by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
After Desperate Widows Charles and I watched a 1937 musical from 20th Century-Fox, King of Burlesque, starring Warner Baxter and Jack Oakie as partners in a sensationally successful burlesque theatre (though all we get to see is a Production Code-sanitized vision of burlesque in which their star, Alice Faye, emerges in hot pants and a Jean Harlow platinum-blonde hairdo and is already wearing so little we can’t imagine her taking anything else off), only as in a million other 20th Century-Fox musicals to come Baxter’s character, Kerry Bolton, yearns for more. In particular he yearns for a respectable theatre on Broadway and a chance to stage Ziegfeld-style revues that will draw in a downtown audience. Bolton and Joe Cooney (Oakie) break up their partnership over Bolton’s plans, though Cooney stays as Bolton’s general manager and, aided by the spectacular choreography of Patricia Doran (Faye), he goes from one success after another in a single montage sequence. Then disaster strikes as he encounters an auction of the personal belongings of Rosalind Cleve (Mona Barrie), a former heiress who’s run through the fortune she inherited and ended up broke, though she still has an obnoxious protégé, aspiring opera singer Stanley Drake (Charles Quigley). We never actually hear this person so we don’t know whether he really has a voice or not, but Bolton is anxious enough to get rid of him he offers him a scholarship, ostensibly from the “American Music Foundation,” to study voice in Italy.
Bolton talks the reluctant Cleve into marrying him but she insists the relationship be strictly on “a business basis,” and what’s more she insists on revamping his new show into something called Rhythm in Color which turns out to be a gigantic flop. When I saw the title Rhythm in Color I was hoping we would get a three-strip Technicolor sequence illustrating it, but instead we don’t see any of it at all – like not letting us hear any of Stanley’s voice, not letting us see any of the show Bolton stars him in at his new wife’s insistence is a major lapse on the part of the writers, 20th Century-Fox regulars Gene Market and Harry Tugend, though the film is allegedly based on a story by fairly famous author Viña Delmar – and we have to take on faith from the comments of the audience as they leave the theatre looking disgusted that it’s terrible. I was thinking of the way a pair of much better writers, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, resolved a similar situation in The Band Wagon 16 years later – having their lead character roll up his sleeves, take over and turn the bum show into a genuinely entertaining success through sheer force of will – but instead Bolton remains in thrall to the rich bitch for two more flop shows until he runs out of money, she unsurprisingly dumps him and he finds solace in drink.
Meanwhile Patricia Doran has become a star choreographer for Charles Cochran (a real person) in London, though there’s an intriguing scene (a variation of a scene in James Cagney’s musical Something to Sing About the same year) in which it seems like Cochran is chewing her out for having lost her mojo because she’s still pining for a man back home, only it turns out to be just an introduction to a comic song she sings as part of her latest smash-hit show. Before she left Bolton pressed $50,000 in bonds on her as a token of his appreciation and a pay-off of their partnership, and like Chekhov’s pistol this is going to be used as a plot device in the final act: Pat returns to the U.S. and she and Cooney hatch a plot to get Bolton to come back by using her money to back his new show. They even hire a homeless guy (Gregory Ratoff) to pose as a millionaire so Bolton won’t realize the true source of his money, and with Pat’s bankroll Bolton mounts a new sort of show, a dinner-theatre revue that features all the talents he’d had in his office staff in his glory days but whom he’d never considered hiring for his shows back then. They include his office boy, Arthur (Kenny Baker – when I saw his name in the cast list I thought he’d turn out to be the terrible opera singer Rosalind was sponsoring, but no-o-o-o-o, we’re actually supposed to think he has a real voice); his phone operator, Marie (Dixie Dunbar), who turns out to be a dynamite dancer; and Ben (Fats Waller), his elevator operator, who gets a featured spot singing the song “Spreading Rhythm Around” as part of the final show.
I suspect director Sidney Lanfield (a 1930’s Fox hack who got the chance to come back in the 1960’s as one of the directors on the TV series The Addams Family) and the other people behind this film also had Waller as the piano double for the usually anonymous accompanists for the dance rehearsals and song demos, since instead of the dull, desultory, sloppy playing we usually hear we get some reliably good and often stunning pianism in Waller’s “stride” style. According to a 1970’s biography of Waller by his manager Ed Kirkeby, Waller accepted this role and then was upset when he got the script and his part was just the typical stupid, shuffling Black servant stereotype, so he made them rewrite it closer in line to his own style of humor – but if any such scenes were written, they must have remained on the cutting-room floor because all we see of Waller are two sequences of him running the elevator and being absurdly deferential to the white cast members, plus his big number in the final sequence. Waller at least got to use his own band in this film, but it’s hardly in the same league as the great Harlem number he, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the quite attractive and personable Jeni Le Gon had done in RKO’s A-minus musical Hooray for Love two years before.
I’d never seen King of Burlesque before but I had seen its remake, Hello, Frisco, Hello (1943), with Alice Faye repeating her role (though with long auburn hair rather than the short platinum blonde “do” she has here), the more personable John Payne as her co-star, vivid three-strip Technicolor and an ironic twist in the plot in which Payne’s character actually produces an opera, only he’s ruined when all the 1-percenters in San Francisco insist on being comped instead of actually paying admission. Originally Darryl Zanuck had planned Hello, Frisco, Hello (a title that came from a song written to commemorate the start of nationwide phone service between New York and San Francisco) as a remake of yet another Alice Faye vehicle, In Old Chicago, with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake replacing the 1871 Chicago fire, but when the U.S. entered World War II Zanuck left the studio “for the duration” and his replacement Bill Goetz decided to make Hello, Frisco, Hello a remake of King of Burlesque instead.
