I wanted to run the videotape I’d brought over: the 1935 film Roberta, with Jerome Kern’s great stage musical brought to vivid cinematic life by Irene Dunne, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Perhaps it was because this movie was suppressed as long as it was — MGM took it off the market in 1952 by buying the remake rights from RKO and producing their own version, Lovely to Look At, which had the virtue of casting Randolph Scott’s part from the original with someone who could actually sing (Howard Keel) and was in color but had little else to recommend it otherwise — but Roberta acquired a very “special” reputation among Astaire-Rogers fans (Arlene Croce wrote, “Roberta came as close to plotlessness as that ideal Astaire-Rogers musical we all like to think they should have made,” though she added, “but this was presumably unintentional”) during the years it was unseeable — and when I finally got a chance to see it when MGM re-released it theatrically in the late 1970’s I thought it was a sheer delight despite an elephantine plot line and some wisecracks that were modestly amusing but nowhere near as funny as the script’s multiple writers (Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott and Glenn Tryon) obviously thought they were.
Today Roberta strikes
me as a near-masterpiece, despite sluggish direction by William A. Seiter.
Despite Croce’s comment that “none of the characters has much definition and
the story makes very little sense,” the film actually seems more emotionally
moving than most musicals of the period. The character of Roberta herself —
really Aunt Minnie, who emigrated from America to France and adopted the
“Roberta” monicker to build herself up as a couturiére — is a strangely appealing one, low-keyed in her
casual flirtation with a British lord her own age (Ferdinand Munier) and with a
genuine attachment to her nephew (Scott) who has come over to Paris with a band
led by Astaire. (Charles noted bemusedly that there was no particular reason
for him to be traveling with a band — since he couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance,
there was no attempt to suggest he could play an instrument and he was neither
the band’s manager nor a roadie — though actually he is described as the manager in the dialogue.) Her head
designer, Stephanie (Dunne), is really a princess from Russia, who hangs out
with a whole group of Russian emigrés in Paris who are sitting around, working low-class jobs (her cousin,
Prince Ladislaw, is the doorman at the Roberta salon) and waiting for the
Soviet Union to fall so they can go back and take over the country again.
Ginger Rogers is a faux Polish
countess who calls herself “Tanka Scharwenka” even though she’s really yet
another impostor, an American nightclub singer named Lizzie Gatz who grew up in
the same small town as Astaire and dated him before they drifted apart and she
went to Europe and adopted her noble disguise because “you have to have a title to croon over here.” In the stage
version from 1933 — which starred Ray Middleton in the Randolph Scott role
(though a “trivia” item on imdb.com says it was Fred MacMurray), Tamara in the
Irene Dunne role, Fay Templeton as Minnie/Roberta, Sydney Greenstreet (in a musical?) as the British lord she’s dating (sort of) and
made an instant star of Bob Hope in the part played by Astaire in the film
(George Murphy appeared as well, in a role that was restored in the 1952 remake
and played by Gower Champion but was eliminated from this script) — Rogers’
role was played by Lyda Roberti, who really was Polish and had a thick accent Rogers mimics here as
she clowns her way through the great song “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” (which Ann
Miller did as a hoochie-coochie routine in the remake). Casting Ginger in this
part meant adding yet one more character who’s disguised to a script that already featured more disguises than your average James Bond
movie!
