The Big Broadcast of 1938 (Paramount, 1937)

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

After Mississippi I screened Charles the film The Big Broadcast of 1938, a film we’d watched together many years ago but I was eager to see again. It was W. C. Fields’ last film for Paramount – his years of chronic alcoholism and resulting physical degeneration (in his early films he was large but convincingly athletic, but by the time Paramount fired him and he ended up at Universal he was bloated and a lot of his pratfalls had to be stunt-doubled) had led the studio to tire of him – and if Mississippi was an example of how to make a “portmanteau movie” in which various elements (comedy, romance, music) gelled into a pleasing whole, The Big Broadcast of 1938 was actually closer to a “smorgasbord movie,” in which a whole bunch of attractions were thrown at the audience with no pretense at creating a unified entertainment and only the barest thread of plot to link them. The story, to the extent that the film has one (and of course it’s a committee-written script: the story is by Frederick Hazlitt Brennan, the “adaptation” by well-regarded Broadway playwrights Harold Lindsay and Russell Crouse, and the actual script by Walter DeLeon, Francis Martin and Ken Englund), deals with a transatlantic ocean race from New York to Cherbourg, France between two huge ocean liners, the Gigantic and the Colossal. (Obviously the writing committee wanted to remind moviegoers of the real-life Titanic and in particular the accusation that the reason the Titanic had sunk was its owner, J. Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line, had wanted it to set a world’s record for the Atlantic crossing on its maiden voyage and had instructed his crew not to worry about pesky little things like icebergs that might be in the way.)

The Colossal is an ordinary-looking liner but the Gigantic looks like a cross-breed between a ship, a plane and a dirigible, and its secret is something called “radio power,” a series of outboard engines mounted on the deck that collect electrical energy from the air and can add speed through propellers mounted on their back ends. These contraptions have been invented by engineer Bob Hayes (Leif Erickson, looking attractive and even sexy in one of his rare sympathetic roles), and without them the Gigantic has no way of beating the Colossal. To ensure the Gigantic’s victory, its owner, T. Frothingill Bellows (W. C. Fields, sporting a moustache, a monocle and a British accent), has booked passage for his brother, S. B. Bellows (also W. C. Fields, clean-shaven and with his normal American voice) … on the Colossal, explaining that S. B. “has been associated with every maritime disaster since the Merrimack” (which wasn’t really a maritime disaster; it was a Union warship the Confederates captured, renamed the Virginia, and armored with iron to make it invincible, only the Union launched their own “ironclad,” the Monitor, and the two ships fought to a draw), and if S. B. is on the rival ship he’ll unwittingly sabotage it and the Gigantic will win. Though the models of the ships in the water are reasonably convincing, the other special effects are remarkably shoddy: in the one scene the two Fieldses have together the split screen down the middle where their separate images were combined is all too obvious, and later when S. B. is shown flying in his golf cart (more on that later), the sky behind him is a tacky-looking process shot.

S. B. decides to get in a round of golf before the two ships sail, and after making an utter hash of the game in some of the film’s funniest sequences, he realizes he’s about to miss the boat, so he pulls a lever that turns his golf-cart scooter into an ultra-miniature airplane and flies – only by the time he gets to the ships they’re already well at sea and he lands on the Gigantic by mistake. During a demonstration of Bob Hayes’ “radio power” system S. B. sticks his umbrella into one of the coils powering it, short-circuiting it and leading S. B. to order that the radio power not be used on the ground that it’s too dangerous. Also on board the Gigantic is radio announcer Buzz Fielding (Bob Hope, in his first feature film – previously he’d done a cheap short for the notoriously misnamed Educational Pictures called Going Spanish) – and his three ex-wives, Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley) and Joan (Dorothy Howe, later known as Virginia Vale). Buzz is supposed to be hosting a radio show from the Gigantic that will be broadcast around the world, bur at the start of the film he’s in jail for non-payment of alimony to all three exes – and at the same time he’s courting Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour), which concerns the other three because if Buzz marries her and then she divorces him, their share of his earnings will drop from one-third to one-fourth. Buzz makes it out of jail and onto the ship courtesy of Dorothy bailing him out and paying off the exes, and he takes his place in the ship’s ballroom announcing a dizzying variety of guest acts. One of them is Mexican singer Tito Guizar (of whom Buzz jokes, “What this country needs is a good five-cent Guizar,” a joke so lame he apologizes for it) doing “Noche de Ronda” (the English title, according to imdb.com, is “Be Mine Tonight” even though the three online translations of “ronda” into English are “round,” “patrol” and “watch” – so the most likely literal translation would be “night watch”) and a song in English called “Don’t Tell a Secret to a Rose.”

