Something to Sing About (Grand National, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As I’ve done on previous weeks when a Lifetime movie wrapped at 10 p.m., Charles was home and he and I had time for another movie, I looked for something in the DVD collection and found it in Something to Sing About, a 1937 musical produced, directed, written and scored by Victor Schertzinger for Grand National Pictures. Grand National was an independent studio founded in 1935 with major ambitions. Its CEO, Edward L. Alperson, wanted to make major pictures with major stars -- and he landed one in 1936 when James Cagney filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Warner Bros. and won in the trial court. Suddenly Cagney was a free agent -- but there were enough gentlemen’s agreements in place between the major studios that none of their production chiefs would risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing him. Alperson swooped in and offered Cagney a contract to work at Grand National, and for his first film there Alperson gave him Great Guy, the kind of script he’d been making at Warners: a tough crime melodrama in which Cagney played an inspector with the Bureau of Weights and Measures looking to bust food retailers running crooked scales that short-changed customers and suppliers. He even hired Mae Clarke,who’d co-starred with Cagney in two previous films, The Public Enemy (1931) -- she was the woman on the receiving end of Cagney’s famous grapefruit -- and Lady Killer (1933).

Great Guy was both an artistic and a commercial disappointment, so for his second Grand National film Cagney and Alperson decided to get more experimental. Though Something to Sing About is one of Cagney’s most obscure films, he devoted an entire chapter of his autobiography to it, mainly because it was the only musical he got to make between Footlight Parade (1933) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). Cagney said in his book that he always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart and his greatest career regret was that he had got to do so few musicals. Something to Sing About casts Cagney as “Terry Rooney,” true name Thaddeus McGillicuddy, who when the film begins leads a dance band in a New York City nightclub in which he does spectacular dance routines involving a staircase (one wonders if he learned to dance up and down stairs from the same person Fred Astaire got it from -- the great Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson; there certainly seems to be a lot of Bojangles in Cagney’s excellent dancing here) that suddenly turns into a slide at the end. He also has a girlfriend, Rita Wyatt (screen newcomer Evelyn Daw), who sings with the band and who appears in his floor-show number in which they do a surprisingly Astaire-and-Rogersish move (in the middle of their dance she tries to pull away from him and he yanks her back).

Things take a turn for Our Hero when he gets offered a one-film contract to make a film called Any Old Love for Galor Studios. (Incidentally this film “outs” the 1938 anti-marijuana exploitation film Reefer Madness as a Grand National production; the big car chase in Reefer Madness takes place on a street set built for this film that features a theatre marquee prominently advertising “Terry Rooney in ‘Any Old Love’.” I mention this because there have been a lot of fanciful tales spun about Reefer Madness and the auspices under which it was made.) When he arrives in Hollywood Terry is put through the wringer, introduced to press agent Hank Meyers (William Frawley, best known for playing Fred Mertz in I Love Lucy) and forced to pose suggestively with four young starlets under Galor contract (one of whom was apparently the young Rita Hayworth, who was at Grand National making a Tex Ritter Western) while his true love waits forlornly back in New York, where the band is still performing but business at the nightclub has nose-dived. He calls her person-to-person long-distance (at a time when any phone call out of your local area code -- especially one to the other end of the country -- was hellaciously expensive) and she sings him a new song she and the band have written about how much she misses him, “Right or Wrong.”

At Galor, Terry is confronted by a hair stylist, a makeup person (played by, of all people, Dwight Frye -- how many other movies can you think of which contain both a cast member from I Love Lucy and a cast member from Dracula?) and a vocal coach who tries to get “pear-shaped tones” out of him in a scene copied almost exactly in Singin’ in the Rain 15 years later. Schertzinger and his writing partner, Austin Parker, fill Something to Sing About with lots of fish-out-of-water gags satirizing the Hollywood meatgrinder and what it did to potentially new and innovative talent, and they also make the studio head tell the film’s director and everyone else connected with Any Old Love not to tell Terry how good he is in it, lest he develop a swelled head and “go Hollywood” on them. There’s also a nice anti-racist joke in that Terry has been assigned a Japanese valet, Ito (played by Philip Ahn, who was actually Korean and who would have made a first-rate Charlie Chan if the studios that made the Chan talkies had been interested in casting a real-life Asian) speaking the usual broken-English stereotype -- until he feels comfortable enough around Terry to let his guard drop and speak perfect Engtlish. He later explains that he came to Hollywood hoping for a career as an actor, but .. he leaves it unspoken but I’m sure moviegoers even in 1937 read that scene as the attack on racial stereotyping Schertzinger and Parker no doubt had in mind.

