, why not?) and Terry and Kay
end up together. While hardly as zany as it could have been with Preston Sturges
directing (we can dream, can’t we?), Gold Diggers in Paris is a quite entertaining movie, a rambunctious farce
that builds itself from some pretty clichéd situations but blessedly doesn’t
take them too seriously — which is just as well because the musical portions
aren’t that great: like a lot of
the Berkeley numbers towards the end of his Warners career (when Jack Warner
was severely limiting his budgets), his two big productions here seem to stop
just when they’re getting interesting, and the songs themselves are
surprisingly undistinguished given that Harry Warren wrote them with
collaborators both old (Al Dubin) and new (Johnny Mercer), but it’s still a fun
movie and a worthy capstone to the Gold Diggers series. Incidentally I read in the American
Film Institute Catalog that a company
called Equitable Pictures actually started a film called Gold Diggers
of Paris in 1933,
starring Madge Bellamy (from White Zombie),
Gilbert Roland and the marvelous villainess Natalie Moorhead, but changed the
title at the last minute to Gigolettes of Paris after Warner Bros. complained that the original
title could have been confused with Gold Diggers of 1933.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Million Dollar Legs (Paramount, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I cracked open the latest boxed set I’d ordered from Turner Classic Movies called, howlingly inaccurately, Universal Rarities: Films of the 1930’s — inaccurately because while the four films in it are titles Universal owns, they were all originally produced by Paramount, acquired by MCA-TV in the 1950’s and later assigned to Universal when it was purchased by MCA in the 1960’s : the 1932 comedy Million Dollar Legs with Jack Oakie and W. C. Fields (billed in that order), Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties (shot during the “pre-Code” glasnost but released post-Code and blatantly butchered; there’s a jarring cut in the middle of one of Mae West’s songs that all too obviously removed a particularly racy chorus at the censors’ behest), the 1937 film Artists and Models (a Raoul Walsh-directed musical starring Richard Arlen and Jack Benny — Robert Osborne, in an introduction included with the DVD set, said it was Jack Benny’s first starring feature, but arguably that honor belongs to Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round three years earlier: Gene Raymond and Nancy Carroll were the stars of that marvelously quirky combination of musical and crime thriller but Benny was billed third and his part ran through the entire movie) and — a weird fit with the other three movies — the 1937 maritime melodrama Souls at Sea, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper. (About the only connection that film had with comedy was that in 1940 Laurel and Hardy parodied its title for their last film at Hal Roach Studios, Saps at Sea, though the plot was not a parody of Souls at Sea and the films otherwise have nothing to do with each other.) TCM also advertised all four films in the box as new to DVD, which is not true; Belle of the Nineties had a previous DVD issue in the mid-2000’s (I know because I bought it then and Charles and I watched it).
I cracked open the latest boxed set I’d ordered from Turner Classic Movies called, howlingly inaccurately, Universal Rarities: Films of the 1930’s — inaccurately because while the four films in it are titles Universal owns, they were all originally produced by Paramount, acquired by MCA-TV in the 1950’s and later assigned to Universal when it was purchased by MCA in the 1960’s : the 1932 comedy Million Dollar Legs with Jack Oakie and W. C. Fields (billed in that order), Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties (shot during the “pre-Code” glasnost but released post-Code and blatantly butchered; there’s a jarring cut in the middle of one of Mae West’s songs that all too obviously removed a particularly racy chorus at the censors’ behest), the 1937 film Artists and Models (a Raoul Walsh-directed musical starring Richard Arlen and Jack Benny — Robert Osborne, in an introduction included with the DVD set, said it was Jack Benny’s first starring feature, but arguably that honor belongs to Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round three years earlier: Gene Raymond and Nancy Carroll were the stars of that marvelously quirky combination of musical and crime thriller but Benny was billed third and his part ran through the entire movie) and — a weird fit with the other three movies — the 1937 maritime melodrama Souls at Sea, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Gary Cooper. (About the only connection that film had with comedy was that in 1940 Laurel and Hardy parodied its title for their last film at Hal Roach Studios, Saps at Sea, though the plot was not a parody of Souls at Sea and the films otherwise have nothing to do with each other.) TCM also advertised all four films in the box as new to DVD, which is not true; Belle of the Nineties had a previous DVD issue in the mid-2000’s (I know because I bought it then and Charles and I watched it).
The movie we watched last night was Million Dollar Legs, a really wild comedy (the posters in 1932
announced, “It’s Insane! — It’s Joyous!,” and both adjectives were quite
correct) that managed to pull off within the limits of early-1930’s Hollywood
the same kind of relentless assault on the funnybone Monty Python did on the
BBC in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It’s set largely in a fictitious
country called “Klopstokia,” made up of all the mittel-Europan standing sets on the Paramount backlot and
introduced in a title as “Chief Exports — Goats and Nuts,” “Chief Imports —
Goats and Nuts,” “Chief Inhabitants — Goats and Nuts.” Migg Tweeny (Jack Oakie)
is a super-salesman who works for the Baldwin Brush Company, whose CEO, Mr.
Baldwin (George Barbier), is in Klopstokia with Tweeny on a sales trip. Only
Tweeny takes a wrong turn with his sample case and bumps into Angela (Susan
Fleming, a quite personable and appealing actress who quit the business in 1936
to marry Harpo Marx), and the two instantly fall in love at first sight. Anxious to take the
steamer out of Klopstokia with his boss, Migg commandeers an ornate carriage he
thinks is a cab, but is in fact the official vehicle of Klopstokia’s President
(W. C. Fields) — who just happens to be Angela’s father. In fact, according to
the wild script by Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who got the job because his brother
Herman was the associate producer of the film — which has led to some sources
claiming that Herman actually wrote it, which he didn’t), Henry Myers and Nick
Barrows, all Klopstokian women
are named Angela and all Klopstokian men are named George (though there’s one
exception in the latter department: Angela’s pre-pubescent brother Willie,
played by child actor Dickie Moore).
What’s more, every Klopstokian is a
super-athlete — we’re supposed to believe, I think, that that’s due to their
subsisting largely on a diet of goat’s milk — and instead of elections, the
Klopstokians select their president by arm-wrestling matches. The Secretary of
the Treasury (Hugh Herbert, in a much stronger role than he usually got to play at Warners — apparently
having a part in a film with people like W. C. Fields inspired him a good deal
more than the rather dreary “woo-woo” roles he played in the Warners musicals)
is working out, determined to beat the President at arm wrestling so he can
take over, and the rest of the Klopstokian cabinet is in league with him: they
have a secret meeting place (there’s an elevator button reading “Down” next to
a tree which lowers the tree and creates the entrance to their Batcave) where
they plot their schemes, which basically involve taking advantage of
Klopstokia’s $8 million debt to dethrone W. C. Fields and take over. Migg
discovers this when he takes Angela for a walk through the woods and she
accidentally sits down on the button — this comes after Migg has been appointed
Fields’ privy councilor when, sentenced to be tortured and killed by a firing
squad as punishment for Fields’ daughter’s suitors, he instead talks them out
of killing him and into buying his company’s brushes — and Migg, whom Fields
calls “Sweetheart” (making for some pretty outrageously gender-bending gags
even by the relatively loose standards of the “pre-Code” era!) because that’s
what his daughter calls him, hits on the idea of entering a Klopstokian team in
the 1932 Olympics, which were being held in the Los Angeles Coliseum (and
Paramount released the film a few weeks before the start of the actual Olympics
to use them as promotion); once Klopstokia’s super-athletes sweep the Olympics,
Migg reasons, his boss Mr. Baldwin will shower sponsorship money on them and
Klopstokia will be able to pay off its national debt.
Only the corrupt cabinet
members (a veritable who’s-who of slapstick comedy sidekicks: Billy Gilbert,
Vernon Dent, Teddy Hart, John Sinclair, and Sam Adams) hit on a
counter-strategy: they’ll call on the internationally famous femme
fatale, “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can
Resist” (Lyda Roberti, the heavily accented blonde singer who introduced George
and Ira Gershwin’s “My Cousin from Milwaukee” in the 1933 flop musical Pardon
My English and who died tragically young at
age 29), to seduce all the Klopstokian male athletes one by one so that when
they find out she’s betrayed them all, their morale will be crushed and they’ll do wretchedly. When the
cabinet members go to visit her, there’s a nameplate outside her door reading,
“Mata Machree: The Woman No Man Can
Resist. Not Responsible for Men Left After 30 Days,” and when she
actually deigns to see them she makes a grand entrance down a long staircase to
the tune of the “Land of Hope and Glory” strain of Elgar’s Pomp and
Circumstance March No. 2. She’s quite
obviously being played as a parody of Greta Garbo — she’s even given one of
Garbo’s most famous off-screen
lines, “I t’ank I go home now” (during an argument with Louis B. Mayer over a
contract dispute in 1928, Garbo told him, “I t’ank I go home now,” and left his
office; everyone at MGM thought she simply meant she was returning to the
bungalow she was staying in in Hollywood … until the next time they heard from
her, when they found out she was in Sweden) — though she also gets to do one of
the almost incomprehensible hot-jazz vocals she was famous for, “When I Get Hot
It’s Terrific,” written by Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger. Mata’s machinations
work — they also temporarily derail the relationship between Migg and Angela —
but Angela drags Mata into the Klopstokian locker room, she confesses to the
athletes that she never loved any of them, and this restores their morale and
they go on to win the overall medal count — thanks to a weight-lifting
performance by W. C. Fields at the end: competing against Hugh Herbert as a
free-lance entrant he seems like he’s going to be unable to lift the
1,000-pound weight until, at Angela’s urging, Migg goads him into getting
angry, whereupon he not only lifts it but hurls it far enough he wins the
shot-put medal as well.
