Gift of Gab (Universal, 1934)

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

Gift of Gab is a 1934 Universal comedy-musical about the radio business that’s been on the fringes of interest among horror-film fans because it’s the second of eight films both Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were in, and there is a famous still photo of Karloff and Lugosi playing chess that was supposedly from this film. Apparently their chess game was part of a longer scene that in some ways anticipated The Seventh Seal, as both of Universal’s great monster stars talked about death and created a genuinely sinister mood with their badinage. Alas, if such a scene were ever shot for this film it got left on the cutting-room floor, and as one imdb.com “Trivia” contributor noted, “When the film finally came to light, a vast disappointment was in store because not only are the two not seen together, Lugosi is wasted with a role literally of about five seconds’ duration. Karloff doesn't fare much better.” Lugosi is shown as a disembodied hand wielding a knife and then gets a five-second closeup as he gets to intone just one line (his spot is so short my husband Charles missed it) and Karloff is billed as “The Phantom” but only gets a few seconds climbing through an open window and delivering just one line of his own.

These occur as part of a sketch spoofing murder mysteries in which Paul Lukas, playing the murder victim but also getting one line just so we know he’s really alive, is just as wasted as Karloff and Lugosi are. Also missing from the final cut were little-person actor Billy Barty as the infant version of the lead character, Philip Gabney (Edmund Lowe), and Dick Elliott and Florence Enright as his parents. What’s left is a pretty ordinary revue-musical centered around the efforts of Phiiip Gabney to become a huge radio star after his previous racket, selling an alleged spot remover called “Spotto” (it removes the spot, all right, but also eats a hole in the cloth of the clothing it’s been applied to), gets broken up by police after a woman he’s tried it on, Barbara Kelton (Gloria Stuart), complains to the police and Gabney and his long-suffering sidekick, Patsy (Hugh O’Connell), high-tail it off the street corner and into the studios of radio station WGAB. (Writers Jerry Wald, Philip G. Epstein, Lou Breslow and Rian James make so many puns on the name “Gabney” – he says he has the “gift of gab,” he calls himself “The Great Gabney” and “The Even Greater Gabney” in honor of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s character and the 1929 film The Great Gabbo, respectively, and he even works for WGAB! – they get pretty tiresome after a while.)

Gabney gets his big break by befriending Col. Horatios Trivers (Victor Moore at his insufferably whiniest; he’d blessedly be off the screen for another two years until he turned up in RKO’s Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Swing Time and did his best to wreck it, though fortunately Fred, Ginger and songwriter Jerome Kern were too much for him). Trivers is the owner of a preposterous company called Trivers’ Canned Chicken Livers which needs all the help it can get from its radio ads, and delivered in the stentorian tones of Edmund Lowe both the ratings of Trivers’ radio hour and sales of canned chicken livers (why would anybody want canned chicken livers?) skyrocket. Alas, fame and the troubles of dealing with his woman program director, Barbara Kelton (that’s right: the same woman whose suit he ruined as a Spotto salesman!), unhinge Gabney and he becomes progressively more arrogant.

There were quite a few movies in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s about conceited entertainers who get their comeuppance, including Lord Byron of Broadway (MGM, 1929), in which a songwriter who’s ripped off the real-life traumas of the people around him for his songs (in the script that’s considered cheating; in the 1970’s it would be considered “sensitive”!) is abandoned by the no-good woman he left his nice girlfriend for and is redeemed by the nice girl’s love; Putin’ On the Ritz (United Artists, 1930), in which legendary entertainer Harry Richman plays an egomaniac who goes blind from adulterated bootleg booze (courtesy of the real-life chemical arms race between U.S. Prohibition agents, who insisted that industrial alcohol contain poisons to render it undrinkable; and the bootleggers, who had to figure chemical ways to get the adulterants out) and is nursed back to health (though he still can’t see) by his girlfriend; Young Man of Manhattan (Paramount, 1930), in which yet another good man – a sportswriter this time – is ruined by a bad girl (Ginger Rogers, in her first film) and salvaged by a good one after she goes nearly blind from another batch of bootleg booze and he has to fund the treatment that enables her to see again; Crooner (Warner Bros., 1932), with David Manners as a singer with almost no voice (his megaphone amplifies him to audibility) is once again torn between a good girl and a bad girl, but whose comeuppance comes when he punches out a heckler in his audience and the guy turns out to be a disabled veteran; and this one, in which Gabney progressively alienates everyone around him until his comeuppance.

Said comeuppance arrives when he’s sent out to a New York airfield to cover the arrival of a British pilot who’s completing his transatlantic flight – only he’s too lazy to go. Instead he stays at the WGAB studio and broadcasts a fake interview with the pilot (and Sterling Holloway, uncredited, providing the imitations of airplane noises in his role as the station’s sound-effects man) from the studio, then learns that the real pilot crashed and was killed in Connecticut. Gabney gets the chance to reform himself courtesy of another plane crash, this time in the hills of upstate New York, where he mounts a daring parachute jump to get to eight stranded crew members and passengers of a flight that crashed, does a broadcast on the spot and signals the search planes where they can look for the passengers and rescue them. (There’s a brief shot of an autogiro – an odd combination of an airplane and a helicopter that had a short-lived vogue in the early 1930’s and whose most famous film appearance was probably as W. C. Fields’ aircraft in International House – but when Gabney finally takes his flight to broadcast and rescue the passengers he’s in a two-seat biplane, a much less practical aircraft for the purpose.)

What saves this movie and gives it most of its remaining interest are the musical guest stars, including Ethel Waters (in superb form as she sings a song called “I Ain’t Gonna Sin No More” backed by a quartet of Mills Brothers wanna-bes called the Beale Street Boys; the song eerily foretells Waters’ eventually becoming a born-again Christian and giving up secular music to be a regular guest at the Billy Graham Crusades), Ruth Etting (in nice if not particularly distinguished songs called “Thinking to Myself” and “Tomorrow, Who Cares?,” Gene Austin (who in 1927 had recorded Walter Donaldson’s “My Blue Heaven” and had the biggest-selling record of anything until Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” 15 years later, but he was on the downgrade by 1934 and his song here, “Blue Sky Avenue,” is hardly “My Blue Heaven”) and an O.K. group called the Downey Sisters who are hardly in the same league as the Boswell Sisters before them or the Andrews Sisters afterwards, but they’ll do.

Oddly, the director of Gift of Gab, Karl Freund, is also better known for horror films than movies like this: he was the cinematographer on the 1930 Dracula and director of The Mummy and Mad Love. and when he returned to comedy it was in the early 1950’s as director of photography for the I Love Lucy TV series. Despite the credentials both before and behind the cameras, Gift of Gab is a pretty ordinary movie for its time and no great shakes now – especially not in the form Charles and I saw it, dubbed from a VHS tape onto DVD from a grey-label source and with a nasty buzzing through the soundtrack. The problem was the VHS machine they were dubbing it from had an automatic tracking control, and those controls were set to make sure the picture looked right no matter what that did to the sound. I had the same problem back in the days of VHS trying to dub clean copies of songs from the soundtracks of VHS tapes, so I knew what was wrong with this copy right away!