Roberta is an unusual
musical in many ways. The romantic complications seem more serious than usual
(Randolph Scott’s contempt for the Russian nobility and the shiftless lives
they’re living in Paris seems heartfelt and not just a plot device) and someone
actually dies in the plot — Madame Roberta quietly passes away of old age while
Stephanie is singing “Yesterdays,” in a beautiful and moving scene lifted
almost exactly from the stage version, in which the lights subtly go down as
the flame of Roberta’s life is extinguished. Even before, we’ve fallen in love
with her ourselves and used her emotional reactions to the characters as an
index of what our own should be. And Dunne, who made surprisingly few musicals
(even though she auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera but dropped her operatic ambitions to
sign with RKO as an actress!), probably never had a film that showcased her
voice so well. She gets some great songs to sing, including the standards
“Yesterdays” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” as well as “Lovely to Look At”
(written especially for the film by the composer of the stage version, Jerome
Kern) — with a haunting verse that is usually left off the song when it’s
performed today (in the remake this song, though used for the title, was
virtually thrown away as a brief number for Howard Keel), and while RKO’s sound
recording doesn’t do justice to her high notes the voice itself is a very appealing mezzo-soprano, perfectly suited to this
sort of material. At the same time, though the comic lines may not exactly be
immortal, her marvelously deadpan delivery of them may have helped convince
director Leo McCarey (incidentally the only director besides Seiter who worked
with both Laurel and Hardy and
the Marx Brothers) to cast her in his comedy classic, The Awful
Truth, which revolutionized her career and
convinced producers she could do comedy as well as the soap operas she’d been
known for previously. And the physical production of this film is properly
massive and impressive — though I wish that, as long as RKO was stretching
their usual budgets on this production (it cost $750,000, a great deal for a
1930’s movie with a contemporary setting, including $65,000 just for the story
and song rights), they’d kicked out the jams and shot the final reel in
three-strip Technicolor, which would have made the dresses in the big
fashion-show finale look better (“A pity the dresses designed for the film are
ugly to look at,” Croce sniffed — Bernard Newman gets the “gowns” credit) and
would also have given us color footage of Astaire and Rogers at their absolute
peak as a team. Still, Roberta is
a really special movie (“their most ebullient film,” wrote Croce), a worthy
successor to The Gay Divorcée and
predecessor to Top Hat in the
Astaire-Rogers oeuvre. — 9/11/98
•••••
Charles and I watched the third film in the first night of
Turner Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to Fred Astaire: Roberta, the third of the nine Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers
movies made at RKO between 1933 and 1939. (They showed the first three in
sequence — Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcée and Roberta — and then jumped one to Follow the Fleet, then caught the very end of the cycle with The
Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, and
closed out the evening with two later Astaire films that didn’t co-star Ginger Rogers, Second Chorus and The Sky’s the Limit.) Roberta
has long remained the stepchild of the Astaire-Rogers series, not only because
Irene Dunne got top billing (in 1935 she was not only a bigger “name” than
either Astaire or Rogers, she was also a capable actress equally at home in
soap operas, romantic comedies and musicals — for which she used her own voice;
she was an operatically trained mezzo-soprano and had actually auditioned for
the Met before RKO signed her) but because in the 1940’s RKO sold the rights to
the film to MGM, which remade the basic story — Alice Duer Miller’s novel Gowns
by Roberta — as the 1952 film Lovely
to Look At. As a result, the
Dunne-Astaire-Rogers Roberta was
kept in the MGM vaults, unseen, from the late 1940’s to the mid-1970’s and was
not part of the initial RKO package that first put the Astaire-Rogers movies on
TV in the 1950’s.