And as if all this isn’t zany enough, there’s also a
former Klopstokian national anthem, “Woof Bloogle Jig,” which is actually the
melody Richard Whiting (Margaret Whiting’s father) wrote for the title song of
the Ernst Lubitsch-George Cukor One Hour with You, starring Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier,
released by Paramount earlier in 1932, but with gibberish lyrics supplied by
Harry Myers; Angela explains these represent “the old Klopstokian language,
which we spoke before we all learned English.” (At last someone in Hollywood parodied the insistence in American
movies that everyone in the world
spoke English, no matter what country they were from or where the story took
place.) Million Dollar Legs is so
arbitrarily put together it makes the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup seem like a model of plot coherence by comparison,
and though W. C. Fields is screamingly funny in it it does suffer from his lack of involvement with the script
(and though Fields at this point was large but without the alcoholic bloat he
acquired later, believing him as a weight-lifter so powerful he makes Arnold
Schwarzenegger look like Twiggy is a bit of a stretch even in this
anything-for-a-laugh context), even though it has some of his classic gags,
including the “hearty handclasp” and the bit in which he would put his cane
over his shoulder, then try to put his hat on, and his hat would end up on the
tip of his cane instead of his head.
Million Dollar Legs may not be the funniest movie ever made (as claimed
by one over-the-top imdb.com contributor) but it’s appealing in its own
zaniness (and it’s interesting that two of the actors in it, Jack Oakie and
Billy Gilbert, later turned up in Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler spoof The
Great Dictator) and especially for the
droll Keaton-esque performance by Andy Clyde, who seems to be the possessor of
the “million dollar legs” alluded to in the title (the working titles were “On
Your Mark” — the name Joseph L. Mankiewicz gave his original story — and
“Million Dollar Feet”) since (thanks to fast-motion photography) he’s so fast a
runner he can give the other contestants in a mile race a 200-yard head start
and still win. (The fact that the Olympics are running a mile race itself dates
this movie: in today’s Olympics all the track events are at distances measured
in metric units — actually, according to infoplease.com, the Olympics were
already running races at metric distances in 1932.) Paramount reused the title Million
Dollar Legs for a Betty Grable musical in
1932 (Grable moved from RKO to Fox to Paramount and back again to Fox, where
she finally broke through as a star when she was a last-minute replacement for
Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way)
but the two films have nothing to do with each other plot-wise. The film is directed by Eddie Cline, who would return to
Fields at Universal in 1940 and make his last three starring movies (My
Little Chickadee, The Bank Dick and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break), who before he became a director was a Keystone
Kop (as was Hank Mann, who supposedly has an uncredited bit part as a customs
inspector), so he knew a thing or two, three or several about slapstick!
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Gold Diggers of 1937 (Warner Bros., 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
For our film last night I continued our trip through the Warner Bros. Gold Diggers series of musicals — which began with Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929, its remake Gold Diggers of 1933, unrelated stories Gold Diggers of 1935, Gold Diggers of 1937 and ending with Gold Diggers in Paris (in which the titular chorines are mistaken for a ballet troupe and awarded a government-sponsored cultural exchange tour to the French capital). The episode we saw last night was Gold Diggers of 1937, which Charles and I had watched over a decade ago and I had thought then was a stronger movie plot-wise than Gold Diggers of 1935 even though the numbers were weaker. This time around the plot seemed interminable and there’s only one big Busby Berkeley production, “Love Is Just Like War” (sometimes the song is referred to as “All’s Fair in Love and War”), and it happens at the very end of the film. The movie begins with a pre-credits sequence — rare in a 1930’s film — though it’s just Dick Powell in a marching-band uniform, wearing a thin “roo” moustache, singing the Harry Warren-Al Dubin song “With Plenty of Money and You” directly at the camera. For this one Warners decided to try some other songwriters; they had Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg (whom they’d hired for Al Jolson’s last Warners film, The Singing Kid) write three songs for this movie but Berkeley, who always felt more comfortable with Harry Warren than any other composer, insisted that the big final number be a Warren-Dubin piece. Lloyd Bacon, the (hack) director of 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, helmed this one from a script by Warren Duff — the American Film Institute Catalog credits Tom Reed with “contribution to scenario construction” and there are a few lines in which I thought I detected Harburg’s decidedly Left-wing slant (Harburg, Arlen’s long-term collaborator and best remembered for their work together on The Wizard of Oz, was blacklisted through much of the 1950’s, which is why Ira Gershwin was the lyricist for Arlen on A Star Is Born), one in which Glenda Farrell refers to “the capitalistic system” in a way that suggests she does not approve of what it’s making her do, and also the bizarre lyrics to the opening song, a hymn to life insurance sung by Rosmer Peck (Dick Powell) — and yes, that’s the name Warren Duff stuck him with — at the apex of an insurance salesmen’s convention to which he’s been brought by his boss Andy Callahan (William Davidson), who’s coined phrases like “Life insurance is immortal” and “The Good Life [the name of his company] goes rolling along,” which itself sounds like a cue for a lyric sung to the tune of “The Caisson Song.”
For our film last night I continued our trip through the Warner Bros. Gold Diggers series of musicals — which began with Gold Diggers of Broadway in 1929, its remake Gold Diggers of 1933, unrelated stories Gold Diggers of 1935, Gold Diggers of 1937 and ending with Gold Diggers in Paris (in which the titular chorines are mistaken for a ballet troupe and awarded a government-sponsored cultural exchange tour to the French capital). The episode we saw last night was Gold Diggers of 1937, which Charles and I had watched over a decade ago and I had thought then was a stronger movie plot-wise than Gold Diggers of 1935 even though the numbers were weaker. This time around the plot seemed interminable and there’s only one big Busby Berkeley production, “Love Is Just Like War” (sometimes the song is referred to as “All’s Fair in Love and War”), and it happens at the very end of the film. The movie begins with a pre-credits sequence — rare in a 1930’s film — though it’s just Dick Powell in a marching-band uniform, wearing a thin “roo” moustache, singing the Harry Warren-Al Dubin song “With Plenty of Money and You” directly at the camera. For this one Warners decided to try some other songwriters; they had Harold Arlen and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg (whom they’d hired for Al Jolson’s last Warners film, The Singing Kid) write three songs for this movie but Berkeley, who always felt more comfortable with Harry Warren than any other composer, insisted that the big final number be a Warren-Dubin piece. Lloyd Bacon, the (hack) director of 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, helmed this one from a script by Warren Duff — the American Film Institute Catalog credits Tom Reed with “contribution to scenario construction” and there are a few lines in which I thought I detected Harburg’s decidedly Left-wing slant (Harburg, Arlen’s long-term collaborator and best remembered for their work together on The Wizard of Oz, was blacklisted through much of the 1950’s, which is why Ira Gershwin was the lyricist for Arlen on A Star Is Born), one in which Glenda Farrell refers to “the capitalistic system” in a way that suggests she does not approve of what it’s making her do, and also the bizarre lyrics to the opening song, a hymn to life insurance sung by Rosmer Peck (Dick Powell) — and yes, that’s the name Warren Duff stuck him with — at the apex of an insurance salesmen’s convention to which he’s been brought by his boss Andy Callahan (William Davidson), who’s coined phrases like “Life insurance is immortal” and “The Good Life [the name of his company] goes rolling along,” which itself sounds like a cue for a lyric sung to the tune of “The Caisson Song.”
Of course, Rosmer hates being a life-insurance salesman — so much so that
he’s got a piano set up in his office, where he writes songs for his hoped-for
break in a Broadway production. The insurance convention takes place in
Atlantic City, where there’s a show playing that closes “out of town,” and on
the train back to New York the chorines in this production, led by Norma Perry
(Joan Blondell — Dick Powell’s vis-à-vis in this one now that they had tied the
knot in real life as well) and Genevieve Larkin (Glenda Farrell, blessedly
playing a basically good girl playing at being a gold digger instead of the avaricious creep she played in Gold
Diggers of 1935), decide the only future
they have is latching on to rich men and being gold-diggers. Unfortunately,
they’re all too aware that a train full of insurance salesmen is hardly the
most fruitful hunting ground for wealthy men with lots of money to spend on
trophy girlfriends. Norma is determined to get a real job and does so at the
Good Life Insurance Company, where she spends most of her time cruising Rosmer
(who’s blessedly called “Ross” through most of the movie) and hanging out with
him and his comic sidekick Boop Oglethorpe (Lee Dixon, who despite his stupid
character name is actually the hottest-looking guy in the film, especially when
we get to see him in shorts!). Meanwhile, theatrical producer J. J. Hobart
(Victor Moore, oppressively whiny as ever but fortunately with considerably
less screen time than he got in the Astaire-Rogers Swing Time, where one just wanted to strangle him so Edward
Everett Horton could have taken over his part!) is putting on a show — only his
business managers, Morty Wethered (Osgood Perkins, Anthony Perkins’ father) and
Tom Hugo (Charles D. Brown), have swindled him out of all his money and lost it
in bad investments, so they hit on the idea of buying a $1 million
life-insurance policy on him from Ross and running him ragged so he croaks and
they can recoup their losses from the payout. Of course, this means Ross and
Norma have a vested interest in keeping Hobart alive and healthy — they’re
counting on Ross’s commission payment for the money to get married on — so the
rest of the movie turns into a tug-of-war between the factions which heats up
when Morty and Hugo hire Genevieve to romance Hobart — only she falls genuinely
in love with him and decides to level with him. The news that he’s broke
propels him into a heart attack and it looks like the show will have to be
cancelled, only Ross persuades Callahan to put $10,000 into it on the ground
that if the show is called off Hobart will die from the shame so it’s cheaper
for the company to put $10,000 into the show than have to pay off a $1 million
policy.