One is Shep Fields, who led a band called the “Rippling Rhythm Orchestra” and does a sequence in which footage of the band performing a song called “This Little Ripple Had Rhythm” is intercut with an animated cartoon (done not by Max and Dave Fleischer, who’d been Paramount’s go-to guys for animation for over a decade, but the crew that later ended up at Warner Bros. for their golden era of cartoon production in the 1940’s: Leon Schlesinger, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, along with Robert McKimson and Irven Spence) in which the central character is a ripple looking for its home in various bodies of water. George T. Simon wrote a review of the Shep Fields band in the June 1936 issue of Metronome, which began, “Shep Fields has attempted the pretty difficult thing of stylizing a society band” – a term that meant a dance orchestra that didn’t play jazz or swing but stuck close to the melody and a simple, rock-solid rhythm aimed at an audience of not particularly good dancers in upper-class ballrooms, nightclubs and hotels. “Using basically society instrumentation, playing society tempos, and sticking closely to the melody most of the time, Fields has still developed a style band,” Simon wrote. “He calls it ‘rippling rhythm.’ Though it’s not musically very exciting, it’s attracting. In its simplest form it merely amounts to reeds, fiddles and sharply muted trumpet playing a very staccato melody with either an accordion, piano or sometimes a muted viola filling in for contrast – more or less the old stop-chorus idea. Or else it may be one of the melody sections playing a much triplitized chorus.” Simon admired Fields’ ability to make his band sound different from every other society band, “but there’s a feeling that he’s carrying it just a bit too far,” he wrote. “After listening to it for more than an hour or so at a time you feel like getting up and hopping very daintily all around the room on tip-toe, squeaking in a very high falsetto, ‘O-o-o-h, lookie, don’t you think I’m a cutey iddy-biddy thing, too?’” In Simon Says, his 1970 compilation of his band reviews from the 1930’s and 1940’s, he ran a photo of the Shep Fields orchestra from The Big Broadcast of 1938 with the members all wearing “G” pins in both lapels – indicating that in the movie they were the house band for the Gigantic – and captioned it, “Don’t let the ‘G G’ on the lapels fool you – this is not the Glen Gray orchestra, but the original Shep Fields band!”

Most of the songs are by Ralph Rainger (music) and Leo Robin (lyrics), and the score includes “Thanks for the Memory,” sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross as they get together, review the good parts of their past relationship, and ultimately decide to reconcile (while one of Hope’s other ex-wives ends up with a middle-aged sugar daddy played by the great character comedian Lynne Overman, who looked on in frustration as his good friends James Cagney and Spencer Tracy became far bigger stars than he, while the other hooks up with Tito Guizar, so it looks at the end like Hope will be back with wife number one and freed from the alimony demands of wives two and three). As for Dorothy Wyndham, she ends up with engineer Bob Hayes via a quite lovely ballad called “You Took the Words Right Out of My Heart.” It’s a song as good as “Thanks for the Memory” and it deserved to become a standard, but the only person I know of who covered it is jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, who gave it a typically (for him) spiky and dissonant treatment. But the most bizarre guest spot in this movie is the great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, of all people, working with Wilfred Pelletier conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra (and I suspect Paramount shot her sequence at Astoria studios in New York instead of bring her and the musicians out to Hollywood), singing Brünnhilde’s Battle Cry from Wagner’s opera Die Walküre (“The Valkyrie”), second of the four operas that make up his great cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). She sings the aria splendidly but stands on one of the tackiest sets of all time: a papier-maché representation of a mountain crag with some gnarled trees in the background, and waves a spear as if it were a baseball bat and she were warming up to take batting practice. I’d like to think Flagstad was a more visually arresting performer on stage in an actual opera than she is here – and 20 years later this scene came back to haunt her when London Records, U.S. distributor for the British Decca label, used a still from this film for the cover of her record of Act Three of Die Walküre.