The stage version of Roberta was written by Jerome Kern (music) and Otto Harbach
(book and lyrics) and premiered November 18, 1933, just months after the
publication of Miller’s book — and the film was shot from November 26, 1934 to
January 21, 1935, copyrighted February 26, 1935 and premiered March 9, 1935—
yet another indication of how much faster properties moved from page to stage
to screen in the 1930’s than they do today! The stage version featured Tamara
in the lead role of Stephanie (played by Irene Dunne in the film), an exiled
Russian princess who has become the principal designer of the famed haute
couture salon Roberta (as in “Gowns by …
”), while Roberta herself has her own incognito — she’s really an American
named Minnie Kent, who at some point decades into the backstory found herself
in Paris, opened a salon and became a star of the world of fashion. The set of
Roberta’s salon contains a working elevator in the middle that was part of the
stage set as well and plays an important part in the plot; when Roberta premiered on Broadway the presence of a working
elevator on stage was much talked about. An American bandleader, Huck Haines
(played by Bob Hope onstage — it was the part that made him a star — and Fred Astaire in the movie), brings his
band, “Huck Haines and His Wabash Indianians,” to Paris to play jazz at the
exclusive Café Russe, owned by another White Russian émigré, Alexander Voyda
(Luis Alberni). Only the band is fired before they even have a chance to start
work because Voyda was expecting bona fide American Indians and got “Indianians” instead. Huck’s manager, John
Kent (Randolph Scott — future movie star Fred MacMurray played his part on
stage), remembers that his old Aunt Minnie runs a high-end fashion house in
Paris as “Roberta,” and he decides to approach her for help. In the original
story there were three sets of couples — John and Stephanie (who of course have
one of those hate-at-first-sight-that-blossoms-into-love relationships that
abound in movies, then and now), a pair of dancers that come out with the band,
and Huck with Countess Tanka Scharwenka, yet another dispossessed noble who’s
making her living as a singer at the Café Russe.
On stage she was played by
Lyda Roberti, a thickly accented Polish-American entertainer whose delightfully
fractured attempts at singing in English could be heard in the films Million
Dollar Legs (1932) — a loony comedy which
cast her as “Mata Machree, The Woman No Man Can Resist/Not Responsible for Men
Left After 30 Days” — and Nobody’s Baby (1937), and onstage in George Gershwin’s last Broadway musical, Pardon
My English (1933), in which she introduced
the song “My Cousin from Milwaukee” (later recorded far more engagingly by Ella
Fitzgerald on her 1950’s Gershwin Songbook album). In the film this part is
played by Ginger Rogers, but the writers (Jane Murfin, Sam Mintz, Allan Scott,
Glenn Tryon — actor-turned-writer father of actor-turned-writer Tom Tryon — and
an uncredited Dorothy Yost) made her an American — Lizzie Gatz, former
girlfriend of Huck Haines — who adopted the Tanka Scharwenka identity because
“you have to have a title to croon over here.” She’s the star attraction at the
Café Russe and she manages to win Huck and his band the job back as long as he
promises not to “out” her. Minnie Kent a.k.a. Roberta is lively enough to have
a boyfriend, British Lord Henry Delves (Ferdinand Munier, playing a part Sydney
Greenstreet had played on stage — Greenstreet was a famous character actor for
decades, known particularly for playing Sir John Falstaff, before he made his
film debut at age 61 in The Maltese Falcon in a part that “typed” him for films as a black-hearted villain), but
she’s also got a bad heart and, in a beautifully filmed, moody scene that’s
quite well staged (by director William A. Seiter, copying the way it had been
done on stage), she asks Stephanie to sing her to sleep with the song
“Yesterdays,” and as the song ends so does her life — symbolized economically
when her arm falls off the couch on which she’s resting. (Earlier in the film
Stephanie had sung her a traditional Russian lullaby in Russian, but no source I’ve seen — not Arlene Croce’s The
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, not
the American Film Institute Catalog
and not imdb.com — has identified it.)