The rest of the chorines in the show raise the money from the rich men
they’ve been gold-digging — they don’t raise 25,000 percent of the cost, though for a while I thought that’s
where this might be going (the idea of socking the backers for several times
the real cost of a show, deliberately staging a flop and making off with the
money was an urban legend on Broadway decades before Mel Brooks filmed it as The
Producers — indeed, Groucho Marx had wanted
to use it as the plot of A Night at the Opera!) — the show goes on, it’s a hit, Hobart is revived
and marries Genevieve, and Ross and Norma get hitched as well. The one big
number Berkeley got to do is a stunner — a spoof of war in which the men are
lined up in “No Woman’s Land,” the women are lined up in “No Man’s Land” and
the battle ends decisively with the distaff side victorious after they
abandoned their pristine white rifles for a gas attack with perfume bottles,
the men fall for it, they kiss across the trenches and then there’s a great
all-female victory parade — though there are other, lesser known Berkeley films
that might have better merited inclusion in the Busby Berkeley
Collection, Volume 2 set we were watching
(like The Singing Marine, with
Dick Powell as a Marine who becomes a radio crooner and lets success go to his
head — the song he sang in that one is “Night Over Shanghai” and Berkeley gave
it an intensely dramatic staging along the lines of “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold
Diggers of 1935) — and Berkeley was getting
more and more disenchanted with having Jack Warner as his employer. In the
1970’s (he died in 1976) his movies were revived and he gave interviews
expressing his bitterness that his grandiose productions were reduced from
three or four per movie to just one — and sometimes none (his idea for a chorus
of dancing trees in the film Stars Over Broadway was nixed by the Warners’ bean counters) — when none
of his movies had actually lost money. He moved to MGM in 1939, accepting a cut
in his own salary in return for the promise of bigger budgets for his numbers,
but he had a new set of problems: MGM had hired him mainly to do the Mickey
Rooney-Judy Garland films but they resented the way Berkeley’s dazzling
spectacles, with platoons of chorus girls and sound effects often drowning out
Mickey’s and Judy’s vocals, took audience attention away from the stars. It’s
not surprising that there’d be only one more Gold Diggers movie after this one — the formula was getting
threadbare and Jack Warner and Hal Wallis were savvy enough to know it (they
ran out Ruby Keeler’s contract with the 1937 film Ready, Willing and
Able and let Dick Powell go two years
later), though there’s really nothing wrong with Gold Diggers of 1937 that a couple more Busby Berkeley extravaganzae
wouldn’t have fixed!
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Philip Marlowe: Murder Is a Grave Affair (Goodson-Todman Productions, TV, 1960)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a rather intriguing archive.org download: an episode in a short-lived (1959-1960) half-hour TV series based on Raymond Chandler’s detective character Philip Marlowe. It was produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman — odd names to see on a dramatic series since they usually only made quiz shows — and though Raymond Chandler died in 1959 he was involved in the pre-production of the program and reviewed at least one of the scripts before it aired. This episode was called “Murder Is a Grave Affair” — the title refers to the fact that during the story a corpse is exhumed, then re-buried after the police discover it’s missing from its grave when they receive permission to exhume it themselves — and it opens with a young aspiring actress named Lydia Mitchell (Connie Hines) arriving at the home of major director Larry Gilbert (Gene Nelson) and announcing to Gilbert’s wife Marian (Betsy Jones-Moreland) that she wants Marian to divorce her husband so he can marry Lydia. Marian is just fine with this, mainly because she is herself in love with someone else — her attorney, Hank Lawford (Dean Harens) — but Larry Gilbert has utterly no intention of leaving his wife for Lydia, who to him was just a quick pickup on an out-of-town shoot in Arizona. He is in love with his secretary, Janet (Maxine Cooper), though he’s not all that serious about pursuing that relationship either.
Marlowe and his friend from the LAPD, Lt. Manny Harris (William Schallert) — with whom he seems to have a Holmes-and-Lestrade relationship going, a far cry from the desperate antagonism between Marlowe and the official police in Chandler’s books (in this script by Gene Wang Marlowe is described as a former L.A. police officer; in Chandler’s stories he was a former investigator for the L.A. County District Attorney, and the implication is that both Marlowe and his former boss at the D.A.’s office, Bernie Ohls, don’t think too much of either the professionalism or the integrity of the LAPD) — enter the story when Lydia Mitchell is found dead in her apartment with the gas jet from her heater still running. The person who discovers the body is a nebbishy aspiring actor named Artie Wells (an almost unrecognizable Jack Weston), and though the official verdict is an accidental death both Wells and Marlowe, who’s hired to find Lydia’s killer by her parents, think it’s murder. While they’re investigating Larry Gilbert is found shot dead in his home — his wife was there at the time but claimed not to have heard the shot (a cop from a situation in Chandler’s next-to-last novel, The Long Goodbye) — the police think it’s suicide induced by guilt over his having killed Lydia Mitchell, but in the end Marlowe proves it was murder because whoever faked Gilbert’s suicide put the gun in his right hand, and Gilbert was left-handed (which Marlowe knew from having seen him slap his wife). The finger of suspicion points to poor, nerdy Artie Wells (who blamed Lydia’s death on Gilbert even though it really does turn out to have been an accident), but in the end Marlowe realizes that Wells was being set up as a fall guy and the real killer is Mrs. Gilbert. (I had thought it would turn out to be Lawford on the least-important-person principle.)
Marlowe was rather oddly cast with Philip Carey, a tall actor (so was Dick Powell, but he didn’t look it on screen) with a scar on his cheek (real or a makeup department fake to make him look more weatherbeaten?) with an imperious manner but better in the role than any of the big-screen Marlowes after Powell and Bogart (Mitchum’s was a nice try but he was a quarter-century too old for the part by the time he finally got it), and while much of the show was pretty straightforwardly directed (by former actor Paul Stewart — ironically, his film debut was an uncredited bit part in the 1937 film Ever Since Eve, the last movie William Randolph Hearst personally produced; and his second film, and the one that launched his career, was playing the slimy butler at Xanadu in Citizen Kane), photographed (by William Margulies) and edited (by Henry Batista — I guess he had to do something after he was thrown out of Cuba — joke), and the modern-day (late 1950’s) cars make it look more like an episode of Perry Mason than a film noir, the cheery amorality of the script and the noir compositions that start to come in later in the story, especially during scenes that take place at night, put this firmly within the Chandler mythos. So does the thinly veiled contempt for the movie industry Chandler came away with after spending several years as a screenwriter at Paramount and then attempting to land free-lance gigs in the film biz. It’s an interesting program and whets my appetite for more episodes in the Marlowe series.
Last night Charles and I watched a rather intriguing archive.org download: an episode in a short-lived (1959-1960) half-hour TV series based on Raymond Chandler’s detective character Philip Marlowe. It was produced by Mark Goodson and Bill Todman — odd names to see on a dramatic series since they usually only made quiz shows — and though Raymond Chandler died in 1959 he was involved in the pre-production of the program and reviewed at least one of the scripts before it aired. This episode was called “Murder Is a Grave Affair” — the title refers to the fact that during the story a corpse is exhumed, then re-buried after the police discover it’s missing from its grave when they receive permission to exhume it themselves — and it opens with a young aspiring actress named Lydia Mitchell (Connie Hines) arriving at the home of major director Larry Gilbert (Gene Nelson) and announcing to Gilbert’s wife Marian (Betsy Jones-Moreland) that she wants Marian to divorce her husband so he can marry Lydia. Marian is just fine with this, mainly because she is herself in love with someone else — her attorney, Hank Lawford (Dean Harens) — but Larry Gilbert has utterly no intention of leaving his wife for Lydia, who to him was just a quick pickup on an out-of-town shoot in Arizona. He is in love with his secretary, Janet (Maxine Cooper), though he’s not all that serious about pursuing that relationship either.
Marlowe and his friend from the LAPD, Lt. Manny Harris (William Schallert) — with whom he seems to have a Holmes-and-Lestrade relationship going, a far cry from the desperate antagonism between Marlowe and the official police in Chandler’s books (in this script by Gene Wang Marlowe is described as a former L.A. police officer; in Chandler’s stories he was a former investigator for the L.A. County District Attorney, and the implication is that both Marlowe and his former boss at the D.A.’s office, Bernie Ohls, don’t think too much of either the professionalism or the integrity of the LAPD) — enter the story when Lydia Mitchell is found dead in her apartment with the gas jet from her heater still running. The person who discovers the body is a nebbishy aspiring actor named Artie Wells (an almost unrecognizable Jack Weston), and though the official verdict is an accidental death both Wells and Marlowe, who’s hired to find Lydia’s killer by her parents, think it’s murder. While they’re investigating Larry Gilbert is found shot dead in his home — his wife was there at the time but claimed not to have heard the shot (a cop from a situation in Chandler’s next-to-last novel, The Long Goodbye) — the police think it’s suicide induced by guilt over his having killed Lydia Mitchell, but in the end Marlowe proves it was murder because whoever faked Gilbert’s suicide put the gun in his right hand, and Gilbert was left-handed (which Marlowe knew from having seen him slap his wife). The finger of suspicion points to poor, nerdy Artie Wells (who blamed Lydia’s death on Gilbert even though it really does turn out to have been an accident), but in the end Marlowe realizes that Wells was being set up as a fall guy and the real killer is Mrs. Gilbert. (I had thought it would turn out to be Lawford on the least-important-person principle.)
Marlowe was rather oddly cast with Philip Carey, a tall actor (so was Dick Powell, but he didn’t look it on screen) with a scar on his cheek (real or a makeup department fake to make him look more weatherbeaten?) with an imperious manner but better in the role than any of the big-screen Marlowes after Powell and Bogart (Mitchum’s was a nice try but he was a quarter-century too old for the part by the time he finally got it), and while much of the show was pretty straightforwardly directed (by former actor Paul Stewart — ironically, his film debut was an uncredited bit part in the 1937 film Ever Since Eve, the last movie William Randolph Hearst personally produced; and his second film, and the one that launched his career, was playing the slimy butler at Xanadu in Citizen Kane), photographed (by William Margulies) and edited (by Henry Batista — I guess he had to do something after he was thrown out of Cuba — joke), and the modern-day (late 1950’s) cars make it look more like an episode of Perry Mason than a film noir, the cheery amorality of the script and the noir compositions that start to come in later in the story, especially during scenes that take place at night, put this firmly within the Chandler mythos. So does the thinly veiled contempt for the movie industry Chandler came away with after spending several years as a screenwriter at Paramount and then attempting to land free-lance gigs in the film biz. It’s an interesting program and whets my appetite for more episodes in the Marlowe series.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Gold Diggers of 1935 (Warner Bros., 1935)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I went to meet Charles and show him the tape of Busby Berkeley’s film Gold Diggers of 1935. It seemed an opportune time to run him this one, not only because the night before he was playing the Harry Warren compilation audiotape on which I’d dubbed the soundtrack recording of “Lullaby of Broadway” (I wanted to give him an opportunity to see the great number he’d so far only had the chance to hear) but also because the female lead is played by Gloria Stuart, who 62 years later got to film the comeback role of her life in the current #1 movie Titanic (she plays the modern incarnation of the character played by Kate Winslet in the bulk of the film — Winslet plays her in 1912 and Stuart in 1997 — and I remember being pleasantly surprised that she was in the film when last spring, in response to a long article in the L. A. Times detailing all the film’s production problems, she wrote a letter to the editor saying that James Cameron was one of the three best directors she’d ever worked with, along with James Whale and John Ford!). Though one misses the presence of a dancing star in this film — Ruby Keeler may not have been a great dancer at the level of Ginger Rogers (post-Astaire) or Eleanor Powell, but at least she was good and provided a focal point for Berkeley’s big numbers in the films they made together — Stuart, even in a fundamentally silly script (she’s the overprotected daughter of miserly rich bitch Alice Brady, who falls in love with hotel desk clerk and aspiring doctor Dick Powell), actually showed signs of major acting talent.
