Broadway (Universal, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lonesome was a surprise box-office hit, and so director Paul Fejos got rewarded with a series of big assignments at Universal: Broadway, the studio’s biggest production of 1929, based on a hit play by Phillip Dunning and George Abbott (Abbott was literally a grand old man of the theatre; he wrote his first play in 1913 and continued working almost until his death in 1995 at age 107); La Marsellaise, a big-budget spectacular about the French Revolution; and King of Jazz, Universal’s super-musical featuring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. Alas, Broadway was the only one of these films Fejos actually finished; he had a nervous breakdown while shooting La Marseillaise (the film, retitled Captain of the Guard, was completed by John S. Robertson, whose best-known credit was the 1920 John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). As for King of Jazz, it was assigned to Ziegfeld Follies director John Murray Anderson, who turned in an epic job – only the film was such an enormous flop (thanks largely to a change in the Zeitgeist that made big-budget musicals box-office poison) Anderson never got to direct an entire film again and Universal was almost driven out of business. (They were bailed out by the blockbuster horror successes Dracula and Frankenstein.)

Alas, Broadway was an example of a director who achieved a brilliant success – artistic and commercial – with a low-budget film telling a simple story being rewarded by being assigned to a big commercial blockbuster property and muffing it. (More recently we’ve seen this happen to Rian Johnson, Gareth Edwards and David Bowie’s filmmaker son, Duncan Jones.) Paul Fejos begins Broadway beautifully with an aerial shot of New York City – it’s pretty obviously a model but Fejos tracks through it spectacularly and achieves the same kind of city montage he’d used so effectively as a scene-setter for Lonesome. Only once the camera comes to rest on the Club Paradise, a New York nightclub run by Nick Verdis (Paul Porcasi), the Dunning-Abbott plot, adapted by Lonesome writers Edward T. Lowe and Tom Reed along with Charles Furthman and Abbott himself, kicks in and we’re seeing a pretty lame gangster movie with brief musical interludes.

The gangster movie centers around who’s going to supply the Club Paradise with bootleg booze (this being four years before the repeal of Prohibition, an experiment stupid in purpose): “Scar” Edwards (Leslie Fenton), who to the extent the gangsters had an informal agreement over who could sell what where was supposed to “own” Harlem; or Steve Crandall (Robert Ellis, who bears an odd resemblance to Paul Whiteman that probably jarred 1929 audiences), who’s started hijacking “Scar”’s shipments (ostensibly of real Scotch smuggled in across the Atlantic, though when we hear that claim in the dialogue we go, “Yeah, right … ”) and is pressuring Nick to buy the stolen product. Only Nick is understandably worried about being caught up in a gang war and doesn’t want to antagonize “Scar” (whose real name, we eventually learn, is Jim) by buying liquor that’s been hijacked from his trucks. There’s also romantic intrigue at the Club Paradise; the star entertainer, Roy Lane (Glenn Tryon), has been rehearsing a duo act with one of the chorus girls, Billie Moore (Merna Kennedy, leading lady of Charlie Chaplin’s underrated 1928 masterpiece, The Circus, who like a lot of other women who’d worked with Chaplin got a major-studio contract until producers found that, bereft of the careful guidance of Chaplin, they couldn’t act for beans), and wants to go out as a vaudeville act and play the Palace Theatre.

Only Billie is also the object of a major pursuit by Steve Crandall, who wows her with his ill-gotten riches and wants to marry her – though, like a typical movie villain of the period, he doesn’t think he ought to stop seeing other women even when he has a wife. There’s also a hard-bitten chorine named Pearl (played by Evelyn Brent, about the only person in this movie who turns in a great performance) who happens to be “Scar” Edwards’ girlfriend, and when Crandall lures “Scar” to the Club Paradise and shoots him in the back, Pearl is understandably upset and vows revenge. Also there’s a taciturn police detective named Dan McCorn (Thomas Jackson – he and Porcasi were the only actors from the 1928 stage production that repeated their roles in the film, and Jaclson went on playing taciturn and implacable cops for at least two decades after the release of Broadway) who’s trying to get the goods on Crandall despite a lack of cooperation from just about everybody at the Club Paradise. Crandall “offs” “Scar” and plants the gun he used on Roy Lane, and it’s touch-and-go for about two or three reels whether he can talk McCorn out of arresting him. Roy and Billie actually saw Crandall and his henchman leading the supposedly drunk – but really dead – “Scar” out of the Club Paradise, and Roy tries to tell this to McCorn, but Billie refuses to back up his story because Crandall has bribed her with a fancy women’s watch to lie for him.

