Hello, Everybody! (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 22) at about 10:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a really peculiar 1933 movie called Hello, Everybody! It was directed by William A. Seiter (who made two truly great movies, 1933’s Sons of the Desert and 1935’s Roberta, both with legendary duos: Laurel and Hardy in Sons of the Desert and Astaire and Rogers in Roberta, but was otherwise pretty hacky) from a script by Lawrence Hazard and Dorothy Yost based on an “original” story by Fannie Hurst. Its star was Kate Smith, the surprisingly great singer who became a legend singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” (which wouldn’t be written until 1939, six years after this film was made) and raising more money during World War II at public War Bonds sales events than any other entertainer. Kate Smith was born in Greenville, Virginia on May 1, 1907 and was sent to nursing school by her father for nine months in the mid-1920’s in a vain attempt to keep her from pursuing singing as a career. (Like so many other great singers, both white and Black, Kate Smith started in church.) Smith was discovered by vaudevillian Eddie Dowling, who heard her in Boston and offered her a part in his Broadway revue (a plotless musical) called Honeymoon Lane. The show was reviewed thusly in the New York Times: “A 19-year-old girl, weighing in the immediate neighborhood of 200 pounds, is one of the discoveries of the season for those whose interests run to syncopators and singers of what in the varieties and nightclubs are known as ‘hot’ songs. Kate Smith is the newcomer's not uncommon name.”

The reference to her weight played up the aspect of Smith that would pretty much dictate the course of her career; she was what today is delicately called “a woman of size,” and while today that may not seem like such a big deal – Adele, Lizzo and Megan Thee Stallion have managed to have major careers despite being similarly zaftig – Smith’s size led her to getting cast in major musicals like Hit the Deck (in which she sang Vincent Youmans’ great song “Hallelujah!” in blackface) and Flying High. Unfortunately, the latter cast Smith as “Pansy” and her entire role in the show, which starred Bert Lahr as a man impersonating a celebrated airplane pilot, consisted literally as well as figuratively of being the butt of Lahr’s unending stream of fat jokes. Smith would hide out in her dressing room and cry her heart out after each performance, traumatized by her humiliation. (When Flying High was filmed in 1931, Smith’s role was reassigned to Charlotte Greenwood, a rail-thin comedienne, and the fat jokes became ironic.) Fortunately Smith signed a recording contract with Columbia, and Ted Collins, assigned to produce her records, quit his job with Columbia to manage Smith full-time. Collins had the idea to steer Kate Smith to a career on the rising medium of radio, where it wouldn’t matter what she looked like and she could become a star on the basis of her voice alone. And Kate Smith’s voice was one of the most remarkable of the time: though she never had a singing lesson in her life, she had a 2 ½-octave range and her contralto timbre was the best range for a woman singer on the airwaves then. (Another woman, Vaughn De Leath, recalled years later being coached to drive her range down from soprano to contralto to get radio jobs in the late 1920’s.)

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the movie industry at first weathered the storm – thanks largely to the momentum generated by the changeover from silent to sound films – but by 1931 the Depression caught up with the film business and studios looked to radio for potential new stars. Sometimes they scored; Bing Crosby had his first starring role in a feature, Paramount’s The Big Broadcast, in 1932 and the movies elevated him from star to superstar. Sometimes they bombed: Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll had become huge on radio as Amos and Andy, but when they put their act on film in the 1930 movie Check and Double Check, they looked like just what they were – two white guys in not very convincing blackface – and the film flopped. Kate Smith got the nod from Hollywood in 1933, when after outbidding several other studios Paramount signed her to make a film called Hello, Everybody! after the tag line she used to introduce her radio show. I first heard of Hello, Everybody! in the Harry and Michael Medved book The Hollywood Hall of Shame, in a chapter that made the film seem even worse than it is. It’s actually an O.K. movie, but an imdb.com “Trivia” poster said, “Costing $2 million, this was the most expensive movie musical produced up to 1933.” That’s almost impossible to believe; even though Collins reportedly negotiated major fees for both Smith and himself (though I can’t find an online source for precisely how much they got paid), including a minor role for Collins in the film as himself, the film itself is a 69-minute rural comedy shot entirely on the “rural” sets of Paramount’s back lot and the “urban” sets of their soundstages.

