by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I saw a 1930 musical called Follow
Thru (that’s the actual spelling), made by
Paramount based on a wildly popular musical (it originally ran for 401
performances) by the songwriting team of Buddy de Sylva and Lew Brown (words)
and Ray Henderson (music) and book writer Laurence Schwab, with Schwab co-directing
the film with Lloyd Corrigan from a script adapted from the original by
Corrigan and Frank Mandel, both of whom were uncredited. What made this film
especially interesting is it’s one of the few films made entirely in two-strip
Technicolor for which the color version survives — and though virtually the
only prominent colors are green and red (well, for an outdoor musical set
largely on a golf course green is about the only color you really do need!), the color is watchable and really improves
on a movie that otherwise has its moments but also its longueurs. The film starts in 1910, when “Dinty” Moore (Don
Tompkins), a golf pro at a country club is solemnly informed that his wife is
about to give birth to their child, and he’s so sure the kid will be a great
golfer he’s even bought a set of miniature clubs for him to play with. Then
he’s informed that the “boy” turned out to be a girl, and he takes the news
with a shrug of his shoulders and a resigned comment, “Well, girls play golf, too!” The story then flashes forward to 1930, when the girl has grown up
to be Lora Moore (Nancy Carroll) — though throughout the film I was assuming
the more common spelling “Laura” — and she falls in love at first sight with a
visiting golf pro, Jerry Downes (Charles “Buddy” Rogers, third and
longest-lasting husband of Mary Pickford — they made a movie together in 1927
called My Best Girl but didn’t
become a couple until 1935, after she’d divorced Douglas Fairbanks). The
problem is not only that Downes is there to coach her upper-class opponent in
the big tournament, Ruth Van Horn (Thelma Todd in an unusual and not entirely
successful role for her), but he’s under ongoing contract to his friend Jack
Martin (Jack Haley), who’s hired him to be his golf pro permanently so he can’t
take on other clients without Jack’s approval.
Jack is scared of women — when
he meets one he might actually be attracted to he does a singularly ugly
involuntary routine of batting his eyes and making gulps with his mouth like a
(literal) fish out of water — and Haley (who was also in the original stage
production) portrays this by making Jack a screaming queen, so much so that
when he and Jerry start talking about kissing girls I half expected Jack to bat
his eyes at Jerry and say, “Kiss me.”
Previously Jack went to a masquerade party, whereupon he let a girl get him
drunk and steal his ring, a family heirloom that the Martins have had for so
many generations Jack’s father will disinherit him if he can’t recover it. The
girl who boosted Jack’s ring is, of course, on hand in the main action; she’s
Angie Howard (Zelma O’Neal, also in the original stage version, and she and
Haley steal the film out from under the two leads), Lora’s caddy, and she’s
convinced that Jack promised to marry her and is determined to make him make
good on that. Also on hand is an older guy named J. C. Effingham (Eugene
Pallette, about midway since his playing a romantic lead for D. W. Griffith in Intolerance and the bloated, gravel-voiced apparition he was in
his later character parts) whose plot function is not altogether clear. The
film is rather dull to watch during the long sequences on the golf course, but
the numbers at least somewhat redeem it even though the dance duets between
Haley and O’Neal on “Button Up Your Overcoat” (one of the three original De
Sylva, Brown and Henderson songs retained from the stage version — as was
standard practice well into the 1940’s, Paramount commissioned new songs from
other writers and stuck them in) and between Rogers and Carroll on “A Peach of
a Pair” (a nice pun courtesy of songwriters Richard Whiting — Margaret
Whiting’s father — and George Marion, Jr.) were truncated to a few steps before
the movie cut away from the good stuff back to that boring plot. The plot, in
case you were wondering, is that Lora is determined to avenge herself against
Ruth Van Horn for beating her in a tournament at the start of the film, and
with the support of Jerry Downes and his putting tips she ultimately wins a
rematch and puts the rich bitch in her place.
Along the way we get something of
a production number to the De Sylva-Brown-Henderson song “I Want to Be Bad” —
great flames spout up from the dance floor and the chorus line appears
alternately as devils and angels — which is the best thing in the movie. Follow
Thru is almost miraculous in its survival —
about the only other full-length two-strip musicals that actually survive in
color are Samuel Goldwyn’s dazzling Whoopee (preserved because Goldwyn, more than most movie
moguls, appreciated that his films were his legacy and should be saved —
indeed, his son remembers dad walking him through the film vaults and telling
him that that was his
inheritance) and Universal’s The King of Jazz (which I’ve read online is in the middle of a major
restoration project that has proved so complicated it may be finished before I die, but I’m not holding my
breath for it). According to film historian Richard Barrios, Technicolor
retained ownership of the physical prints of their movies and had the two-strip
prints delivered to them and destroyed en masse when the three-strip process was introduced — but
somehow Follow Thru escaped the auto-da-fé and survived in color. In black-and-white it would
be just another dull musical from the early days of sound, but in color it’s actually
rather fun even though one can see the heavy makeup used to make the characters
look credible in the color process. Nancy Carroll in particular looks like a
china doll, with huge blotches of rouge on her cheeks — but that’s still better
than seeing the two-strip films that now exist only in black-and-white, which
look like all the actors,
including the males, are wearing heavy black lipstick. One reason Ethel Waters
comes off so much better in On with the Show than the white performers — aside from her being by
far the best singer in the cast — is the print-down from two-strip to
black-and-white did her dark skin less damage than it did to the fairer
complexions of the white performers!