In between the gangster scenes – of which the best that can be said is that they weren’t probably as clichéd to a 1929 audience as they seem now because Dunning and Abbott had invented a lot of these clichés for their play – there are brief musical interludes featuring Roy Lane leading the Club Paradise chorus in bits and pieces of some of the lamest songs of the period: “The Chicken or the Egg,” “Hot-Footin’ It,” “Hittin’ the Ceiling,” “Sing a Little Love Song” and a ditty that was obviously intended to be the title song but only a blip of it gets performed. Until the big final sequence, shot in two-strip Technicolor and which had to be restored from a Vitaphone-system sound disc and a Hungarian print of the alternate silent version because it was lost from the surviving sound print, we don’t get to see a complete musical number anywhere in the film – nor, given the awfulness of the songs by Con Conrad, Archie Gottler and Sidney D. Mitchell, do we particularly want to. (You wouldn’t guess from this movie that five years later Con Conrad and Herb Magidson would win the first Academy Award for Best Song for “The Continental,” from the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic The Gay Divorcée.) By far the best piece of music in this film is an instrumental, which I believe is called “Broadway Rhapsody” or “Manhattan Rhapsody,” which I’m sure I’ve heard elsewhere and is played over a montage sequence showing the club’s cleaning people getting it ready for the next night’s festivities. It’s also repeated over the closing credits, though this Blu-Ray edition truncated it.

Broadway isn’t a bad movie, and certainly we’ve seen even worse early talkies – the line delivery isn’t as naturalistic as we got from early-1930’s films but there at least aren’t the mind-numbing pauses between (and sometimes in the middle of) lines that made the 1929 Charlie Chan movie Behind That Curtain almost unwatchable – but one gets the impression that even in 1929 there was a better potential movie in this story than the one that actually got made. Merna Kennedy’s performance isn’t bad, exactly; she has at least some clue that to act in a sound film you have to vary the inflections of your lines to convey emotions, but all too much of her line delivery is pretty flat and one wishes Evelyn Brent had been promoted to play her role. But then we wouldn’t have Brent’s superb playing of the final scene, in which she confronts Steve Crandall and shoots him, not in the back but to his face because she wants to be the last thing he sees before she consigns him to hell – and in a surprising twist even for this genuinely “pre-Code” film, Detective McCorn lets her get away with it because he finds her crime morally justifiable, and announces that as far as the police are concerned Crandall killed himself. At least one imdb.com reviewer said the film would have been better if Lee Tracy, the actor who played Roy Lane on stage, had repeated the role on film – though I have no idea if Lee Tracy could dance (the one scene that shows Roy Lane doing a solo dance at the club shows him only from the waist down, obviously so they could use a dance double for Glenn Tryon) and he might have made the character even more annoying than Tryon does. The very ordinariness that made Tryon so good in Lonesome – even his gawky moments seem appropriate for the love-struck proletarian character he’s playing – serves him ill here; a character who advertises that he has star-making “personality” is played by a performer who has virtually none. The actor I kept thinking should have got the part was James Cagney, who at the time hadn’t made a film but whose star charisma, spectacular dancing and overall personality would have been ideal for the role – provoking a thought experiment in alternative film history: what if Cagney had made an explosive film debut in a story so perfectly tailored for him and gone on to become a star at Universal instead of becoming a star at Warner Bros., where he chafed at being put in one crime film after another? (In Cagney’s autobiography he said he always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart, and his one career regret was that he made so few musicals.)

Broadway was stunningly produced – perhaps too stunningly produced for its own good; cinematographer Hal Mohr, who lived long enough to be interviewed by serious film historians (including Leonard Maltin) and is our best primary source on the making of this film, joked that Roy Lane wanted to play the Palace whereas the nightclub he was performing in was big enough to contain the Palace and New York’s other biggest theatres at the time, the Winter Garden and the Hippodrome, all at once. Broadway is also the film for which Fejos and Mohr had an elaborate camera crane constructed that was so big that, as film historian William K. Everson joked, it looked more like a medieval scaling tower than a piece of film equipment. Alas, though they had this marvelous crane at their disposal, they did surprisingly little with it and for some reason it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Fejos or anyone else connected with this film that as long as they had this object that could do stunning overhead shots, they should design the film’s production numbers to be shot from above. Though Busby Berkeley, who’d become the most famous director to use that effect, wouldn’t make his film debut until Samuel Goldwyn’s Eddie Cantor vehicle Whoopee a year later, at least three other directors – Luther Reed in Rio Rita, Joseph Santley in The Cocoanuts (the Marx Brothers’ first film), and Albertina Rasch in her dance sequences for Lord Byron of Broadway and the unfinished revue film The March of Time, had shot down at chorus lines and deployed dancers in the kaleidoscope patterns later identified with Berkeley.

Whereas most musicals in 1929 shot chorus lines as if we were watching from a good orchestra seat in the theatre (and sometimes the cameras were so far away the dancers looked like ants on a wedding cake), all too often the numbers in Broadway look like we were watching them from the rafters. For a movie that was such a spectacular entertainment in its time – Universal advertised it by saying, “At last you can SEE and HEAR the most imitated play ever pictured; with the ORIGINAL play dialog; with songs that you'll never forget; with drama that will hit your heart!,” and in a piece of copyright trollery that seems outrageous even in our age of far-reaching “intellectual property” claims, Universal threatened to sue any other studio that released a film with the word “Broadway” in its title – it hasn’t worn well.