The Barkleys of Broadway (MGM, 1949)

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

When I got back from work last night there were a couple of movies I wanted to watch on the Turner Classic Movies channel, which last night debuted a “new look” consisting of a new, less cluttered set for Ben Mankiewicz and his colleagues to deliver their intros and outros from, and a really ugly new logo that, like the current KPBS logo, replaced a dignified-looking serifed version of their initials with a surpassingly ugly and depressingly plain one (just the letters “TCM” in a sans-serif font that looks like Helvetica or one of its variations, with the “C” doubled). Last night they were doing a theme night, and the theme was the final films legendary screen couples made together: The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and They Died With Their Boots On (1941) with Errol Flynn and Olivia De Havilland. (The next film they showed was the truly ghastly Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, made in 1967 with the dying Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier in a preposterous tale about interracial marriage in which Poitier’s character was drawn so perfectly – “He’s a Black Albert Schweitzer!” my mother exclaimed when we saw the movie when it was new – that in their parody Mad magazine called him “Dr. Sidney Sensational.”) The Barkleys of Broadway had a convoluted production history; it was originally set up by MGM musical producer Arthur Freed as a follow-up to the highly successful Easter Parade (1948) with the same personnel: Fred Astaire and Judy Garland as stars and Judy’s friend Charles Walters (one of the many Hollywood “beards” who abounded in that era, Gay men who could be trusted to squire around the “protegées” of studio bosses who could safely entrust their mistresses to them, knowing the “beards” wouldn’t hit on them) directing. Only Judy Garland had one of her nervous breakdowns, drug withdrawals or whatever and started missing rehearsals for the new film.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green had written one of their mildly bitchy scripts casting the two leads as a married couple doing a series of successful Broadway musicals, only they not only bicker constantly over trivial things, their relationship is in trouble because Mrs. Barkley wants to break out of musicals and prove herself a Serious Dramatic Actress. (This ironically parallels the career of the real Ginger Rogers, who by the late 1930’s was desperate to get out of musicals and into dramatic roles – at which she succeeded; just two years after The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, the last of the nine films she and Astaire made together at RKO, she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Kitty Foyle, beating out Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and Bette Davis in The Letter. To add to the irony, Judy Garland had become ferociously jealous of Ginger Rogers for having broken out of musicals and won an Academy Award for a non-musical; she pleaded with MGM for dramatic roles and got the non-musical The Clock, but while The Clock made money, it made so much less money than Judy’s musicals she never got to do a “straight” film at MGM again.) Anyway, Arthur Freed fired Judy Garland from The Barkleys of Broadway and then had a talk with Fred Astaire about who should replace her. At one point Freed suggested Ginger Rogers, and Astaire – who had maintained a cordial but not especially close friendship with her since their glory days at RKO – mentioned that they’d often talked about doing another film together, so he grabbed at the chance.

The film opens with a dazzling credit sequence under which Josh Barkley (Fred Astaire) and his wife and co-star Dinah Barkley (Ginger Rogers) are dancing to a song called “Swing Trot.” Shortly before The Barkleys of Broadway was finished Astaire demanded that a song and dance called “Swing Trot” be put into the movie; in the wake of the success of the Arthur Murray dance studios in the 1930’s (quite possibly inspired by the success of the Astaire-Rogers films, which made a lot of straight couples out there want to learn at least a reasonable simulacrum of their dances), Astaire had opened his own chain of dance studios, which kept going at least until the late 1970’s. (In his parody song, “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” rock DJ Steve Dahl sang, “Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I know the dance steps/Learned ’em all at Fred Astaire’s.”) He was planning to introduce a new dance called “swing trot” at his studios and wanted a song of that name so he and Rogers could display the dance and promote the studios – only the film was basically finished at that point and there was no room to slot in another number. So Arthur Freed agreed to have Astaire and Rogers dance it under the film’s opening credits. Arlene Croce, in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, called it “the best thing in the movie,” and she’s got a point. (In the last That’s Entertainment compilation, we finally got to see this remarkable dance without the credits in the way.)

