by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was Babes in Arms, an old favorite of mine from 1939 and the first musical Arthur Freed
produced on his own at MGM (on The Wizard of Oz he had been Mervyn LeRoy’s assistant), and though it
wasn’t the first film Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had been in together it was the one that set the clichés for the ones to come.
The film was based on a 1937 stage musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart —
though the title song and “Where or When?” are the only songs from the original
actually performed in the film — and the plot centers around vaudeville star
Joe Moran (Charles Winninger), his wife and onstage partner Florrie (Grace
Hayes) and their two kids, son Mickey (Mickey Rooney, top-billed) and daughter
Molly (Betty Jaynes). The film begins with the elder Morans playing the Palace
theatre — well, Joe playing it anyway; he struts about the stage playing Bob
Carleton’s jazz standard “Ja-Da” on trombone and apologizes for Florrie’s
regrettable but temporary absence from their act because she’s off giving birth
to Mickey. The fact that Rooney’s character enters the world during his dad’s
performance is supposed to indicate that he’s born and destined for the stage
and couldn’t possibly grow up to be anything else.
Flash-forward to a young
Mickey Moran tap-dancing as part of his parents’ act (a clip from Rooney’s
earlier MGM film Broadway to Hollywood from 1933 — the ultimate “doubles” movie since it not only features
both Rooney, star of the 1943 Girl Crazy, and Eddie Quillan, who had played the part in the earlier version
from 1932, they play the same role in Broadway to Hollywood as well: Rooney’s character grows up to be Quillan)
and then to a montage showing the death of vaudeville at the hands of talking
pictures and also audience boredom with the same old routines — one character
even kids the Morans by saying their act is so old, if they miss a line the
audience can prompt them. (This was true of a lot of vaudevillians; the ones who did successfully make the transition to other forms of
entertainment were the ones like George Burns who were inventive enough to keep
creating new material based on his familiar characterization. Alas, not many
were.) Before their part of show business crumbled around them, the
vaudevillians had actually managed to make a stable life for themselves,
settling in the upstate New York town of Seaport and staying there for the 12
weeks of every year they could afford to lay off. Now, with fewer places to
work, families like the Morans and the Bartons — another vaudeville couple
whose daughter Patsy is Judy Garland’s role — are running up bills all over
town and having to struggle. Joe Moran hits on the idea of gathering up the
remaining vaudeville entertainers and having them go out together on tour, but
because they have to keep down expenses they can’t take their kids along the
way they used to when they were flush. So the kids decide to mount a show of
their own, which Mickey Moran will write, direct and star in while Patsy Barton
will be the female lead. Their hope is to bring the major Broadway producers
down to Seaport to witness what they have wrought, so they’ll get an offer to
bring Babes in Arms to Broadway
and make enough money to pay off their parents’ debts. Only they have to work
fast because the town busybody, Martha Steele (Margaret Hamilton, re-creating
her “Miss Gulch” persona from the
Kansas scenes of The Wizard of Oz),
wants the town judge (Guy Kibbee) to pull all the vaudevillians’ kids from
their homes and put them in the state work school — and when she snarls at the
poor man, “I want all those actors’ kids in the state work school, where they
belong,” one half-expects her to add, “And their little dogs, too!”
Complications ensue in the appearance of Baby Rosalie (June Preisser),
burned-out child movie star who’s looking for a comeback vehicle as an
adolescent — judging from the titles of her fictitious films writers Jack
McGowan and Kay Van Riper were obviously intending her as a parody of Shirley Temple (and not coincidentally,
1939 was the year Shirley Temple fell off her perch on top of the list of
Hollywood’s top moneymakers, replaced by — you guessed it — Mickey Rooney) —
and who agrees to bankroll the show if she, not Patsy, gets to play the female lead. (Though most of the
sophisticated songs Rodgers and Hart wrote for the stage version — “My Funny
Valentine”, “I Wish I Were in Love Again”, “Way Out West”, and “Johnny One
Note” — were left out of the film altogether, “The Lady Is a Tramp” survived
instrumentally as a theme symbolizing Rosalie’s prima donna bitchiness.) Rosalie makes a play for Mickey, Patsy
is left to sulk in the background and sing a version of the 1932 song “I Cried
for You” (co-written by the film’s producer, Arthur Freed) with a talking
bridge similar to the one in the “Dear Mr. Gable” rearrangement of “You Made Me
Love You” she performed in Broadway Melody of 1938 (and as in that film, the acoustics change
noticeably when she finishes the talking bridge and resumes singing —
evidently, Judy once again pre-recorded the sung portion but delivered the
spoken lines “live” as the cameras were turning), then tears off on a bus to
join her parents on their tour in Schenectady, where she finds out they’re
bombing. Fortunately, the old-time troupers talk her into returning to Mickey’s
show — and a good thing, too, because on opening night Rosalie’s father shows
up and angrily pulls her out of the show, Patsy goes on in her place and
everything looks headed for a happy ending when a catastrophic hurricane sweeps
the East Coast and drenches Mickey’s outdoor theatre in terrific rain. (There
really was a huge hurricane on
the East Coast in 1938, so the writers were being topical with their plot.)