I went to meet Charles and show him the tape of Busby Berkeley’s film Gold Diggers of 1935. It seemed an opportune time to run him this one, not only because the night before he was playing the Harry Warren compilation audiotape on which I’d dubbed the soundtrack recording of “Lullaby of Broadway” (I wanted to give him an opportunity to see the great number he’d so far only had the chance to hear) but also because the female lead is played by Gloria Stuart, who 62 years later got to film the comeback role of her life in the current #1 movie Titanic (she plays the modern incarnation of the character played by Kate Winslet in the bulk of the film — Winslet plays her in 1912 and Stuart in 1997 — and I remember being pleasantly surprised that she was in the film when last spring, in response to a long article in the L. A. Times detailing all the film’s production problems, she wrote a letter to the editor saying that James Cameron was one of the three best directors she’d ever worked with, along with James Whale and John Ford!). Though one misses the presence of a dancing star in this film — Ruby Keeler may not have been a great dancer at the level of Ginger Rogers (post-Astaire) or Eleanor Powell, but at least she was good and provided a focal point for Berkeley’s big numbers in the films they made together — Stuart, even in a fundamentally silly script (she’s the overprotected daughter of miserly rich bitch Alice Brady, who falls in love with hotel desk clerk and aspiring doctor Dick Powell), actually showed signs of major acting talent.
This time around, not having seen this film in a while, I
actually found myself rather charmed by the script — though its continuing
entertainment value actually comes in the numbers: the long, wordless opening
sequence (in which a crew of janitors, clerks, washerwomen, maids, polishers
and whatnot get a summer resort hotel ready for the season in unison and in
strict tempo while an instrumental version of the song “I’m Going Shopping with
You” plays on the soundtrack); and the big productions at the end, “The Words
Are In My Heart” and “The Lullaby of Broadway.” “The Words Are In My Heart” is
the one in which Berkeley gets 56 baby-grand pianos to dance, and is notable
for its stunning size displacements as well as the mobile pianos: Dick Powell
starts out in a garden setting, singing the song to Gloria Stuart, and the camera
pulls back to indicate that the garden setting, Powell and Stuart are just
parts of a floral arrangement on top of a giant spinet piano at which three women are sitting, one of them playing it
and all three doing a trio version of the song — Berkeley actually cribbed this gimmick from Sammy Lee’s staging of the song “It Was
Sweet of You” in Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round the year before (though Lee had relentlessly copied
the water ballet in “It Was Sweet of You” from Berkeley’s “By a Waterfall”
number in his previous film Footlight
Parade), but it’s still amusing to note
that the spinet the three ladies are sitting at is adorned with a candelabrum,
13 years before the film A Song to Remember (in which Chopin is going blind as he plays, and
servants bring in a candelabrum to help him see the keys) supposedly gave
Liberace the idea to make that his trademark. Then Berkeley pulls back and dissolves to his piano
ballet, and while for the most part the illusion that the pianos are
self-propelled is absolutely convincing, in the opening boom shot (while the
pianos are still mounted on a staircase, before he dissolves to a more typical
Berkeley overhead shot of them doing their stuff on a black Bakelite
background) one can readily see
the black-clad stagehands under the
pianos, pushing them around in order to make them move. (They were, of course,
hollow dummy props to keep the weight of them within reason.)
The “Lullaby of Broadway” number remains one of the most
audacious production numbers ever put on film — only the ballet at the end of
Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris can
compare with it for its fertility of imagination, and unlike the festive
Impressionism of the Kelly sequence, this is dark, sinister, almost noir, a far cry from the relatively unimaginative though
professionally competent direction of the rest of the film (Gold
Diggers of 1935 was the first film Berkeley
was allowed to direct entirely by himself — interestingly, he got two directorial credits, one as dance director and one
as director). The famous opening scene, in which a white pinprick on an
otherwise black screen swells until it fills the screen and is revealed to be
the disembodied head of Wini Shaw as she sings the opening chorus of the song,
then she throws her head back and
it disappears from the screen, to reveal the New York skyline while the rest of
the screen, all but the part where her head was, remains stark black, was copied for the 1951 film Lullaby
of Broadway but the rest of that number was
a typically unimaginative, stage-bound setting quite far from Berkeley’s
imagination. The number dramatizes Al Dubin’s lyric — “When a Broadway baby
says goodnight/It’s early in the morning/Manhattan babies don’t sleep
tight/Until the dawn” — and casts Shaw as a “Broadway baby” who, after a night
of nightclub-hopping with her rich beau (Dick Powell), comes home in the morning just as everyone else is
getting up, sleeps all day in her cheap apartment, wakes up again at 7 and gets
ready for another night on the town. This turns out to be another date with
Powell, who takes her to the “Club Casino” — where whole platoons of dancers of
both genders entertain them even though there seem to be no other audience
members in the club. “Come and dance!” cry the floor-show participants to Shaw, perched on
a balcony overlooking the floor. “My sweetie may not let me … Why don’t you
come and get me?” she sings back — and they do, pushing her farther and farther
back towards a set of French windows until they push her onto an outdoor
balcony, and then out of the club altogether and down to her death in the
street, many stories below (this nightclub must have been patterned on the
Rainbow Room, “sixty-five stories nearer the stars”), as the chorus sings the
chorus of “Lullaby of Broadway” as a requiem — and Shaw returns, magically restored, to sing the
final chorus of the song and become a pinprick on the screen again as the
number fades out. It’s a surprisingly sinister number for Berkeley (well, maybe
not so surprisingly — he did at
least two other big numbers, the title tune of 42nd Street and “Night Over Shanghai” from The Singing
Marine, which had sinister atmospheres and
ended with the deaths of their heroines), one of the closest approaches anyone
has come to musical noir. —
1/30/98
•••••
The film I picked out was the next in the Warner Bros. “Gold
Diggers” series, Gold Diggers of 1935, a
bit of a comedown after Gold Diggers of 1933 — by this time the Zeitgeist had shifted again and while the economy was still depressed, Franklin
Roosevelt had been president for over two years and the country’s mood was
considerably more optimistic. This was the first film in the series that
jettisoned Avery Hopwood’s rather shopworn (by then) Gold Diggers of
Broadway plot — though Robert Lord, who’d
written the 1929 Gold Diggers of Broadway movie, was one of the screenwriters here, along with Manuel Seff and
Peter Milne — and though Dick Powell played the male lead, Ruby Keeler sat this
one out and Gloria Stuart played the female lead. The movie was also noteworthy
for Busby Berkeley’s career in that he got to direct the entire film, not just
the production numbers (and he gets two credits, one for direction and one for dance direction, in the opening
roll) and for a marvelous opening in which he builds a production number out of
the preparations being made to open the swanky Wentworth Plaza resort hotel for
the summer season, in which floors are being polished, shoes shined, curtains
cleaned and waiters dressed for duty in a long silent sequence in strict time
to the rhythm of the intro music. Indeed, the sequence begins with a shot of a
magazine about horse breeding — which it turns out is being read by a homeless
man in a park! — and Berkeley’s camera dollies down the magazine’s page to an
ad for the Wentworth Plaza, and the picture of its entrance in the ad dissolves
to the real thing. While the whole idea of the resort as a plaything for the
rich is one the Soviet censors would have considered unconscionably decadent
and thereby horrendously politically incorrect, the number ironically mirrors
the practice of Soviet musical directors that, since the government regarded
depicting popular dancing as an example of bourgeois social decadence, they
would build their production numbers out of the musical depiction of work
itself.
Alas, the movie becomes considerably less creative once the plot gets
underway — an all too typical pattern for Berkeley but one his best movies, Gold
Diggers of 1933 and Footlight
Parade, avoided (Gold Diggers of
1933 through a compelling Depression-era
story and Mervyn LeRoy’s nervy direction, and Footlight Parade largely through the galvanic energy James Cagney
brought to the otherwise pretty standard plot) and we meet the key characters:
wealthy widow Mrs. Mathilda Prentiss (Alice Brady, carrying over from the Fred
Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie The Gay Divorcée in which she’d played a similar but more charming and
much less oppressive character)
and her daughter Ann (Gloria Stuart) and son Humboldt (Frank McHugh, getting a little more to do this time around and playing befuddled
rather than whiny). Mathilda is a New Englander who’s outrageously cheap (one
wonders if the writers were patterning her on the real-life New England widow
Hetty Green); Humboldt has married and divorced four showgirls, forcing mom to
cough up $100,000 each time; and Ann is about to be plunged into an arranged
(by Mathilda) marriage with T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert at his most Hugh
Herbertiest), who’s got $15 million to the Prentisses’ $10 million but is an
asexual doofus whose only passion in life is collecting snuff boxes (he’s got
his collection in two exhibit cases which he won’t let the hotel porters
handle). Naturally Ann is revolted by him and the whole idea of having to marry
him, and in order to meet her demand that she be allowed one summer to do what she likes and have fun, mom hires
desk clerk Dick Curtis (Dick Powell, top-billed) for $500 to take her daughter
on dates. Dick’s initially reluctant to take the job because it makes him seem
too much like a gigolo, but his level-headed fiancée Arlene Davis (Dorothy
Dare) talks him into it because Dick’s studying to go to medical school and
$500 will pay his first year’s tuition, books and expenses. (My, how times have
changed.) There follows yet another Berkeley not-quite-production number to the
Harry Warren-Al Dubin song “I’m Going Shopping with You,” as Dick squires Ann
through all the shops inside the Wentworth Plaza and ends up buying her — on
her mom’s dime, of course! — modish dresses and hats, a beauty makeover (not
that Gloria Stuart really needs one!) and, as the capstone, a $12,000 diamond
bracelet, all while Dick Powell is crooning and Gloria Stuart is occasionally
supplying a line of almost-singing.
