by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” Charles and I watched two nights ago was Broadway
Gondolier, a quite interesting Warner Bros.
musical from 1935 that turned out to be stylish and genuinely entertaining even
when the principals (or the musical guest stars) weren’t singing. The early signs weren’t good — Dick Powell
was the star, though billed below the title on a miscellaneous card that also
included Joan Blondell (two of whose real-life husbands were involved with the
production; her first husband, cinematographer George Barnes, photographed it,
and her second husband, Powell —whom she married September 19, 1936, over a
year after this film was made and just two weeks after she and Barnes divorced
— was her co-star), Adolphe Menjou (whose TCM “Summer Under the Stars” day it
was when I recorded this) and Louise Fazenda (usually a raucous Marie Dressler
type but here cast as a cheese heiress who plays surprisingly dignified and
sophisticated comedy). The director was the usually hacky Lloyd Bacon and the
script was written by a committee; Sig Herzig, E. Y. Harburg (better known as a
lyric writer and Harold Arlen’s long-time collaborator, notably on The
Wizard of Oz) and former Lubitsch
collaborator Hans Kräly were credited with the story, Herzig and Warren Duff
with the script, and imdb.com lists additional uncredited contributions by
Julius J. Epstein and future Warners producer Jerry Wald. (Another writer,
Francesco Maria Piave, is also listed because in the 19th century he
wrote the libretto for Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, excerpts from which — notably “La donna è mobile”
and the Quartet — are heard here.)
Also there aren’t any big spectacular
production numbers by Busby Berkeley, Bobby Connolly or anyone else — not that
we miss them, as things turned out, because Broadway Gondolier turned out to be a nice mixture of screwball comedy
and musical. Dick Purcell (Dick Powell’s character name and later the screen
name of another Warner Bros.
player) is a New York cabdriver with ambitions to be an opera singer. His vocal
coach, Eduardo de Vinci (Adolphe Menjou, cast according to the Hollywood
one-accent-is-as-good-as-another tradition), of course is horrified that the
man he is grooming for an operatic career might sink so low as to sing on the radio, but that’s the career he goes after — especially
after he meets and falls in love at first sight with Alice Hughes (Joan
Blondell), receptionist at the UBC network. She tries to get him an audition
with E. V. Richards (Grant Mitchell), producer of the Flagenheim Cheese hour,
but the imperious Mrs. Flagenheim (Louise Fazenda) doesn’t wait for him to show
up and so he doesn’t get the job. Alice scores him a gig making animal noises
on a children’s program, but he gets fed up with the whole schtick and angrily chews out the listeners as “brats” and
gets fired instantly. (This plot twist anticipates by a decade the famous one
in which Nila Mack lost his popular “Let’s Pretend” children’s radio show after
one broadcast in which he signed off and then, unaware that his mike was still
on, said, “Well, that ought to hold the little bastards for a while.”) After a
ghastly country-music number Mrs. Flagenheim concludes that there’s no suitable
radio talent in the U.S. and she’ll have to go to Italy to look for a singer
classy enough to give “romance” to her cheese products. Richards and Alice
accompany her, and Dick stows away on the boat and works his way across washing
dishes in the ship’s kitchen (and puts off his fellow dishwashers by practicing
opera as he works), and when he meets up with de Vinci, who’d gone to Italy
earlier hoping he still had contacts in the Italian opera world he could use to
get Dick a job, de Vinci manages to get him a job as a gondolier. When he finds
out what a gondolier does, Dick says, “Can’t I ever get away from driving a cab?,” but soon he relents
and, of course, Alice, Richards and Mrs. Flagenheim turn up in his gondola,
hear him sing (in a marvelously Lubitsch-esque sequence in which the people
watching as the gondola passes become his back-up singers) and sign him at
once.
De Vinci, acting as his manager, passes him off as Italian “Ricardo
Purcelli” and wins him $500 a week, and of course he’s an immediate sensation
on the Flagenheim Cheese Hour (where he shares the stage with Ted Fio Rito and
his band and the Four Mills Brothers, playing themselves — and I suspect this
was the Mills Brothers’ last film appearance before John Mills, Jr., the one
who played guitar as well as sang, died young of tuberculosis and was replaced
by their father, John Mills, Sr.). Only his new-found success is threatened
when Alice’s former boyfriend, Cliff Stanley (William Gargan), a writer at UBC
who does the “Buck Gordon” science-fiction serial and always relies on Alice to
figure out how to get Buck Gordon out of the latest cliffhanger (“Just have him
jump!” Charles yelled at the screen. “It works for Republic!”), threatens to
“out” Dick as an American cabdriver if Alice doesn’t jilt Dick and come back to
him — only the radio audience likes Dick so much they don’t care where he comes from, they demand to keep hearing that
voice, and in the nick of time de Vinci and Alice run him down where he’s been
hiding and bring him back to the station to continue his program. The End. It
may not seem like much in synopsis — and there’ve been any number of movies,
from the Columbia Let’s Fall in Love
and its remake, Slightly French,
to Jessie Matthews’ marvelous series of British musicals (Evergreen,
First a Girl — an earlier version of Victor/Victoria with Matthews’ real-life husband, Sonnie Hale, in
the Robert Preston role — and It’s Love Again, and one imdb.com reviewer added more recent films
like Tootsie and Chicago to the list), in which the aspiring star has to
enter and continue an outrageous masquerade to achieve fame, but the writing
committee enlivened it with a lot of clever wisecracks (notably Alice’s
statement about crooners: “They don’t get married, they only get divorced”) and
Bacon’s usually slovenly direction turned quite stylish this time around. Broadway
Gondolier is a pleasant surprise and shows
that Dick Powell 1.0 (the musical star, as opposed to Dick Powell 2.0, the film
noir icon) could make a genuinely pleasant,
entertaining and even sophisticated movie without having to serve time as the
center of Busby Berkeley’s extravaganzae.