Kate Smith (Kate Smith) and her younger sister Lily (Sally Blane, real-life sister of Loretta Young; like George Sanders' brother Tom Conway, Blane took a different last name to avoid being accused of coasting on a more famous sibling) are farmers in the Virginia hills whose existence is threatened by the General Water and Power Company. General Water wants to build a dam that will choke off the farm community’s supply of water and therefore make it impossible for the farmers to keep farming. (The dam would not flood the valley, as a few commentators have claimed; instead it would do just the reverse.) General Water and Power sends various representatives to the farm community, including Hunt Blake (Randolph Scott), who because he’s young and hunky is assigned by the company to romance Kate Smith and get her to sell her land and water rights. Only Hunt falls genuinely in love with Kate’s more conventionally attractive sister Lily, the two get married and Hunt quits his job with the company because he’s conscience-stricken over what he’s been assigned to do. The company arranges a radio broadcast from the town in hopes to win public opinion to their side, and Kate Smith is invited to appear on it as the warmup act for a windbag ex-Senator (Edwards Davis) who’s supposed to convince the world that the dam is actually a good thing. The ex-Senator literally loses the entire live audience when it walks out on him en masse, but Kate Smith is an instant radio star and gets a letter from Ted Collins inviting her to do her own program – only the show would be broadcast from New York and therefore she’d have to leave her beloved farm community. However, Smith ultimately accepts the offer because the community needs to raise money for its legal battle against the dam. Kate Smith goes to New York and becomes a radio star, sending most of her money back home to fund the community’s legal battle against the company – only the company wins all the lawsuits.

Kate comes back home to find the townspeople have organized what amounts to a lynch mob against the company and its CEO, Mr. Marshall. Fortunately she gets back in time to talk her neighbors out of lynching him and just then Hunt Blake arrives with the information that by building the dam somewhere else, the company can avoid putting hundreds of farmers out of business and still expand its ability to service cities. Marshall had earlier rejected that route because it would cost $100,000 extra, but Kate Smith has an answer for that, too. She says that with her newly signed radio contract, she can personally fund half of the additional cost (one hopes she thought to ask for stock in the company for her investment), and so the farm village is saved, progress marches on and Kate Smith has a long and prosperous career as a radio singer. Along the way Kate Smith gets to sing some rather mopey but still effective “torch” ballads by Arthur Johnston and Sam Coslow, along with a “ringer” – the Harry Akst-Sam Lewis-Joe Young 1925 hit “Dinah,” used for a rather odd sequence in which Smith not only sings at the Central Park Casino (despite her initial reluctance because she hears the word “casino” and assumes gambling goes on there) but does a “hotcha” dance as well. The Medveds ridiculed her dance number, saying she looked like a football player in drag, but she’s actually pretty good – not at the level of Megan Thee Stallion, but still she moves with an idea of where she’s going and gets caught up in the rambunctious spirit of the music. The low point of this film is a bizarre Johnston-Coslow song called “Pickanninies’ Heaven,” which is if anything even more racist and wince-inducing than you’d guess from the title. Kate Smith sings it as part of her radio show and dedicates it to all the little Black children in orphanages around the country – and director Seiter cuts to a Black children’s hospital in which the youngest kid gets caught up in the spirit of the number (full of lines that promise the “good little pickanninies” a heaven with “a Swanee River made of real lemonade”) while two older boys listen with disgust on their faces.