The next plot issue is an attempt by
non-paying guest Nicolai Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou — a Frenchman cast as a comic
Russian, once again proving that in this era, as far as Hollywood was
concerned, one foreign accent was as good as another), a former theatrical producer/director,
to earn enough money to pay his hotel bill by conning Mrs. Prentiss out of a
large sum of money to stage her annual benefit for the Milk Fund at the hotel.
Joining the con are his set designer, Schultz (Joseph Cawthorn) — a
Jewish-dialect role (some of the most delicious moments of the movie are the
gags about Nicoleff and Schultz being unable to understand each other’s
English) — and Betty Hawes (Glenda Farrell), who got into Mosley Thorpe’s life
when he requested a stenographer to help him write his definitive monograph on
snuff boxes but who decided it would be more lucrative to trick him into
signing a love letter to her (he thinks it’s just the lyric of a song) and then
sue him for breach of promise. Indeed, one of the most annoying things of Gold
Diggers of 1935 is the sheer amount of
greed on which its plot is built: the hotel workers aren’t getting paid
salaries on the ground that they’ll earn their keep in tips, but the head of
each department is getting a kickback and the manager of the whole hotel, Louis
Lamson (Grant Mitchell), is getting a share of everybody else’s share. Nicoleff
and Schultz hatch a Producers-like
plot to get Mrs. Prentiss and Mosley Thorpe each to put up two-thirds of the
cost of doing the milk fund show — and Betty threatens to report them unless
they give her one-third of the extra third. One gets the impression that Dick
Powell’s and Gloria Stuart’s characters are meant for each other if only
because they’re the only people in the movie who aren’t either greedy or
creepy! Eventually, of course, Dick and Ann do end up together, Dick’s former fiancée Arlene ends
up with Humboldt Prentiss, Mosley is disgraced and becomes tabloid fodder, and
Mrs. Prentiss is ultimately reconciled to her daughter marrying Dick because
“think of all the money I’ll save on medical bills” with a doctor in the
family.
Of course, the main attraction of a Busby Berkeley movie is
the big production numbers, though after Gold Diggers of 1933 did a good job of spacing them throughout the film,
this one gives us two sort-of production numbers in the early going but then
holds off on the full-dress ones until the end. One is “The Words Are In My
Heart,” which begins with Dick Powell and Gloria Stuart in a waterfront park on
a moonlit night (tying in to an earlier performance of the song, a “straight”
rendition in which Dick is singing it to her in a speedboat which he’s parked
on the shore of the lake where the Wentworth Plaza is located), then dollies
back to three women sitting in front of an ornate antique piano — the scene
with Dick and Ann is supposedly a corsage atop the piano, and also atop it is a
candelabrum with three lit candles (13 years before the film A Song to Remember, which inspired Liberace to make the
candelabrum-on-top-of-the-piano his trademark!) — and then to the famous
sequence in which Berkeley had over 40 pianos animated and put them through a
production number. Each piano had a chorus girl supposedly playing it (the
“pianos” were actually dummy shells so they could be pushed around the
soundstage in the pattern Berkeley wanted, and the black velvet-clad stagehands
under them pushing them around
can clearly be seen in some shots) and they form into a typical undulating
Berkeley chorus line, then into the shape of a huge piano, and finally a
rectangular dance floor on which a single girl does a solo dance. (The number
is indicative of the way the Berkeley musicals and the Fred Astaire-Ginger
Rogers films were cross-influencing each other; the first Astaire-Rogers film, Flying
Down to Rio, had featured them dancing to
“The Carioca” on a dance floor made up of six rotating pianos, and it had also
featured long wordless sequences of a hotel being made ready for its tourist
season.) It’s a wonderful number but also an indication of how desperate
Berkeley was becoming for new, fresh ideas — for the film Stars Over
Broadway he wanted to do a chorus line of
dancing trees, but Jack Warner decided that would have been too expensive and
refused to green-light the sequence, which inspired Berkeley to give MGM a call
and see if they might want him
when his Warners’ contract expired — but the next number, “Lullaby of
Broadway,” is enough in itself to make the whole film worth watching.
It’s the
entire fantasy of “Broadway babies,” gold-diggers and the men who date (and
finance) them wrapped up into one number, beginning with a shot that would
become a Berkeley trademark: a white speck of light in an otherwise pitch-black
screen, gradually swelling in size until it’s revealed to be the head of featured
singer Winifred Shaw (called “Winny” in the cast list, identified as “Miss
Shaw” in the dialogue and later billed as “Wini” in other films) crooning the
song in a haunting contralto about midway between Helen Morgan’s and Ivie
Anderson’s. As Berkeley’s camera dollies towards her (remember that Berkeley
made it a professional fetish never
to use more than one camera to shoot his elaborate productions), Shaw’s face
gradually fills the screen, then turns as she lights a cigarette, then her face
disappears and becomes a cut-out through which we see an overhead vision of New
York City. Then follows a montage of ordinary New Yorkers (most of them young
and female, of course!) getting dressed and going to work at ordinary jobs,
only while the rest of the city is waking up Wini Shaw is being driven home in
a taxi by her beau (Dick Powell) and let off in front of her apartment, because
according to Al Dubin’s lyrics “Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight until the
dawn.” The day progresses for everyone else, and then shortly after 7 p.m.
Wini’s alarm clock goes off and she readies herself for a night on the town.
This time Dick takes her to the “Club Casino,” a surrealistic establishment
that’s all Deco, looks like it’s the size of two airplane hangars and has a floor
show featuring tango dancer Ramon (his usual partner Rosita sued Warners
because she was billed in the film but the girl he danced with in it was
someone else) and then enough chorus people of both genders to mount an
invasion of a small Caribbean country. (Critics wondered how it stayed in
business and met its gigantic payroll when Dick Powell and Wini Shaw appeared
to be its only paying customers.) What’s more, the choruses in this film are
actually doing some hard-core dancing instead of just being marched through one of Berkeley’s quasi-military
formations — and the thunder of their tap shoes hitting art director Anton
Grot’s Deco floors itself becomes surprisingly intimidating. The choristers
call on Wini to “come and dance!” “My sweetie may not let me … why don’t you
come and get me?” she cries out, and they do, driving her to the club’s
balcony, charging her and ultimately pushing her to her death when the doors
give way and she takes a tumble off the balcony to the ground many floors below
— only to revive magically when it’s time for Berkeley to take the number out
again and reverse the opening shot, a close-up of Shaw crooning the last line
of the song (“Listen to the lullaby of old Broadway”) as her face dwindles in
size to become a pinprick on the screen again.
“Lullaby of Broadway” was
Berkeley’s favorite of his numbers, and though (as Charles pointed out) it
doesn’t have the emotional impact of “Remember My Forgotten Man” it’s a
dazzling piece of imaginative filmmaking — and when, in a miscarriage of
justice that probably helped sink the Academy’s short-lived award for dance
direction, it lost in that category, the man who won, Dave Gould (for the
spectacular but hardly as audacious “straw hat” number Maurice Chevalier
performed in Folies Bergère),
gave Berkeley the award because even he thought Berkeley should have won. (Ironically, “Lullaby of Broadway”
itself won the Best Song Oscar for Harry Warren and Al Dubin, Berkeley’s
favorite songwriters.) It’s also amazing that it didn’t launch Wini Shaw on a
superstar career; it’s the sort of introductory showcase newcomers dream of
(though she’d actually made nine films before it, including Gift of
Gab, the elusive 1934 Universal musical
that starred Edmund Lowe, Gloria Stuart and Ruth Etting, and featured Boris
Karloff and Bela Lugosi in a guest scene as themselves) but Warners kept her
mostly in undistinguished “B”’s (including a villainess role in the first
Torchy Blane movie, Smart Blonde)
and she retired in 1939 even though she lived into the 1980’s. Gold
Diggers of 1935 is a bit of a comedown from
its predecessors but the “Lullaby of Broadway” number is a work of cinematic
genius and stands apart from the rest of the movie much the way “Let’s Face the
Music and Dance” soars above the rest of the Astaire-Rogers musical Follow
the Fleet — and though you might not guess
it from this film, Berkeley was actually a surprisingly accomplished
non-musical director (he’d made his debut as full director in a quite good
pre-Code melodrama called She Had to Say Yes, starring Loretta Young, in 1932, and shortly before
he left Warners for MGM in 1939 he did They Made Me a Criminal, an exciting and suspenseful thriller with John
Garfield) who could make great movies even without platoons of chorus girls and dances with (normally)
inanimate objects. — 8/27/12
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Gold Diggers of 1933 (Warner Bros., 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran him the tape of Gold Diggers of 1933 that I’d recorded from Turner Classic Movies two days ago (they were showing it along with five other films — 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Dames, Flirtation Walk and Go Into Your Dance — as a birthday tribute to Ruby Keeler) — a movie that delighted both of us. I’ve always thought Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade are Busby Berkeley’s best films at Warners (though Gold Diggers of 1935 contains the very best number he ever did, “Lullaby of Broadway”) because they’re the ones which are the most entertaining as movies — the plot portions are amusing and interesting in their own right instead of just “filler” in between the big Berkeley production numbers. It was odd in retrospect to see Warren William top-billed (he plays Dick Powell’s Boston-blueblood brother and doesn’t even appear until the film is 45 minutes old!), and even odder to see the lack of respect with which Ginger Rogers was treated as both actress and character (she’d have her revenge when she left Warners for RKO later that year and started her series with Fred Astaire, which would push her ahead of Keeler as the movies’ biggest female musical star) — but the camaraderie between the three leading ladies (Keeler, the marvelous Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahon) as the showgirls sharing a flat and leading such poverty-stricken lives that, in one of the film’s most marvelous scenes, MacMahon carefully uses a pair of ice tongs to steal a quart of milk from a neighbor so they’ll have something to eat before breakfast is wonderful — and so are the catch lines in the second half of the movie (Charles is already starting to incorporate them into our life, whispering “Cheap and vulgar” when he wants me to kiss him the way Joan Blondell does to Warren William in the film).