Fortunately, a deus ex machina
arrives in the form of another ex-vaudevillian who saw the light in time and
became a Broadway producer; he agrees to put Mickey’s show on the Main Stem and
for good measure hires his dad Joe to coach its performers. Babes in
Arms was the original follow-up to The
Wizard of Oz — a movie that actually
flopped commercially on its first release; it was one of those films that
attracted audiences but cost so much to make it still didn’t turn a profit even
though a lot of people paid to see it — and though considerably cheaper Babes
in Arms actually out-grossed Oz and it
was the film that made Judy Garland a star — even though she’s oddly ill-used
in it: she gets to sing a bit of “Where or When” (interrupting a rehearsal by
the stentorian Betty Jaynes and her real-life husband, Douglas MacPhail, whom
MGM were hoping to build into the next Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy), she
makes an appearance in drag as a minstrel in yet another one of Hollywood’s
mind-numbing tributes to minstrelsy that clog up a lot of otherwise good movies (they would do the minstrel
schtick again in Babes
on Broadway, a 1940 follow-up that really
wasn’t a sequel to Babes in Arms
even though the title made it look like one), she gets “I Cried for You,” she
gets some brief appearances in other big ensemble numbers — including the
bizarre routine director Busby Berkeley (just after his switch from Warners to
MGM and already starting to chafe under MGM’s ukase that his numbers could be big, but not so big that they took attention away from their star
performers) worked up for the title song, in which the vaudevillians’ kids look
like they’re staging a protest rally that ends in a bonfire.
She’s also
featured in the final production number, a Popular Front song by Harold Arlen
and Yip Harburg called “God’s Country” (requisitioned from a stage musical
called Hooray for What! that had
convinced Arthur Freed that Arlen and Harburg would be the right people to
write the songs for The Wizard of Oz),
celebrating the wonders of American democracy, where “every man is his own
dictator” and “we’ve got no Duce, we’ve got no Führer/But we’ve got Garbo and
Norma Shearer” (and Judy does her best to convince the listener that “Führer”
and “Shearer” actually rhyme). The number includes a bizarre segment in which
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland impersonate Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt,
which according to imdb.com was removed from the film after FDR’s death in
1945, long thought lost and only restored when a 16 mm print containing it
surfaced in the 1990’s. Babes in Arms is a comfortable musical, at its best when Judy is singing — she and
Betty Jaynes also do an “Opera vs. Swing” number closely paralleling the one
Judy and Deanna Durbin did in their 1936 short Every Sunday, including a nice parody of the big “Figaro” aria
from The Barber of Seville
written by Judy’s long-term confidante and coach Roger Edens and sung by her in
one of her early, and reasonably close, simulacra of swing. (In a lot of her
early appearances — including her first commercial record, “Stompin’ at the
Savoy” and “Swing, Mr. Charlie” with Bob Crosby’s band for Decca in 1936 — Judy
was presented as a swing singer, which she really wasn’t. Her phrasing was too
squarely on the beat for her to sing jazz, and Artie Shaw — who was dating her
platonically while Billie Holiday was singing with his band — recalled that Judy
was ferociously jealous of Billie and wished she could sing like her.) One can
see why 1939 audiences liked it and felt more comfortable with it than they had
with The Wizard of Oz, especially
since it not only gave Rooney a showcase for the overacting his fans expected
from him, but by casting Charles Winninger as his dad it made overacting seem
like a genetically acquired trait!