Al Jolson pulled the same concept in the “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule” number from his 1934 film Wonder Bar, in which the racist “pickanninnies’ heaven” vision was stunningly realized by Busby Berkeley and Jolson actually tried to sound Black, but hamstrung by a production budget that was almost certainly considerably less than $2 million and a total lack of Berkeley’s demented imagination, Seiter couldn’t make this number visually interesting enough to overcome its obnoxious political content. This number strikes even more of a wrong note when you realize that both Kate Smith and Fannie Hurst, author of the “original” (quotes definitely intended) story that became the basis of this film, were anti-racist pioneers: Hurst had written Imitation of Life and Smith said in 1945, “Race hatreds, social prejudices, religious bigotry, they are the diseases that eat away the fibers of peace. … [I]t is up to us to tolerate one another in order to achieve peace.” (In 1945, those were definitely not the anodyne sentiments they seem today; Frank Sinatra was denounced as a Communist for saying similar things and for making the anti-racist short The House I Live In.) This makes it even more ironic that in the “cancel culture” of the 21st century, Kate Smith has been denounced as a racist, and her likeness and her record of “God Bless America” purged from sports stadia, for performing “Pickanninnes’ Heaven” and an equally problematic song from two years earlier called “That’s Why Darkies Were Born.” (Smith’s defenders point out, among other things, that Paul Robeson – who was not only Black but a particularly fierce and committed anti-racist whose career suffered when he fell victim to the McCarthy-era blacklist of the 1950’s – also recorded “That’s Why Darkies Were Born”; Smith’s record of it is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_11Fb01Ujw and Robeson’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lqaw2jviEsQ.)

Hello, Everybody! is a movie fascinating in its wrong-headedness, not only cinematically but politically as well; the basic plotline of good farmers vs. evil power company is pretty progressive but there’s that awful racist Black song to spoil it. Kate Smith sings terrifically – even though most of her songs are slow torch ballads that are individually effective but start to pall after a while – and, unlike Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, she’s at least a good enough actress to play herself on screen. Both Charles and I spent much of the movie wondering about that claim that it cost $2 million to make, and we weren’t the only ones: in 2016 a reviewer identified only as “Danny” published a post on the “Pre-Code.com” site (http://pre-code.com/hello-everybody-1933-review-with-kate-smith-sally-blane-and-randolph-scott/) that asked the same question we did: where did all the money go? Hello, Everybody! runs only 69 minutes and it doesn’t contain any spectacular production numbers (it’s what I’ve taken to calling a “monomusical” because only one cast member sings), any Technicolor sequences or anything that would have lifted it above the normal run of mid-budget programmers. At the time the most expensive film ever made was Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels, which cost $2.5 million (a record not broken until the $4.25 million David O. Selznick spent on Gone With the Wind), and in Hell’s Angels you could see the spectacular aerial footage on which Hughes spent most of that money.

I think Kate Smith has been treated unfairly by cultural historians, largely because she made it through the 1960’s and 1970’s (she had her last hit record in 1974, retired in 1976 and died in 1986) and because in the cultural and political polarization of the time she was on the “wrong” side. In 1969 she co-headlined a concert with The Lettermen, Anita Bryant and Jackie Gleason that was organized by the Nixon administration in protest against The Doors’ infamous concert in Miami where Jim Morrison had allegedly exposed himself to the audience, and in 1982 Kate Smith went to the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan (who had introduced her singing "God Bless America" in the 1943 film This Is the Army, her first film appearance since the debacle of Hello, Everybody!), who said, “In giving us a magnificent, selfless talent like Kate Smith, God has truly blessed America.” Kate Smith had become so totally identified with “God Bless America” that it was startling to me to hear some of her other records, first a version of George Gershwin’s “Somebody Loves Me” from a 1950's LP compilation, The Music of George Gershwin, on Columbia’s budget label Harmony (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTuu8R0Sz9c), and then an even more powerful Gershwin recording: “I Got Rhythm,” from a 1999 Columbia CD compilation From Gershwin’s Time. “I Got Rhythm” had been introduced by Ethel Merman in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, and it had made her a star, but Smith’s voice was just as big as Merman’s and her musicianship – especially her intonation – was far superior (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoluxDoYCNQ). I still wouldn’t call Hello, Everybody! a great film, but it’s a workmanlike showcase for a talented singer and it was worth watching at least once.