I ran him the tape of Gold Diggers of 1933 that I’d recorded from Turner Classic Movies two days ago (they were showing it along with five other films — 42nd Street, Footlight Parade, Dames, Flirtation Walk and Go Into Your Dance — as a birthday tribute to Ruby Keeler) — a movie that delighted both of us. I’ve always thought Gold Diggers of 1933 and Footlight Parade are Busby Berkeley’s best films at Warners (though Gold Diggers of 1935 contains the very best number he ever did, “Lullaby of Broadway”) because they’re the ones which are the most entertaining as movies — the plot portions are amusing and interesting in their own right instead of just “filler” in between the big Berkeley production numbers. It was odd in retrospect to see Warren William top-billed (he plays Dick Powell’s Boston-blueblood brother and doesn’t even appear until the film is 45 minutes old!), and even odder to see the lack of respect with which Ginger Rogers was treated as both actress and character (she’d have her revenge when she left Warners for RKO later that year and started her series with Fred Astaire, which would push her ahead of Keeler as the movies’ biggest female musical star) — but the camaraderie between the three leading ladies (Keeler, the marvelous Joan Blondell and Aline MacMahon) as the showgirls sharing a flat and leading such poverty-stricken lives that, in one of the film’s most marvelous scenes, MacMahon carefully uses a pair of ice tongs to steal a quart of milk from a neighbor so they’ll have something to eat before breakfast is wonderful — and so are the catch lines in the second half of the movie (Charles is already starting to incorporate them into our life, whispering “Cheap and vulgar” when he wants me to kiss him the way Joan Blondell does to Warren William in the film).
And the numbers are among Berkeley’s best — ranging from the
spectacular “Shadow Waltz” (with its famous neon violins) to the sexy “Petting
in the Park” (the Berkeley movies were definitely Hollywood-glasnost
productions!) and the intensely dramatic “Remember My Forgotten Man” (which
overall director Mervyn LeRoy put at the very end of the film, after all the romantic knots are properly tied — nothing could follow this intense dramatization setting the
Depression to music!). About the only things we need to apologize for are the
musical talents of the principals, which are rather limited; Ruby Keeler is an
acceptable dancer but her singing voice makes Marion Davies sound like Maria
Callas by comparison, and Dick Powell does have a strong voice but his rendition of the haunting ballad “I’ve Got
to Sing a Torch Song” was aptly described by Michael Brooks as follows: “This
number was thrown away in the movie[1],
if ‘thrown away’ can be applied to Dick Powell’s tenor that pinned you to your
seat like a dentist’s drill.” Certainly the Brunswick record Bing Crosby made
of the song at the time (including its haunting verse, omitted in the film) is far more musical, with Crosby showing a genius for
phrasing far beyond the square, on-the-beat singing we get from Powell
(especially on the last reprise of the final eight bars, where Bing does a
haunting register drop and suddenly makes the song sound more intimate and
therefore more moving) — but Powell is an appealing enough personality as an actor (with just a hint of the
wise-guy toughness that would make him the screen’s best Philip Marlowe 11
years later!) and Blondell (whom he married in 1936) is a first-rate actress in
these tough-girl-with-a-heart-of-gold roles. — 8/27/98
•••••
Charles and I ended up watching a movie. After having
experienced (I can’t really say we “watched” it because only 15 minutes of the
film footage exists and we were trying to make out the rest just by listening
to its soundtrack) Gold Diggers of Broadway
the night before, I thought it would be interesting to watch the far more
famous remake, Gold Diggers of 1933
(and apparently there’s even a fourth version: in 1951 Warners put Doris Day
through the paces of this plot and named it after one of the Gold
Diggers of Broadway songs, “Painting the
Clouds with Sunshine”). I hadn’t seen this film in a long time, and I’d quite
forgotten how good it is: indeed, I’d call it one of the very best musicals of
the “pre-Code” period (along with the much more escapist Love Me
Tonight and The Gay Divorcée — an Astaire-Rogers vehicle I’ve always liked better
than its more famous follow-up, Top Hat). What makes Gold Diggers of 1933 special is that it’s not just another Busby Berkeley musical — instead
of just marking time between the spectacular production numbers, Gold
Diggers of 1933 is consistently interesting
start to finish. It also avoids the mistake Warners frequently made of
back-loading all the big numbers at the end: it starts with a full-dress Berkeley production on the song
“We’re In the Money” (sung by Ginger Rogers and danced, maneuvered, platooned
or whatever you want to call it by the full Berkeley chorus), while the next
number (“Pettin’ in the Park”) occurs roughly two-fifths of the way through and
only two numbers, “Shadow Waltz” and “Remember My Forgotten Man,” are held back
until the end. Gold Diggers of 1933
also benefited from a much better (plot) director than the Berkeley films
usually got, Mervyn LeRoy, who brought to this story some of the cynicism and
bitterness of his previous films dealing with the Depression, notably I
Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (LeRoy had
actually been set to direct the first Berkeley film at Warner Bros., 42nd
Street, but because retakes and
post-production on I Am a Fugitive
ran behind schedule he had to give up the 42nd Street assignment to hack Lloyd Bacon); reunited with Sol
Polito, his cinematographer on Fugitive, LeRoy brings some quite advanced compositions to the surprisingly
bleak tale of three chorus girls — Polly Parker (Ruby Keeler), Carol King (Joan
Blondell) and Trixie Lorraine (Aline MacMahon in a surprisingly assertive,
non-victim role even though Winnie Lightner, who played her part in Gold
Diggers of Broadway, was even better) —
living together and so desperately starving that Trixie has to take a pair of
ice tongs and steal a bottle of milk from a neighbor (in a nicely done suspense
sequence during which we worry that Trixie will drop it and neither of those two needy households will get it).
Gold
Diggers of 1933 is also an argument against my general field theory of cinema that the quality
of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers: the script was a
committee product (Erwin Gelsey and James Seymour, screenplay; David Boehm and
Ben Markson, dialogue) but it’s also quite marvelous, well done and brittle in
its cynicism, starting with an audacious opening in which the “We’re In the Money”
number, representing the dress rehearsal of a new show being produced by Barney
Hopkins (Ned Sparks, usually a whiny-voiced comic-relief third banana but
surprisingly good here as an authority figure), is abruptly shut down in
mid-performance by a gang of sheriff’s deputies, attaching the costumes and
sets to pay off the debts Hopkins has run up to get the show to the point of a
dress rehearsal. “They close before they open,” Carol grimly points out. Later,
over their morning meal of stale bread and stolen milk, the girls hear from Fay
Fortune (Ginger Rogers) that Hopkins is putting on a new show — only they find
he doesn’t have the backing for it: the “angel” he was counting on just
reconciled with his estranged wife and she talked him out of it. Brad Roberts
(Dick Powell), a songwriter who lives in the building across the street from
the girls and who’s been carrying on a mutual flirtation with Polly, says he
can come up with the $15,000 Hopkins needs, and of course the girls assume he’s
kidding — especially when he starts to write Hopkins a check and then thinks
better of it and says he’ll have to pay the money in cash. He says he’ll be at
Hopkins’ office at 10:30 the next morning and Hopkins, the secretary he’s hired
for the day, and the girls are all waiting, impatiently drumming on their
bodies and every flat surface in the audience (a scene Charles said Busby
Berkeley could well have choreographed!), and Brad finally shows up two hours
late but with the cash in hand. Rehearsals start and Hopkins tries to talk Brad
into appearing in the show as well as financing it and writing the songs —
“Give your songs a break!” he says, noting that Brad sings them much better
than the professional juvenile (Clarence Nordstrom) who’s been given the male
lead opposite Polly — but for mysterious reasons Brad won’t risk a public
appearance.
The girls see a newspaper story about a man who robbed a bank for
$20,000 and is known to hang around theatres, and assume that’s where Brad got the money — but after the show opens with Brad as a last-minute replacement for Nordstrom, the
truth emerges: “Brad Roberts” is actually Robert Bradford, younger brother of
Boston banker J. Lawrence Bradford (Warren William, who’s top-billed but
doesn’t appear until 45 minutes into this 96-minute movie), and the elder
Bradford is against his younger brother being involved in show business and
even more against him getting romantically entangled with a showgirl. It’s here that the plot of Gold Diggers of 1933 begins to track that of Gold Diggers of
Broadway, as J. Lawrence Bradford goes to
the chorus girls’ apartment (a newer, swankier Art Deco one they’ve presumably
rented with the money they’re making from the hit show they’re in) intending to
buy off Polly — only Polly is out and he mistakes Carol for Polly. (Ironically,
in the plot Dick Powell is mistaken for Joan Blondell’s boyfriend when he’s
really Ruby Keeler’s; in real life Powell and Blondell were an item and eventually got married.) Polly and
Trixie decide to take J. Lawrence and his attorney, Faneuil “Fanny” Peabody
(Guy Kibbee) — who recalls his own youthful dalliance with a showgirl and concludes from it that they’re
all parasites and gold-diggers — on the ride of their lives, getting the men to
buy them everything for orchids to lapdogs to $75 hats (“Do all hats cost $75?” Peabody whines when it turns out
that’s the asking price for the one he’s buying Trixie as well as the one
Lawrence bought Carol) that are rather helmet-like but surprisingly tasteful
(one wouldn’t look at these and
associate them with Danny Kaye as Anatole of Paris, giggling that he designed
atrocious hats because “I … hate … weemen!”) and ultimately winning their
hearts, though just because he’s fallen in love with Carol doesn’t make
Lawrence one whit less determined to break up Brad’s relationship with Polly,
to the point where when Brad announces that he and Polly already are married,
Lawrence snarls, “Then I’ll have it annulled!”