The guest numbers – including a final production of a song called “The Waltz Lives On” that suggests that even though other dances, including the polka, cakewalk, Charleston and jitterbug, have tried to dethrone the waltz, it lives on and keeps coming back – intersperse a plot that consists mainly of Bob Hayes, Dorothy Wyndham and S. B. Bellows’ daughter Martha (Martha Raye), whom the Gigantic picks up from a life raft after her jinx (she once broke every mirror in a factory and ended up with 9,000 years’ bad luck) caused her previous ship to sink. They’re all trying to keep S. B. from the radio power engines long enough for Bob to repair them and use them to catch up to and pass the Colossal (ya remember the Colossal?), so Buzz Fielding can win the $50,000 bet he made on the Gigantic in the race (ya remember the race?), which S. B. Bellows finally wins at the helm of the Gigantic by crashing it into the pier at Cherbourg just seconds ahead of the Colossal. The Big Broadcast of 1938 isn’t much of a W. C. Fields vehicle – in most of his films (especially the ones he wrote himself, usually under preposterous pseudonyms like “Charles Bogle,” “Mahatma Kane Jeeves” or “Otis J. Criblecoblis”) his character is carefully balanced so he remains a lovable rogue. Here, the writing committee made him actively unpleasant and boorish, and though he gets laughs he also gets uncomfortable to watch after a while. By far his best scene is the early golf routine, especially the climax in which he turns his golf cart into an ultra-ultra-light airplane and flies away from the course.

On the whole, it’s probably the weakest of the four Big Broadcast films – at least in part because it’s the one George Burns and Gracie Allen aren’t in, and especially given how well they worked with Fields on International House (and, less so, in Six of a Kind), they’re sorely missed. Martha Raye helps make up for them, though, especially when her sheer presence seems to make glass mirrors shatter right and left; when she falls through one of the radio-power coils, thereby dislodging the tip of Fields’ umbrella that shorted out the radio-power system in the first place; and singing a song called “Mama, That Moon Is Here Again” in which she phrases the relatively quiet verse surprisingly well before she opens her big mouth (literally – her introduction in the opening credits consists of a caricature of her with a giant mouth that threatens to devour her whole face) and starts massacring this song on the chorus. (In 1941 Raye would make a film with Abbott and Costello called Keep ’Em Flying in which she played a dual role, sedate Barbara Phelps and her raucous sister Gloria, and sang the beautiful ballad “The Boy with the Wistful Eyes” delicately and romantically as Barbara before giving it a no-holds-barred attack as Gloria.) The film is directed by Mitchell Leisen, a quirky filmmaker – Billy Wilder co-wrote several scripts for him in the 1930’s before he became a director himself and objected to the changes Leisen made in his scripts, and Leisen’s Murder at the Vanities (1934) is a good deal less entertaining than it could have been because Leisen insisted that the big musical numbers be shot from a good-seat-in-the-theatre point of view and refused to allow overhead shots, tracking cranes and the other effects Busby Berkeley was known for because he thought them ridiculous and unrealistic. They were, but so what? Here Leisen does a pretty good job handling a wide variety of scenes, though aside from Tito Guizar’s numbers there really isn’t a lot of atmosphere in this movie and it lacks the visual distinction A. Edward Sutherland had brought to Fields’ previous films Mississippi and Poppy. Still, though it’s a mess The Big Broadcast of 1938 is at least an entertaining mess, and it makes me wish once again that Universal Home Video, which holds the right to most of Paramount’s output between 1928 and 1949, would issue all four Big Broadcasts in a boxed set the way they did with the first four Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies (and, while we’re at it, I wish they’d also release a box of all four of the films Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson made for Universal in the early 1940’s).