Once Roberta croaks Stephanie and John
try to run the business together, realizing (like Donatella Versace after the
murder of her brother Gianni Versace) that their first show after Roberta’s death will
be heavily scrutinized and the business’s future will hang on its success —
only the two have a jealous hissy-fit over John’s ex-girlfriend Sophie Teale
(Claire Dodd). Sophie dumped John for being a hayseed but since then he’s been
made over by Stephanie and has a sophisticated job co-running a fashion house,
so now she’s after him again — only Huck sabotages their reconciliation by
having Sophie dress in an especially revealing dress the rather prudish John
had wanted dropped from Roberta’s line. (Quite a few of Fred Astaire’s films
reveal this nasty streak in his screen persona — worst of all is Holiday Inn, whose entire plot is the vicious tricks he and Bing
Crosby pull on each other to steal away each other’s girlfriends — which I’ve
suggested in the past could have enabled Astaire to have pulled off the same
transition Dick Powell, the other great male musical star of the 1930’s, did and start
playing tough guys in films noir;
oddly, out of all the actors in Hollywood during the classic era, Astaire came
closer to Dashiell Hammett’s physical depiction of Sam Spade than anyone else,
leading me to imagine an alternate-universe film of The Maltese
Falcon with Astaire as Spade, Barbara
Stanwyck as Brigid and Edward Arnold as Gutman.) Huck and Scharwenka try to
keep Roberta’s going but are unable to do so without Stephanie’s knowledge, and
though her relationship with John is on the rocks — especially since not only
is she jealous of Sophie, he’s
jealous of her cousin Prince Ladislaw (Victor Varconi, whose best-known credit
was as Pontius Pilate in the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille King of Kings and who was also in William Wellman’s proto-noir masterpiece Safe in Hell) — nonetheless she pulls together a new show for
Roberta and Huck and Scharwenka put on entertainment in the form of songs
(Irene Dunne gets a beautiful ballad called “Lovely to Look At” which hadn’t
been in the original show: Kern, Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields co-wrote it
for the film — and though the song’s chorus is pretty comfortably within a pop
singer’s register, its verse soars quite high and shows off Dunne’s operatic
chops) and a rather banal rap commentary by Astaire on the various clothes
being shown.
Among the models in the fashion show is a woman who would become
very famous in a much different context later; RKO put out an ad asking for
women who’d worked as models at the famous Bergdorf Goodman store in New York.
Lucille Ball, who’d had a brief career as a Goldwyn Girl (she made her film
debut in Roman Scandals as part
of a Busby Berkeley number, set in an ancient slave market, in which she and
the other chorines wore nothing
except very long wigs strategically placed to cover the “naughty bits”), had
never actually been employed by Bergdorf’s but had worked a fashion show a promoter had put on there,
so she figured she qualified, got the job and managed two brief shots in a
feathered dress strikingly like the one Ginger Rogers would wear in the “Cheek
to Cheek” number in the next
Astaire-Rogers film, Top Hat.
(When, after years in the vault, this film was revived at the Cento Cedar
Cinema in San Francisco in the late 1970’s, the audience gasped when they
recognized her.) The fashion show is a success, John and Stephanie are
reunited, Huck and Scharwenka ditto — showing that despite Dunne’s top billing
RKO knew who the real stars were,
the final scene is a dance reprise of Astaire and Rogers together doing “I
Won’t Dance” (a Kern song from another show, Three Sisters, which Dorothy Fields adapted for Astaire, including
throwing in the line, “When you dance you’re charming and you’re gentle/’Specially
when you do the Continental,” an in-joke reference to the big Academy
Award-winning hit song from The Gay Divorcée) which Astaire had earlier performed as a ratcheting
tap solo on the floor of the Café Russe.
Roberta has acquired a “special” aura that sets it apart
from the rest of the Astaire-Rogers output, partly because it was unavailable
for so long but also because even more than the rest of the movies in their
series, it has the insouciant, free-for-all spirit that Astaire and Rogers epitomized.
“Because they share billing with Irene Dunne, a legend has grown that it’s a
minor and unrepresentative film,” Arlene Croce wrote in The Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book. “On the
contrary; it’s a key film. It widens their range and establishes them
unshakeably as a team. Astaire and Rogers become Astaire-Rogers in this film —
you can see it happening. It’s true that the roles they play are inflated
supporting roles, but since none of the characters has much definition and the
story makes very little sense, that doesn’t diminish their impact. It lets them
soar. Roberta gives us that
soaring spirit in such abundance that, in a way, it does stand apart from the
rest of the series. It’s their most ebullient film.”