The plot strands get resolved
quickly and perfunctorily during a performance of the show-within-a-show, in
which Lawrence threatens to have Brad arrested, Brad tells Hopkins he can’t go
on for the last number because “my brother’s trying to have me arrested for
getting married,” and Hopkins recognizes the “policeman” who’s about to make
the arrest as “an old ham actor” who played cops in so many plays he got the
delusion that he was one. The show and the relationships go on, and with the
plot portions done the movie goes into one of the most audacious sequences ever
put on film, “Remember My Forgotten Man?,” the big number that expresses the
Hopkins’ character stated desire to do a musical about the Depression. (“We
won’t have to rehearse that,”
Carol says bitterly — and when Trixie asks if there’ll be a comic-relief part,
Hopkins said, “Sure, I’ll have the audience laughing at you starving yourself
to death.”) As I noted in my comments on Gold Diggers of Broadway, the two films may be related plot-wise but the Zeitgeist behind them couldn’t have been more different — one
made just before the stock market crash, when most people (including so-called
economic “experts”) believed the market bubble would never end, and the mood of
the country (at least the part of it that went to movies) was all about
tip-toeing through the tulips and painting the clouds with sunshine; and one
made at the depths of the Depression, when even people who could afford a movie ticket (especially to one of the
proletarian neighborhood theatres Warners had acquired en masse when they bought the First National theatre chain in
1928 with the profits from The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool)
keenly felt the economic desperation of the time and flocked to a movie that
ended not with a big, optimistic production number but a bitter song about
forgotten men who’d served in World War I and were now dependent on breadlines.
The name “Busby Berkeley” is usually associated today with the big, splashy,
almost abstract production numbers like “Shadow Waltz” in this film — but
sometimes (the title number of 42nd Street, “Remember My Forgotten Man” here, “Shanghai Lil” in
Footlight Parade, “Lullaby of
Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935 —
the number Berkeley regarded as his very best, and most people since have
agreed — and “Night Over Shanghai” in The Singing Marine) he did surprisingly dark, dramatic numbers telling
miniature stories almost totally separate from the film.
“Remember My Forgotten
Man” (a song that rivals “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” as a musical
depiction of the Depression with a surprisingly radical, class-based lyric —
more of a surprise from Al Dubin, who wrote the lyrics for this as he had for Gold
Diggers of Broadway but with a different
composer, Harry Warren instead of Joseph Burke, than it was from E. Y. Harburg,
the Left-wing activist who wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” with a fellow
Leftist, Jay Gorney, as composer) begins with Joan Blondell essentially rapping
the lyrics as she passes a cigarette to a man under a lamppost (a setting
Berkeley probably borrowed from the way Florenz Ziegfeld staged Fanny Brice
singing “My Man”), and it moves to some haunting close-ups of Depression
victims coming home from the war, ending up on the streets, desperately waiting
on breadlines and, in one haunting image, a closeup of a man (former Chaplin
impersonator Billy West) showing his service medal. The number moves into a
booming version of the song by Black contralto Etta Moten (who later appeared
in Flying Down to Rio singing
“The Carioca”) and ends with an elaborate arc-shaped bridge over which lines of
men are marching while another bridge looms in the background and Blondell
returns to take out the song, this time singing in full voice instead of
talk-singing (she almost certainly had a voice double and James Robert Parish,
in his book Hollywood’s Great Love Teams, says it was Marian Anderson), the Vitaphone credit comes up and the
film ends. Kudos to Mervyn LeRoy for realizing that nothing could follow “Remember My Forgotten Man” and
allowing the film to end with those final, haunting images! Gold
Diggers of 1933 has its flaws — the movie
begins to sag a bit at the midpoint when the original Avery Hopwood Gold
Diggers plot horns in on the Depression
realities, and as good as Dick Powell is his voice had a rather enervating
quality (Michael Brooks compared it to a dentist’s drill) and Bing Crosby, in
the Brunswick records he made of “Shadow Waltz” and “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch
Song” (a haunting ballad that Powell sings at his piano and which does not get the full Berkeley treatment — what would he have
done with it, one wonders: a Frankenstein-style treatment with Powell leading a search party through a haunted
wood trying to find his missing girlfriend?), totally outsings Powell — but on
its own it’s a masterpiece and probably the best movie Busby Berkeley ever
worked on, not despite but because
of all the stuff in it between his awesome production numbers. — 8/26/12
[1] — Meaning it wasn’t staged by Busby Berkeley as a big production number
— one can only imagine how he might
have done it, perhaps with Powell as an anguished Dr. Frankenstein chasing a
girlfriend instead of a monster, with torch-carrying villagers arranging
themselves into kaleidoscope patterns on the hillsides!
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Gold Diggers of Broadway (Warner Bros., 1929)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran two of the Charley Chase shorts I’d taped from TCM last Tuesday — Mum’s the Word and Dog Shy — as well as the odd “From the Vaults” feature TCM showed between them, the surviving fragments from the early two-strip Technicolor musicals Gold Diggers on Broadway and The Rogue Song. The Gold Diggers on Broadway clip features Nick Lucas in 1929 doing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a style surprisingly close to Tiny Tim’s infamous cover version from 40 years later, in what passed for a production number in 1929 — a stationary camera shooting a scene that blacked out (there were actually insert shots of the stagehand pulling the light switch off and on) from a scene with Lucas and the girl he was singing to to a stage set of giant tulips that opened, each revealing a chorus girl inside. There were a few bits before and aft, including a funny shot of Winnie Lightner (who played the part Aline MacMahon played in the well-known remake of this story, Gold Diggers of 1933) practicing for a number that cast her as the Statue of Liberty, but the “Tiptoe” number was by far the most interesting part of this clip. (Apparently the entire soundtrack of Gold Diggers on Broadway survives on Vitaphone discs but the film, with the exception of these few minutes, is lost.) — 4/11/05
The “feature” Charles and I
watched — or, in large measure, just listened to — last night was Gold
Diggers of Broadway, a big-budget Warner
Bros. musical from 1929, just two years after The Jazz Singer and an illustration of the vagaries of film preservation
or the lack thereof. Warners was still using the Vitaphone process, in which
the movie’s sound was recorded on phonograph records (20 inches in diameter and
playing at the 33 1/3 rpm speed which became standard in the 1950’s for the
12-inch LP) that were played along with the film — an elaborate mechanism
synchronized the motor that ran the turntable with the one that ran the
projector for the visual portion, but not surprisingly accidents frequently
happened and if the film got broken and spliced, the record got scratched and
jumped, or some other happenstance occurred, the picture and sound could get
out of synch. Thus there are movies in Vitaphone for which the soundtrack
survives and the picture does not, movies for which the picture survives and the
soundtrack does not (like Broadway’s Like That, a 1930 short filmed in New York with Ruth Etting, Humphrey
Bogart and Joan Blondell: David Wolper discovered the picture and used a short
clip from it, of Bogart taking Etting to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, in his
early-1960’s series of TV biographies, but the soundtrack remains lost), and
movies like Gold Diggers of Broadway
for which the complete soundtrack survives — including a trailer that is nearly
10 minutes long as well as a seven-minute overture obviously used originally as
entrance music rather than for a prologue — but only about 15 minutes of actual
film footage is known to exist.
I ran two of the Charley Chase shorts I’d taped from TCM last Tuesday — Mum’s the Word and Dog Shy — as well as the odd “From the Vaults” feature TCM showed between them, the surviving fragments from the early two-strip Technicolor musicals Gold Diggers on Broadway and The Rogue Song. The Gold Diggers on Broadway clip features Nick Lucas in 1929 doing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a style surprisingly close to Tiny Tim’s infamous cover version from 40 years later, in what passed for a production number in 1929 — a stationary camera shooting a scene that blacked out (there were actually insert shots of the stagehand pulling the light switch off and on) from a scene with Lucas and the girl he was singing to to a stage set of giant tulips that opened, each revealing a chorus girl inside. There were a few bits before and aft, including a funny shot of Winnie Lightner (who played the part Aline MacMahon played in the well-known remake of this story, Gold Diggers of 1933) practicing for a number that cast her as the Statue of Liberty, but the “Tiptoe” number was by far the most interesting part of this clip. (Apparently the entire soundtrack of Gold Diggers on Broadway survives on Vitaphone discs but the film, with the exception of these few minutes, is lost.) — 4/11/05
•••••
This is a real pity, for what we have indicates
that this was one of the best early musicals, stiffly photographed and with
production numbers shown as they’d be seen from a good seat in a theatre
instead of made truly cinematic, but with a good story, a good score, a good
cast and the always energetic direction of Roy Del Ruth — whose wife-to-be,
Winnie Lightner, has a key role. The story began life as a play by Avery
Hopwood called The Gold Diggers of Broadway, which was premiered in New York in 1919. Warners bought
the movie rights and made a silent version in 1923 (shortening the title to The
Gold Diggers), then with the musical craze
in full swing in the early years of the talkies, Warners dredged up the story
for an original film musical and shot the works budget-wise, shooting the whole
thing in two-strip Technicolor (though the word “Technicolor” wasn’t used in the
trailer — instead it was called “natural color,” which two-strip really wasn’t
since it couldn’t reproduce blue). They didn’t stretch the budget for a
big-name cast — unlike their next shot at the same plot line, Gold Diggers
of 1933, which featured Warners’ biggest
musical stars of the time (Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Ginger
Rogers) and some of their top players in the non-musical roles as well (Warren
William, Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee) — and the casting is a bit awkward
because neither of the romantic leads, William Bakewell and Helen Foster, could
sing or dance, so other characters had to be created to give this musical film
genuinely talented musical performers: singer-guitarist Nick Lucas and dancer
Ann Pennington.
Charles and I experienced Gold Diggers of Broadway by listening to the recent CD release of the complete
soundtrack and playing the two surviving video clips — Nick Lucas singing
“Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” (a song actually written for this film by Joseph
Burke and Al Dubin — and performed by Lucas with his own accompaniment in a
high falsetto tenor quite like the voice of Tiny Tim, who had a hit with this
song as a novelty number in 1969) segueing into a big production number in
which chorines emerge from giant tulip bulbs (a gimmick done even more
effectively five years later in Murder at the Vanities) and most of the film’s big dance finale, representing the
show the musical performers in the cast are rehearsing when they’re not
involved in offstage romantic intrigues. The plot of Gold Diggers of
Broadway will be familiar to anyone who’s
seen Gold Diggers of 1933 (which was
billed as a sequel but was actually a remake), though the Zeitgeist of the films couldn’t be more different: Gold Diggers
of Broadway was released August 30, 1929,
nearly two months before the stock market crash, and its mood is that of the
1920’s: big, brassy, optimistic, without the grim Depression gags the writers
of Gold Diggers of 1933 added to their
version. The film centers around three chorus girls in a hit Broadway show (in
this version the show is already running, not in preliminary rehearsals like
the one in Gold Diggers of 1933): Jerry
Lamar (Nancy Welford, top-billed) and her roommates Violet (Helen Foster) and
Mabel (Winnie Lightner). Violet is in nice, sweet, innocent love with Wally
(William Bakewell), a rich but sympathetic kid who’s part of a Boston banking
family, but his uncle Stephen Lee (Conway Tearle, who was not only billed
second but narrated the trailer as himself) fears both that Wally will disgrace
the family if he marries a chorus girl and that the family will be taken to the
cleaners financially by her gold-digging demands.
