by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Music in the Air, which Turner Classic Movies was showing as part of their salute to
expatriate German filmmakers who left when Hitler took power (or shortly
thereafter) and settled in Hollywood. Music in the Air was a 1934 film by (pre-20th
Century-)Fox, originally planned at Fox’s short-lived Paris studio (where
German expat Fritz Lang made the marvelous 1933 film Liliom, with Charles Boyer starring in an adaptation of the
same Hungarian play that later produced the plot for the musical Carousel) but quickly relocated to the U.S. once Fox decided
that their European production effort was a money-loser and shut it down. It was
based on a 1932 Broadway musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, and
it has two other points of distinction: it was Gloria Swanson’s last film in
her long run as a star, from her debut at Essanay in 1915 through her tenures
at Triangle, Paramount and United Artists to this one-shot film at Fox. (At the
time she made this she was at least nominally under contract to Irving Thalberg
at MGM, but she never actually made a film with him and the contract was
canceled after Thalberg’s death in 1936.) During the next 16 years Swanson made
only one movie — Father Takes a Wife
at RKO in 1941, co-starring Adolphe Menjou and Desi Arnaz (she was a woman who
married widower Menjou and had to deal with the opposition of his grown kids) —
until her great comeback role in Sunset Boulevard, filmed in 1949 and released in 1950. The other
point of distinction is that not only were the producer (Erich Pommer) and
director (Joe May) of Music in the Air German expats, so was one of the screenwriters, Billy Wilder (his first
name was spelled “Billie,” German-style, in his credit), who a decade and a
half later would be one of the most successful directors in Hollywood and would
make Sunset Boulevard. Vividly
directed by May — who begins the movie with a long-shot of a mountain (remember
that in the classic film era mountaineering movies were a staple of German
filmmaking and were the same reliable crowd-drawers Westerns were in the U.S.)
and has the film’s title waft in as if being blown in by a mountain breeze —
and quite well acted by a quartet of principals, Music in the Air is a quite stylish film and a welcome rediscovery
even though one of the two hit songs from the stage version, “The Song Is You,”
was left on the cutting-room floor. (The other, “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star,”
is included and nicely sung by Swanson and her co-star, John Boles.)
The film
takes place in Bavaria, alternating between Munich and a little village 40
miles away as the crow flies and 60 miles by the hiking trail through the
mountains which a group of mountain climbers including local schoolteacher Karl
Roder (Douglass Montgomery, clad in lederhosen that do quite a good job of showing off his
“manhood” and even allowed to show a patch of chest hair — usually chest hair
was a bozo no-no in classic Hollywood films; movie males rarely got to show
bare chests at all and if they did, either they had no chest hair au
naturel or they were obliged to shave it)
climb to get to the big bad city of Munich. Roder is also an aspiring writer of
song lyrics and his composer is Dr. Walter Lessing (Al Shean, the Marx
Brothers’ uncle and the only member of the Broadway cast who repeated his role
in the film), who in the opening scene hears a bird warble a tune (Roder caught
one of his students hiding the bird in his schooldesk, confiscated it and set
it free), writes it down and it becomes “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star.” Roder is
also dating Lessing’s daughter Sieglinde (June Lang), and the three of them end
up in Munich where Roder and Lessing successfully pitch their song to music
publisher Ernst Weber (Reginald Owen) for inclusion in a new operetta. The only
problem is that the real-life couple who are supposed to star in the operetta,
Frieda Hotzfelt (Gloria Swanson) and Bruno Mahler (John Boles), are fighting each
other like cats and dogs. What’s more, Bruno is not only the male lead in the
show, he’s also its writer, and Frieda’s prima donna antics are pissing him off so much he’s not inclined
either to write or act in the new
production despite the intense deadline pressure, since the theatre’s manager
tells them the operetta has to be
produced within days. The gimmick is that when Roder and Sieglinde show up,
Frieda and Bruno regard them as delectable potential lovers and use the
youngsters to make each other jealous — creating an eerie anticipation of Sunset
Boulevard, the other Wilder-Swanson
collaboration. Though it’s a comedy, Gloria Swanson is playing a surprisingly
similar role: a temperamental star on the thin edge of sanity who successfully
seduces a younger man despite his queasy sense of guilt and the presence of an
age-peer alternate girlfriend for him.