It’s somewhat weakened by
the way the plot requires Rogers to retain her “Scharwenka” identity throughout
the movie, thereby preventing her from singing in her real voice, and it also
doesn’t help that the male romantic lead, Randolph Scott, is good enough as a
“type” (his fame in Westerns, then and even more later, helps him be credible
as the kind of plain-spoken American “type” he’s supposed to be playing, lost
in the world of high-fashion Paris and its White Russian émigré, but he
couldn’t sing and as a result RKO had to relegate some of Kern’s best songs
from the original score, including “You’re Devastating,” to background music —
they also did that to “The Touch of Your Lips,” a duet for Stephanie and
Ladislaw in the play, even though Victor Varconi could sing), but the film’s biggest missed opportunity is
that, though they spent a good deal on the production ($65,000 for the story
rights alone — outbidding Paramount and MGM — and quite elaborate sets,
including a supposed Paris street as flagrantly unrealistic and stylized as
Venice in Top Hat), they didn’t
spring for the budget to shoot the last reel in the then-new three-strip
Technicolor process. Arlene Croce rather snippily says, “The dresses designed
for the film are ugly to look at,” which is being unfair to them; they seem
quite appropriately chic to me
(not that I have anything like the world’s greatest fashion sense!) but it’s
clear they would have been far more impressive in color — and so would have the
Astaire-Rogers dance to a reprise of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the show’s
other big ballad hit (besides “Yesterdays”), stunningly sung by Irene Dunne to
a balalaika ensemble accompaniment and later danced by Astaire and Rogers in a
brief but breathtaking sequence. “The dance is almost humble in its brevity and
simplicity — a few walking steps, a sudden plunge, a silky recovery, and it’s
over,” writes Croce. “But the spell that blooms while you are watching it is
powerful, and there are astonishing moments, like his very tender gesture of
pressing her head to his shoulder as they walk.” To have a clip of Astaire and
Rogers dancing together at their peak in color — sigh, what a missed opportunity. (They ultimately did make a color film together, The Barkleys
of Broadway in 1949, but that was a
late-career reunion and, as Croce politely put it, “Rogers had developed a
muscular thickness in her back and arms that robs her gestures of their former
beautiful transparency.”)
Nonetheless, and despite a relatively weak director,
William A. Seiter (“a jovial hack,” Croce calls him), whose two greatest films
were this one and another vehicle for a legendary team (Laurel and Hardy’s Sons
of the Desert), Roberta emerges as a real charmer, stunningly well cast,
vividly staged and with Kern’s imperishable score (even if some of the lyrics
were bowdlerized by the Production Code people — Roberta bears Production Code Certificate No. 608, and one
of the qualifications was the deletion of the line “Love’s no sin” from “Let’s
Begin”), fully worthy of its place in the Astaire-Rogers oeuvre between The Gay Divorcée and Top Hat and far better than any treatment of the same story since. The 1952
MGM Lovely to Look At altered the
storyline — the third couple deleted by the RKO screenwriters were put back in
(and played by real-life dancing couple Marge and Gower Champion) and Roberta
died in the backstory, not on screen — and benefited from color and a male lead
(Howard Keel) who could actually sing, but everything else was a major step
down. Irene Dunne’s role was taken by Kathryn Grayson (a technically superb
singer but a much less interesting screen personality), Astaire’s by his former
Three Little Words co-star Red
Skelton and Rogers’ by Ann Miller, who turned “I’ll Be Hard to Handle” into one
of her typically brassy, almost assaultive solo tap numbers. What’s more, the
dresses for the final fashion scene (directed, uncredited, by Vincente Minnelli
even though Mervyn LeRoy did the rest of the film and was the director of
record for all of it) are so horrid one wonders what Croce, who said the 1935
dresses were “ugly to look at,” thought of them; they’re the work of a totally
demented designer who seemed to think that the way to make clothes to look
“fashionable” was to blithely and blatantly ignore the bilateral symmetry of
the human body. Bob Hope repeated his original stage role on TV twice, in 1958
and 1969, and there are more recent Roberta films from the Philippines in 1979 and the U.S. in
1999 that have nothing to do with this story — but it’s this one that
encapsulates so much of what Roberta,
1930’s musicals in general and the world of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in
particular were about. — 12/5/13
