by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Hollywood
Cavalcade, an entry in the second 20th
Century-Fox boxed set of The Films of Alice Faye, and while I could hope for a third box in the
series devoted to her pre-20th Century Fox films (including the quite fascinating 1935
musical Music Is Magic, which I
watched while the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow-Soon-Yi Previn scandal was in full
swing and seemed like an eerie anticipation of it in its tale of a young man
infatuated with an old-time musical star, played by Bebe Daniels, and steers
her to a comeback but also falls for her daughter, played by Alice Faye), this one
is quite compelling and has a number of her most important movies. Hollywood
Cavalcade was one of the first
attempts by a major movie studio to deal at least somewhat honestly with the
medium’s history, and in particular the era of silent films and the contentious
period in which they were suddenly (within two years) replaced by talkies. The
story opens in New York in 1913, in which aspiring actress Molly Adair (Alice
Faye) suddenly gets her big break when the star of a (real) play called The
Man Who Came Back takes sick in the middle
of a performance and Molly, her understudy, goes on in her place. She’s scouted
by Michael Linnett Connors (Don Ameche sans his trademark moustache, though he grows it later
in the film and looks more like himself), who when he isn’t covering theatre
for the New York Evening Record works as a prop boy and general factotum for the Globe movie studio in
Edendale, California. (Edendale was the original location for Mack Sennett’s
Keystone studio; this is one of the many references to Sennett’s career in
which the script — written by the usual committee: Lou Breslow, “original
idea”; Hillary Lynn and Brown Holmes, “story”; Ernest Pascal, “screenplay”; and
uncredited contributions by James Edward Grant and silent-film director Malcolm
St. Clair, who’s also listed on imdb.com as uncredited director for the
silent-movie sequences — abounds.)
Connors signs Molly to a personal contract
and gets Globe to pay her the then-handsome sum of $100 per week — double what
she was getting on stage — and plans to star her in a big dramatic feature.
Only her screen test (with Buster Keaton, of all people, as her leading man —
and he’s also listed on imdb.com as an uncredited co-director of the sequences
reproducing silent comedy) is being shot on the same stage as a comedy scene by
one of Globe’s other units, and unable to react convincingly as a dramatic
actor when a stock roué villain
puts the make on his girlfriend, Keaton instead goes into a comedy routine that
ends up with him throwing a pie at the bad guy, missing and hitting Molly
instead. Connors realizes he’s onto something and sends one of his staffers to
buy 500 custard pies a day from a local baker (the real pies in Sennett’s films
were usually fakes made with shaving cream, but in this film the pies are
actually edible). Molly becomes an instant star and Connors walks out of Globe
and sets up his own company to make first comedies, then dramatic features,
with her. He also hires an actor named Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis) to be her
romantic leading man, only their relationship gets too romantic for Connors’ taste; the three of them are
scheduled to take a vacation, only Connors remains behind working out ideas for
new pictures, and while they’re alone together, proximity works its magic and
Molly and Nicky fall in love and get married for real. They’re willing to
continue working for Connors, but he’s so pissed off at Molly for hooking up
with Nicky instead of him that he fires them both, making the famous-last-words
speech of just about every fictional movie producer in a movie that if he can
make one pair of stars, he can make another. Only, while Nicky and Molly rise
up the Hollywood food chain to a contract with Metro and then a berth at United
Artists, Connors loses all his money on a big-budget epic called Queen of
the Nile (two decades before 20th-Century
Fox would take a real-life financial bath on the Liz Taylor Cleopatra), he walks out on two major-studio contracts over
“creative interference,” and his house is foreclosed on and he’s written off by
the business until Molly Adair tries to salvage the career of the man who
discovered her by insisting on him as director of her new film, Common Clay.
They’re in the middle of producing this when
Molly and Nicky are involved in a car accident while racing to get to the
location on time; Nicky is killed (well, the writers had to do something to eliminate the extraneous character!) and Molly
is laid up in the hospital for two to three months. While all this has been
happening Warner Bros. has released The Jazz Singer, it’s been an enormous hit and Molly’s producer,
worried that if they wait for her to recover and complete the movie it will
seem hopelessly out of date as a silent, wants to shoot a quick final scene
with a double for Molly and rush it out while there’s still a market for silent
films. Only Connors steals the negative and refuses to give it back unless he’s
allowed to come back and finish the movie his way, with Molly finishing her role and with the
script rewritten to include sequences with sound so it won’t be written off as obsolete. This duly happens, and
at the end, with a hit on their hands and Molly Adair having navigated the
transition from silent to sound quite ably, she and Connors seem headed for a
reunion off screen as well. Hollywood
Cavalcade is often referred to as a film
à clef about the real-life
professional and personal relationship of
Mack Sennett and Mabel Normand, and Sennett himself was involved in this
production; he not only consulted on the silent comedy scenes (which don’t have
quite the panache of the original but are
still screamingly funny and among the best parts of the film) but actually
appears as himself, speaking at a testimonial dinner to Molly Adair which a
decidedly inebriated Connors crashes in a scene pretty obviously ripped off
from the Academy Awards sequence of the 1937 A Star Is Born. It is and it isn’t; obviously the writers and
director Irving Cummings (an efficient traffic cop, as usual) didn’t dare
depict the real reason Sennett’s and
Normand’s off-screen romance broke up (she caught him in flagrante delicto with another one of his actresses, Mae Busch), but
the film is full of Sennettesque anecdotes and even the plot twist of a
director stealing the negative of an uncompleted film and essentially using it
to hold the studio hostage really happened to Sennett, though at the other end.
In 1918 Sennett’s production Mickey, Mabel Normand’s first feature, had gone through four directors and the
last one, F. Richard Jones, was having a major argument with Sennett over his
salary. Unable to get the increase he wanted, Jones stole the negative of Mickey and refused to give it up until Sennett paid him
the extra money; Sennett paid up, Mickey got finished, and upon release it was the third biggest hit of the
entire silent era (topped only by The Birth of a Nation and The Big Parade). But Connors’ descent into dramatic spectacle,
his financial failure, his troubled dealings with the major studios and his
descent into alcoholism sound like the writers were tapping D. W. Griffith for
their second act.
Hollywood Cavalcade is quite an entertaining movie, a rare Alice Faye vehicle in which she
doesn’t sing — and though they shot her performing a song, “Whispering,” which
wasn’t used in the final cut, the film isn’t hurt much by her vocal silence
even though she’s not much of an actress and gets by in the role on an
appealing personality and a hauntingly beautiful face (including the blue eyes
which look spectacular in three-strip Technicolor — it was Faye’s first color
film — even though they would have bedeviled cameramen in the silent era since
the films were too slow to reproduce blue — cinematographer James Wong Howe
“made his bones” by figuring out how to photograph blue-eyed actress Mary Miles
Minter without having her eyes go white: he hid himself and his camera behind a
black curtain, “bounced” light off of it and thereby got a shadow on Minter’s
eyes so they looked normal on screen). It’s nice for once to see a film made in
1939 that doesn’t regard the silent era as
so hopelessly old-fashioned no one should bother watching its movies — though
it’s revealing that the film reproduced silent comedy but didn’t try to do a scene from one of Molly’s
dramatic films because silent drama, especially romantic drama, would have been
considered risible to a 1939 audience — and though it’s hardly at the level of
the first two A Star Is Borns or Singin’ in the Rain it is a quite estimable take
from Hollywood on its own history
