The Cat and the Fiddle (MGM, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating MGM musical from 1934 which we hadn't seen in over 20 years: The Cat and the Fiddle, starring Ramon novarro and Jeanette MacDonald in an adaptation of a Broadway Stage Show by autoheart Bach and Jerome Kern. It's stylishly directed by William K. Howard and the screenplay was by Sam and Bella Soewack. These three turned in quite an adventurous movie, especially jn its first half. The plot deals with struggling composers Victor Florescu (Ramon Novarro) and Shirley Sheridan (Jeanette MacDonald in her first MGM film). The movie opens in Brussels, where Victor gets an opportunity to have an Operetta produced by sugar daddy daudet Frank Morgan, only he nearly misses the appointment when a cab driver confiscates his music. Meanwhile Shirley's song becomes a huge European hit, and Victor is upset, especially since he doesn't want a girlfriend who is independently wealthy and also because he rewrote part of her hit song. What's remarkable about this movie, at least to me, is the sheer number of annoyances and insults, mostly but not entirely unwitting, fast the script puts our two leads through before they finally get together at the end. It's the sort of movie where one rebels in the complications and marvels at the shear obstacle course the writers create for the leads to get together and be successful despite their penchant for insulting each other.

The first half of The Cat and the Fiddle is asheer Delight, the second half hails off into more conventional movie musical territory as Victor gives a bad check to the owner of the theater where his operetta is going to be produced. Yet another aging sugar daddy in the cast membership I had offered to produce the show for his wife Odette (Vivienne Segal), only when he caught Odette in Victor's dressing room he abruptly pulled the plug on the show. (It’s hanky-panky on her part but not on his: it;s already made clear to us that Shirley is the only woman Victor is interested in.) So the musical opens without either a male or female lead, and while Victor takes the male part himself it's touch-and-go whether the show can go on without a woman until Shirley steps in, not because she's in love with Victor but she's determined to save his skin and get the needed two shows that will generate the money to pay off Victor's bad check. In the end, the two young and attractive leads get together, and there's an intriguing final sequence in three-strip Technicolor which represents the last ntmber of Victor's operetta. This was the first example of three-strip color that was publicly released in live action, though Walt Disney had been using it in several cartoons. Nothing could tame the inability of three strip to deal with Jeanette MacDonald’s red hair. In The Cat and the Fiddle she looks like she's wearing a neon skullcap, and the few color films she made later don't improve her hair that much.

The Cat and the Fiddle is an overall favorite of mine, though it's hardly Jeanette McDonald's best film; that would be the brilliant Love Me Tonight, made two years earlier at Paramount, and even more brilliantly directed by Rouben MamToulian. It also is worth noting fhr the sheer amount of fag-haggery going on around that film: not only was Novarro Gay in real life (and 1934 was the year MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer gave his remaining Gay stars, Novarro and William Haines, hTis ultimatum to marry women or get fired; Haines retreated to interior design and Novarro continued his career back home in his native Mexico), but Vivienne Segal had had success on Broadway in musicals by Gay composers Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart In fact, Lorenz Hart twice proposed marriage to her, but she was wise enough to turn him down both times. Still, The Cat and the Fiddle is well worth watching, even though it was a financial flop at the box office when it was first released. McDonald's second film for MGM, The Merry Widow, reunited her with director Ernst lubitsch and star Maurice Chevalier, but it too was a financial flop and McDonald didn't redeem her MGM career until her third to film for the studio, Naughty Marietta, the first of eight in which she co-starred with Nelson Eddy.