What’s most amazing about The Barkleys of Broadway was how well Ginger Rogers danced despite being literally a decade out of practice. She hadn’t made a full-fledged musician in the intervening years (aside from Lady in the Dark, in which she was mostly whirled around on revolving platforms), though she’d done a few brief dances in otherwise non-musical films. When I saw her in MGM’s 1945 film Weekend at the Waldorf (a semi-remake, semi-spoof of Grand Hotel with Rogers in Garbo’s old role and Walter Pidgeon in John Barrymore’s) I found myself wishing MGM had cast Astaire instead of Pidgeon, added some songs and dances and made that the big Astaire-Rogers reunion film, but this one will do quite well. Freed got Harry Warren to write the songs and Ira Gershwin to do the lyrics, and the script was by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (with, according to imdb.com, some uncredited contributions by Sidney Sheldon). The Comden-Green wit is well in evidence even though some of their other scripts for MGM musicals, notably Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and The Band Wagon (1953), are better. Oscar Levant has a key supporting role (he’s supposedly the composer for the Astaire-Rogers musicals, with Astaire himself supposedly writing their books and lyrics) and gets a lot of snappy Comden-Green one-liners, including the film’s most famous line: “You know, I find that girl completely resistible.” The girl he finds completely resistible is Shirlene May (Gale Robbins), a breathy Southern woman who’s hired as Dinah Barkley’s understudy in their big show and insists that she’s going to follow her around and learn her every move even though she knows that Dinah’s so reliable she’ll probably never miss a performance. Of course people are always calling her “Shirley” and she has to keep correcting them, “It’s Shirlene.” Alas, we don’t get to see Shirlene sing or dance, and I think Comden and Green missed a great opportunity to anticipate All About Eve by a year and make Shirlene a scheming bitch studying Dinah because she wants to take her place both onstage and in Josh Barkley’s bed. (Ginger Rogers herself would do an All About Eve knock-off in 1954 in the film Black Widow, essentially a murder mystery grafted onto All About Eve in which the jealous older star knocks off the young pretender who’s trying to take her place.)

Instead the person who comes along to break up the Barkleys’ marriage and offer Dinah the chance she’s been longing for to be a serious actress is French playwright Jacques-Pierre Barredoux (Jacques François, who’s a decent-looking young man but so supercilious and pretentious one gets the impression that by leaving Fred Astaire for him, Ginger Rogers would definitely be trading down), who’s written a play about the early life of Sarah Bernhardt and thinks Dinah would be the perfect actress to star in it. Dinah is hopeless in her early rehearsals but is a huge hit on opening night, at least partly because Josh has been secretly attending her rehearsals and coaching her by calling her on the phone at night, affecting a ridiculous French accent and convincing her he’s really Jacques. The big set-piece is a preposterous scene in which Ginger as Dinah as Sarah recites the words to “La Marseillaise” as her audition piece for the French national theatre (the head judge is played by George Zucco, who was also in The Pirate with Gene Kelly and Judy Garland – it was nice to see him get out of the “B” horror ghetto and get recognizable, if small, roles in two big, splashy color musicals while the other horror stars of his generation – Karloff, Lugosi, Atwill – got stuck in the salt mines of one predictable horror cheapie after another) and practically spits the words at the camera in what Arlene Croce called “one Rogers stunt that doesn’t come off.” The Barkleys of Broadway is strongest when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers are dancing together – they dredged up the George and Ira Gershwin song “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” because, though it had been introduced in an earlier Astaire-Rogers film, shall We Dance (1937), they hadn’t actually danced to it themselves. Arlene Croce thought Rogers had become too muscular to pull off this dance the way she could have in 1937 – and certainly Rogers’ body had lost its whip-like pliability over the years – but the big dances they get to do together, that one as well as “Swing Trot” and the exciting tap duel “Bouncin’ the Blues,” are great.

So is “Shoes with Wings On,” a pantomime number (Astaire is playing the rather hapless clerk in a shoe-repair store that specializes in dancing shoes; he tries on the shoes a customer has left, and the store’s whole stock comes to life and the screen fills with disembodied shoes; I suspect it was done the way the effects in The Invisible Man were, with dancers wearing the shoes and otherwise wrapped in black velvet so they would turn clear in negative film and could be processed in) that ends with a whole pile of shoes collapsing and falling on Astaire’s head. (He once said his inspiration for the number was The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, both the original Paul Dukas tone poem and the adaptation of it in Walt Disney’s Fantasia, with all those anthropomorphized brooms carrying buckets of water until the master sorcerer returns and breaks the spell his apprentice could cast but couldn’t uncast.) The Barkleys of Broadway might have been a better movie if it had been planned as an Astaire-Rogers reunion from the get-go instead of originally being set for Judy Garland – there are a number of lines in Dinah’s part one could readily imagine Judy being able to deliver with more “bite” than Ginger does – but on its own it’s a fine, entertaining movie and, if they don’t quite reach the heights they had in the 1930’s, Fred and Ginger don’t embarrass themselves either. As I noted above, the most impressive aspect of the movie is how Ginger got her dancing mojo back despite having not done a full-fledged musical in a decade – and she had summed up the arduousness of making a musical, especially with an exacting perfectionist like Astaire (those who joke that “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels,” ignore that it was Astaire and his assistant Hermes Pan who worked out those dances in the first place and then, when they were ready for her, it was Pan who taught them to her; he served as rehearsal partner for both of them and once joked, “With Fred I’d be Ginger, and with Ginger I’d be Fred”), when a journalist caught her during a break from rehearsing Follow the Fleet (1936) and she quipped, “After this I’d like to take a vacation – digging mines!”