Told throughout the production of Any Old Love that he’s no good -- to which Cagney responds by telling the studio people that if they think he’s so bad they can always fire him and he can go back to leading his band -- and with only Ito and his phone calls to Rita to sustain him emotionally, Terry is about to shoot the final scene of Any Old Love, a bar fight. One of the stunt people explains the “pass” system by which movie fights were staged, but the other guys on the set hate Terry so much they decide to fight him for real -- and Cagney gets his biggest dose of fisticuffs in the film, as the director realizes what’s going on and keeps the cameras rolling so he can liven up the movie with a real on-screen brawl. Terry finishes Any Old Love but then slips out of Hollywood before Galor can sign him to a contract to make another movie; instead he asks Rita to meet him in San Francisco, where he secretly marries her and takes her on a vacation on a tramp steamer to the South Seas. There’s more colorful dancing between Cagney and the sailors, including one who’s in rather crude drag and gets thrown overboard at the end of the sequence.

When they return to San Francisco they find that Any Old Love has become a huge hit and Terry is mobbed by fans as he walks by a movie theatre that’s showing his film. The theatre owner reports him to Galor and the studio head flies out to San Francisco with a contract for a large amount of money but one provision that appalls Terry -- it says he is to remain single for the seven-year term of the contract because the studio is merchandising him as America’s Heartthrob and women moviegoers won’t have fantasies about him if he’s already married. Eventually Terry agrees to Rita’s idea that she be hired by the studio as his “confidential secretary” keeping track of his fan mail so they can at least be together professionally, if not personally, but even that doesn’t work as Terry gets called out to premieres and other public events. What’s worse, Hank Meyers decides to concoct a publicity “romance” between Terry and the co-star of his new film, Steffi Hajos (Mona Barrie, obviously copying real-life Frenchwoman Fifi D’Orsay’s performance as a similar vamp who tried to lure a nice Irish boy in Hollywood, Bing Crosby that time, in the 1933 film Going Hollywood), and there’s a marvelous scene in which Terry and Steffi are talking about how they’re going to break the news to his previous partner that he’s leaving her so he and Steffi can be together … and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, he’s going to dump that nice wife of his for the vamp,” then the camera pulls back and it’s revealed that this is only a scene they’re shooting for their film together.

The head of Galor and the film’s director realize that if Terry sees the headline announcing his alleged “engagement” to Steffi before they get the last scene of his film “in the can,” he’ll go ballistic and walk out. They try to intercept anyone who might show him the newspaper with the devastating headline, but he sees it and disappears … ultimately turning up in New York, where the owner of the nightclub where Terry used to perform is advertising “Mrs. Terry Rooney” as their star vocalist. She’s reluctant to go on, to say the least, but agrees to do so to save the band members’ jobs -- and then of course Terry himself crashes the performance, waves in front of his wife’s face a newspaper with a banner headline that his engagement to Steffi was just a P.R. hoax, and the two dance together and presumably live happily ever after as real-life co-stars both on and off the screen.

Though it was a flop at the time, Something to Sing About has held up surprisingly well; its sometimes bitter jokes about the motion picture industry and the treatment of its stars by studio executives no doubt sat well with Cagney, who had got to make it only after a legal dispute with Warners, and Schertzinger proves an able director with a penchant for “breaking the frame” -- for reminding the audience that we are only watching a movie -- would stand him in good stead when he directed the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby “Road” films in the early 1940’s. Something to Sing About has a plot that makes sense and portrays characters with real emotional conflicts -- and Cagney rises to the challenge of a part that at once takes advantage of his feisty screen image and lampoons it. Evelyn Daw is also excellent -- why this pleasant-voiced singer and highly talented actress (she gets some unforgettable closeups subtly but unmistakably expressing heartbreak) made only one more film, a Smith Ballew Western called Panamint’s Bad Man, is beyond me - and though this isn’t a heart-rending melodrama like the first “official” version of A Star Is Born (made the same year) it’s one of classic-era Hollywood’s better films about itself.

Alas for Grand National’s fortunes, Warner Bros, appealed the verdict that had allowed Cagney to sign with Grand National and won him back. In turn Grand National sold Warners the third Cagney project they had developed -- a grim tale of the slums, the church and crime called Angels with Dirty Faces written by Rowland Brown, who had hoped to make a comeback as screenwriter and director with that film. Instead Warners put their own people on it -- writer John Wexley and director Michael Curtiz -- and the movie was one of Cagney’s biggest hits and best-remembered films. Grand National itself stuck it out for two more years, mostly on the profits from their musical Westerns with Tex Ritter, before going out of business and selling what was left of the company to RKO. Alas, the print we were watching (from an American Movie Classics DVD) didn’t include Grand National’s charming logo -- a clock tower in which the hands of the clock wiped in the company’s name across its face.