by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched our
“feature” for the night, Rose Marie, an oft-filmed story (imdb.com lists three versions — 1928, 1936 and
1954) based on a 1924 operetta by Rudolf Friml with book by Otto Harbach and
Oscar Hammerstein II (originally produced by Hammerstein’s father Arthur — I
know this sort of thing gets confusing but Oscar Hammerstein II was actually
the grandson, not the son, of Oscar
Hammerstein I). The one we were watching was by far the most famous of the
three, the 1936 version, the second film Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy
made together. They were put in it after the enormous blockbuster success of
their first joint effort, Naughty Marietta (1935) — another film based on an operetta, that one by Victor Herbert
(and the reason MGM made all these films based on operettas long after the genre had faded from popularity is very simple: operetta
was Louis B. Mayer’s favorite form of music) — even though there’s a note on
the imdb.com trivia page that says the project was originally intended to be
shot in three-strip Technicolor as a vehicle for Grace Moore and Nelson Eddy,
but after the smash success of Naughty Marietta MacDonald replaced Moore and Mayer had the film
shot in black-and-white instead. (Mayer was notoriously indifferent to color,
thinking that three-strip Technicolor was simply not a big enough box-office
draw to justify the added expense; in those days it cost twice as much to make
a film in color as it did in black-and-white. After Irving Thalberg’s death
Mayer scrapped the color footage that had been shot for the third
MacDonald-Eddy film, Maytime, and as is well known Mayer actually tried to talk David O. Selznick
out of shooting Gone With the Wind in color — but Selznick felt the story demanded color, and as it turned out he was right not only
aesthetically but commercially: Gone With the Wind had a far longer theatrical reissue life in color
than it would have in black-and-white.)
Rose Marie has a relatively simple plot — at least once the
screenwriters, Frances Goodrich, her husband Albert Hackett, and Alice Duer
Miller, got done with it (I’m assuming the plot of the original operetta was
more complicated — operetta plots usually were): Marie de Flor (Jeanette
MacDonald) is a brilliantly talented and highly temperamental prima donna who turns in a magnificent performance of Gounod’s
opera Roméo et Juliette and
afterwards fires her manager, breaks off her relationship with her sort-of
fiancé Teddy (a young and almost unrecognizable David Niven) and tells her maid
Susan (Aileen Carlyle) that the only man she’ll ever love is her outlaw
brother, John Flower (James Stewart — this early in his career MGM had no idea
what to do with him!), who’s in prison for being involved in a holdup and has
just been turned down for parole. When Marie hears after her performance that
her brother has escaped and killed a Mountie in the process, she determines to
head up to the wilds of the Canadian north (the whole movie is set in Canada
and the opera house where she performs is in Québec) to get money to him and
help him flee the country. The film is about half an hour into its running time
before we finally met Nelson Eddy — as Sgt. Bruce, a Mountie who is assigned
the task of replacing his slain colleague and running down John Flower so he
can be recaptured. (Once again MGM’s casting department was turning Eddy’s
notorious stiffness into an asset by casting him as a military or
law-enforcement officer, so his stiffness could be read as discipline and military
bearing.)
Marie dons old clothes and ties her hair back so she won’t be
recognized, and she loses her money when her half-Indian guide Boniface (George
Regas) steals it, but Sgt. Bruce is on the scene, tracks him down and helps her
recover the money — though she refuses to press charges against Boniface
because he’s the only clue she has to her brother’s whereabouts. Bruce also
rescues her when she tries to ride her horse through a lake and falls off, and
the two end up in a rowboat where he sings to her the first in a succession of
romantic duets that were probably key to this film’s blockbuster appeal in
1936. Rose Marie is a frustrating movie
because there were plenty of interesting plot potentials that went ignored —
like the long scene at the beginning in which Marie meets the Premier of
Québec, which seemed to be setting up a scene at the end in which she’d appeal
to him to pardon her brother (indeed, I was expecting the plot payoff to be
that John Flower had not killed
the Mountie — Boniface had — and therefore could be let off relatively easily)
— and it’s also one of those damnable 1930’s movies in which the heroine is
shown as a woman of fierce independence and spunk until she meets the leading
man, whereupon the writers turn her into a pile of jelly, helpless without him
(a piece of sexism especially annoying on a film in which two of the three
screenwriters were women!). What’s more, the script has Sgt. Bruce arrest John
Flower quickly and unceremoniously (as if he weren’t an important character,
just a contrivance to get the mismatched leads together) and pair Marie and
Sgt. Bruce at the end even though they’re from totally different worlds (at one
point, noticing what a great voice he has, she offers to sponsor him in a
career in opera but he turns her down) and there’s no clue how they’re going to
manage their relationship — will they live half of each year in the Canadian
wilderness and half in the big cities so she can sing, or will she have to give
up her career completely the way Irene Dunne did for Australian outlaw Richard
Dix in Stingaree (1934), a film which if it
had had a singing male lead would have been a beta version of a MacDonald-Eddy
movie.
Rose Marie also suffers from the
usual problem with the MacDonald-Eddy films: she was a great actress and a fantastic singer, while he was a fantastic
singer who could barely act at all. Her movie is a lot more interesting than
his, and when the two get together they sing some nice operetta pieces —
including the famous “Indian Love Call” — but their chemistry seems “off.” They
don’t seem as comfortable with each other as they had in Naughty Marietta or would in their third film together, Maytime (a masterpiece miles ahead of the rest of the MacDonald-Eddy series for
power, emotion and depth, and which dared an unhappy ending and made it work),
and I suspect it’s because that for all the efforts of the writers and director Woody Van
Dyke to make it seem like they’re meant for each other, they’re still playing
antagonistic characters (she’s trying to help her brother escape, and he’s
trying to catch him) and MacDonald is too good an actress to let the audience
forget that. Rose Marie has a
lot going for it, including sumptuous black-and-white cinematography by William
Daniels (even though all that luscious scenery — Lake Tahoe was “playing”
Canada — practically demands color), the MGM studio orchestra, well staged operatic excerpts from Roméo
et Juliette at the beginning (and I’m
sure it wasn’t coincidence that this film
opens with a Romeo and Juliet opera and was made the same year MGM was filming a major-budget
prestige version of Shakespeare’s play!) and Tosca at the end (co-starring Allan Jones, who has no
other part in the film, as MacDonald’s tenor — he was probably kicking himself
for having turned down the male lead in Naughty Marietta and kicked himself even more when his big solo
number, the Tosca aria “È lucevan le stele,”
was taken out of the final cut, reportedly at Eddy’s insistence) and the killer
voices of the legendary leads — but it’s still a mediocre movie that had every
right to be a great one. Not that it mattered in 1936; Rose Marie was a bigger hit than Naughty Marietta and cemented MacDonald and Eddy as one of the
great screen teamings, and “Indian Love Call” became the biggest joint hit record
the duo ever had. (It also got parodied two years later in a marvelously
vicious swing deconstruction by Artie Shaw and his novelty singer, Tony Pastor;
and in the 1960’s by the TV series Get Smart! Maxwell Smart infiltrates KAOS and the password to
get in their headquarters is “When I’m calling you,” to which the answer is
“Oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo.”)