The plot of Music in the Air is pretty much the old-fashioned fish-out-of-water
story, though there’s also a strong similarity to The Guardsman in the presence of a real-life showbiz couple whose
members are pathologically jealous of each other — rightly so, it turns out, as
Frieda makes a bee-line for the innocent young Karl, up to and including
offering him a trip to Venice she decides to take in the middle of the show’s
rehearsals (though his guilt over the whole relationship, anticipating William
Holden’s queasy acting against Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, causes him to bail at the last minute and her to
leave alone), while Bruno has such a case of the hots for Sieglinde that he
insists she replace Frieda in the show even though she has zero acting
experience and a decent voice but no stage presence. (Ironically, Douglass
Montgomery and June Lang both had voice doubles — Dave O’Brien and Betty
Helstand, respectively — but Gloria Swanson and John Boles both did their own
singing.) The whole thing comes to a head at the dress rehearsal for the show,
at which the producers tell Sieglinde that if she insists on playing the
starring role the show will last just one night and all the other cast and crew
members will be out of work (why they didn’t sock their backers for 25,000
percent of its costs and abscond with the overages is a mystery to me) — and
one of them gives Sieglinde a talk about how the great star Frieda Hotzfelt
started as a seamstress, worked hard for years, spent every dime she could save
on singing lessons, and only slowly worked her way up the theatrical ladder.
This is supposed to convince her that she should go back to the little village in
the mountains and be the milkmaid nature intended her to be until she’s ready
to marry Karl, but I would have
wanted her to deliver a stiff-upper-lip comeback and say, “All right, I’ll
admit I’m not ready now, but I’ll
go back home, I’ll save my money, I’ll get trained and when I come back here I will be!” Still, despite this annoying bit of classism (a
surprising number of Hollywood movies in the early 1930’s openly condemned the
attempts of working-class people to work themselves up the class ladder and preached
that they were precisely where they belonged when they were proletarians), Music
in the Air is great fun. As Charles pointed
out, it helps that though made in the U.S. and presented as a star vehicle for
Gloria Swanson and John Boles, it’s really an ensemble film and, if anything,
the Montgomery and Lang characters are the leads and Swanson and Boles (who
don’t appear for the first 20 minutes of this 85-minute film and disappear
about 10 minutes before the end) are the second leads.
It also helps that
rather than direct it in the bland, conservative, shot-reverse shot style most
American directors would have used in a story like this, Joe May mounts his
camera on a crane and swoops it up and down for much of the action, picking
unusual angles that propel us into the action instead of just presenting it at
a safe distance. The high point of the film is an impromptu rehearsal of a new
song in the musical producer’s office in which desk lamps become stage lights
and the props are whatever comes to hand — including a trash can, which in one
lovely shot Gloria Swanson overturns with a lordly indifference to its
contents, which are spilling out on the floor as she swoops it over to where
she wants it at the moment. Director Joe May had been a major “name” in German
film in the Weimar era — he’d had some blockbuster hits, including the two-part
film The Indian Tomb (written by
Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou and originally slated for Lang to direct, until
producer Erich Pommer decided that May was a bigger name and should get the
assignment) — but after Music in the Air was a box-office flop he didn’t get another assignment for three years,
making a Warner Bros. musical vehicle for Kay Francis called Confession (a remake of a German film called Mazurka) and then ending up at Universal doing mostly “B”
movies (including the quite interesting 1939 film The House of Fear, a remake of a part-talkie called The Last
Warning from 1929 that had been the last
film of another German expat,
Paul Leni, and also The Invisible Man Returns and a 1940 version of The House of Seven
Gables that both gave Vincent Price early
parts in the Gothic-horror genre
that would eventually become his specialty) before he sank to Monogram, where
he made his last film, Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in 1944. Then he and his wife Mia May (she’d been
the star of many of his German films) briefly opened a restaurant that,
according to his imdb.com page, “failed because, in keeping with his Teutonic
roots, [he] told customers what they should order.” Joe May died in Hollywood
in 1954 at the age of 73, a rather sad end to a career that, judging from the
few films I’ve seen of his both from Germany and the U.S., showed a quite
impressive talent.