So Stephen comes to New York
with the family attorney, Blake (Albert Gran), in tow — only when he visits the
apartment where the three chorus girls live and Jerry answers the door, he
mistakes Jerry for Violet. Jerry decides to continue the impersonation and
decides to make herself seem so creepy that Stephen will let his nephew marry anyone else — and there Violet will be. Only Stephen ends up
falling for Jerry himself, and Blake similarly goes for Mabel, so the curtain
falls with three happy if rather mismatched couples and a big musical finale
representing the big climax of the show the chorus girls have been working in
all movie. Obviously it’s difficult to judge a movie that exists only in such
fragmentary form — rumors persist that it will be reconstructed much the way
the silent London After Midnight was
from the surviving production stills, with the extant footage spliced in at the
appropriate points — and Charles and I didn’t make it easier because,
responding to a bit of mistaken information on our source for the visual clips
(the bonus features section on the Warner Home Video release of Gold Diggers
of 1937), I played the clip of Nick Lucas
singing “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” at the point where Lucas sings the song
for the first time (at a nightclub where the principals are partying) instead
of the second time (when he performs it as part of the show); the DVD had
identified this clip as from reel six of the film when it’s actually
considerably later. At the same time Charles and I both had a sense of relief,
after sitting in the dark for over an hour listening to disembodied voices,
from actually having something to watch!
What there is of Gold Diggers of Broadway
is actually quite good: the script by Robert Lord (who’d have his name on a lot of important Warners’ films in the 1930’s) is full of
snappy dialogue (some of it quite daring even for the so-called “pre-Code”
era), good in-jokes and a nice running gag for Lightner, who’s obliged to come
on in a Statue of Liberty costume, carrying a torch and declaiming, “I am the
Spirit of Liberty and the Progress of Civilization!” — only she keeps blowing the
line. The two film clips that exist show how splendiferous this production’s
budget really was — the finale takes place on a set that’s supposed to
represent Paris (the Arc de Triomphe and the front of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral are
clearly recognizable) but whose buildings are at such extreme (and unrealistic)
angles to each other both Charles and I thought, “Ah, The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari — the musical!” — and also how
Del Ruth was able to avoid the static feeling of a lot of early talkies even
though within a year directors like John Murray Anderson in The King of Jazz and Busby Berkeley in Whoopee would develop ways to do production numbers on screen that
broke the stage frame once and for all and took advantage of what film could do
— not only soar over chorus lines and
show them in the overhead kaleidoscope formation Berkeley became famous for but
expand the landscape over which a number could take place far beyond what was
practical, or even possible, on stage.
Gold
Diggers of 1933, though in black-and-white
(Berkeley’s first film, Whoopee, had
been in two-strip but he wouldn’t get a chance to work in color again for
another 13 years, until The Gang’s All Here), is a better film — the script is more mordant, the cast
is stronger (and it helps that the principal musical talents, Dick Powell and
Ruby Keeler, also play the juvenile leads) and the numbers have Berkeley’s
staggering imagination going for them — in Gold Diggers of Broadway the numbers were staged by Larry Ceballos (incidentally
Conway Tearle pronounced the “l”’s in his name when introducing him in that
extended trailer — I’d always assumed the “l”’s were silent, Spanish-style),
who according to the American Film Institute Catalog was originally assigned to direct the numbers in the 1933
musical Footlight Parade and sued
Warner Bros. for breach of contract when Berkeley replaced him, and the two
surviving production numbers (as well as an incredible still showing Nick Lucas
singing the song “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” in front of a set of a
giant palette, with chorus girls poking their heads through holes in it, while
Ann Pennington dances in front of him) show him as perfectly competent and
imaginative but still awfully stage-bound. Still, Gold Diggers of Broadway seems like a quite good movie, better than the common run
of musicals of the period, and though it’s great that it hasn’t been entirely
lost, it’s still frustrating that we have to watch/listen to it in this
piecemeal fashion and try to reconstruct in our own imaginations what the
original 1929 audiences got to see and
hear!
Liberace: Great Personalities (Guild Films/TV, 1954)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Gold Diggers of Broadway I ran Charles a 1954 episode of Liberace’s TV show called “Great Personalities” which tied in with the film because, a quarter-century after making Gold Diggers of Broadway, Nick Lucas appeared in it and once again sang “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips.” This was something of a cheap-jack production because it purported to pay tribute to great performers of the past — only quite a few of them were not quite as “past” as the show made out: Liberace kicked things off with a medley of “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” “Some of These Days,” “Love in Bloom” and “If You Knew Suzie” that paid tribute, through elaborate posters (and a squawking clarinet sound on “When My Baby Smiles at Me”), to the four people most identified with those songs: Ted Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor, respectively, all of whom were still alive when this show was done but none of whom was going to appear on it for what pittances Liberace’s producers, Guild Films, could afford to pay (and Benny was a major TV star on the CBS network, which would have looked unkindly on his appearing on a non-network syndicated show like Liberace’s). Lucas, who in 1954 as well as 1929 was a surprisingly good guitarist, sang “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” in the same high falsetto tenor he used in the movie — whatever you think of his style, his voice and guitar chops had both held up quite well — and the other guest star on the program was also someone who’d reached her peak in the 1920’s: Gilda Gray, a white blues singer and dancer who was apparently the first white person to dance the shimmy on stage.
She sang “St. Louis Blues” on the program and Liberace identified her as the first white person to record it (which she wasn’t: Al Bernard sang it with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1921, just seven years after W. C. Handy wrote it), and I suspect Liberace’s interest in her was largely because, like he, she was of Polish descent: her birth name was Marianna Michalska and her parents emigrated from Warsaw when she was eight and raised her in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — also Liberace’s birthplace. Liberace also paid tribute to a couple of other famous Poles on the show: he played Paderewski’s “Menuet Antique” (he pronounced “Menuet” as “minuet” and did one of his most annoying things: instead of playing the piece as the piano solo Paderewski wrote, he dragged in four violinists led by his straight brother George and they added totally unnecessary parts; I started cringing every time they began to move their bows towards their strings, dreading what was about to happen) and he also played a Chopin nocturne, delivering it come scritto as a solo piano piece and playing it with the right delicacy and phrasing. I’ve heard occasional recordings of Liberace playing classical piano pieces as written (including a beautiful rendition of “Claire de Lune” by Debussy) and he was clearly at his best when he played that way: though no one was going to mistake him for Rubinstein, Horowitz, Gieseking or Arrau in that repertoire, it’s clear that playing “straight” classical brought forth a simple eloquence and phrasing from him that eluded him when he was playing pops (especially when he sang in that annoying voice that was once described as “a dormouse with adenoids”) and is about the one genuinely moving aspect of a performer whose persona was generally so obnoxious it’s not surprising director Tony Richardson took full advantage of it by casting him as an unctuous undertaker in the 1966 film The Loved One.
After Gold Diggers of Broadway I ran Charles a 1954 episode of Liberace’s TV show called “Great Personalities” which tied in with the film because, a quarter-century after making Gold Diggers of Broadway, Nick Lucas appeared in it and once again sang “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips.” This was something of a cheap-jack production because it purported to pay tribute to great performers of the past — only quite a few of them were not quite as “past” as the show made out: Liberace kicked things off with a medley of “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” “Some of These Days,” “Love in Bloom” and “If You Knew Suzie” that paid tribute, through elaborate posters (and a squawking clarinet sound on “When My Baby Smiles at Me”), to the four people most identified with those songs: Ted Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Jack Benny and Eddie Cantor, respectively, all of whom were still alive when this show was done but none of whom was going to appear on it for what pittances Liberace’s producers, Guild Films, could afford to pay (and Benny was a major TV star on the CBS network, which would have looked unkindly on his appearing on a non-network syndicated show like Liberace’s). Lucas, who in 1954 as well as 1929 was a surprisingly good guitarist, sang “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” in the same high falsetto tenor he used in the movie — whatever you think of his style, his voice and guitar chops had both held up quite well — and the other guest star on the program was also someone who’d reached her peak in the 1920’s: Gilda Gray, a white blues singer and dancer who was apparently the first white person to dance the shimmy on stage.
She sang “St. Louis Blues” on the program and Liberace identified her as the first white person to record it (which she wasn’t: Al Bernard sang it with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1921, just seven years after W. C. Handy wrote it), and I suspect Liberace’s interest in her was largely because, like he, she was of Polish descent: her birth name was Marianna Michalska and her parents emigrated from Warsaw when she was eight and raised her in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — also Liberace’s birthplace. Liberace also paid tribute to a couple of other famous Poles on the show: he played Paderewski’s “Menuet Antique” (he pronounced “Menuet” as “minuet” and did one of his most annoying things: instead of playing the piece as the piano solo Paderewski wrote, he dragged in four violinists led by his straight brother George and they added totally unnecessary parts; I started cringing every time they began to move their bows towards their strings, dreading what was about to happen) and he also played a Chopin nocturne, delivering it come scritto as a solo piano piece and playing it with the right delicacy and phrasing. I’ve heard occasional recordings of Liberace playing classical piano pieces as written (including a beautiful rendition of “Claire de Lune” by Debussy) and he was clearly at his best when he played that way: though no one was going to mistake him for Rubinstein, Horowitz, Gieseking or Arrau in that repertoire, it’s clear that playing “straight” classical brought forth a simple eloquence and phrasing from him that eluded him when he was playing pops (especially when he sang in that annoying voice that was once described as “a dormouse with adenoids”) and is about the one genuinely moving aspect of a performer whose persona was generally so obnoxious it’s not surprising director Tony Richardson took full advantage of it by casting him as an unctuous undertaker in the 1966 film The Loved One.
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