Lady Be Good (MGM, 1941)

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

Last night (Monday, November 20) my husband Charles and I watched the 1941 film Lady Be Good on Turner Classic Movies. This was an early Arthur Freed musical at MGM, directed by Norman Z. McLeod (whose most famous movies are Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) from a committee-written script: Jack McGowan wrote an “original” story (quotes definitely intended!) and then worked it into a script with the help of Kay Van Riper and John McClain. Freed took the film’s title from a 1924 Broadway stage musical by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson, with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira, but he junked the original story (about a brother-and-sister dance team, played by real-life brother-and-sister dance team Fred and Adele Astaire, who find themselves broke, so each decides to help the other land a rich spouse to replenish the family fortunes) and all but two of the original Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” (Fortunately, when Fred and Adele Astaire went to London in 1926 to play the musical on the East End, they made records of “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Hang On to Me,” also from the Lady Be Good score, with George Gershwin himself on piano as their accompanist.) Instead the writing committee came up with a new plot about a feuding husband-and-wife songwriting team, Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan Crane (Ann Sothern), who when the film opens are appearing before a divorce-court judge, Murdock (Lionel Barrymore, who plays his entire role behind the judge’s bench to conceal that he no longer could walk and had to use a wheelchair). Dixie is on the witness stand being examined by the couple’s lawyer, Blanton (Tom Conway), and as she testifies we see a flashback of how she and Eddie met in the first place. It seems that Eddie was an aspiring songwriter using an office in Tin Pan Alley he borrowed from music publisher Max Milton (Reginald Owen). Eddie is trying to write a song and he has a melody all worked out, but the man he’s brought in as a lyricist can’t think of anything to fit Eddie’s melody.

Dixie, who’s hanging out there with a dog called Buttons who’s assumed the classic “His Master’s Voice” pose, starts scribbling down her own ideas for a lyric on her handkerchief, and in no time at all Eddie and Dixie have their first song, “You’ll Never Know” (one of two original songs with producer Arthur Freed supplying the real lyrics and his musical assistant, Roger Edens, coming up with the tunes). They place it in a nightclub show featuring radio singer Buddy Crawford (John Carroll, a singularly repulsive screen presence with a stentorian voice; he’s shown introducing Eddie’s and Dixie’s songs and making them hits, but as I wrote on moviemagg before, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/06/lady-be-good-mgm-1941.html, his voice is so terrible it sounds like the songs are becoming hits in spite of him) and dancer Marilyn Marsh (Eleanor Powell, inexplicably given top billing even though she’s really playing a second lead). Eddie and Dixie get married and they land a plum assignment to write an entire score for a Broadway revue (which meant a musical without a plot) in which Marilyn will star. Only success goes to Eddie’s head and he surrounds himself with “society” phonies whom Dixie can’t stand. They get divorced, but then proximity works its magic on them again because they’re still committed to write songs together even though they’re no longer a couple. There’s a great Production Code-bending scene in which the two have been up all night working on “Oh, Lady Be Good” when Dixie forgets they’re no longer married and starts undressing for bed. Since the underwear she’s wearing is still concealing enough she could probably have gone out in it, even in 1941, and not risked being arrested for indecent exposure, it hardly seems to matter, but she realizes her mistake and throws her dress back on. They get married again but almost as soon as they’re back together, they start having the same old arguments and things come to a head on the night of a songwriters’ association banquet where they were being honored. This sequence features the movie’s strongest emotional moment: Ann Sothern performs “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” written by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics) after Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940. Hammerstein had spent enough time in pre-war Paris he felt the loss personally, and sought out Kern even though he was working on a musical with Sigmund Romberg at the time. He and Kern licensed the song to MGM, which put it in this movie; it won the Academy Award for Best Song (probably because of its topicality; Kern himself thought Harold Arlen’s and Johnny Mercer’s “Blues in the Night” should have won, but it was showcased far less effectively in its film than “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” in which stock clips of pre-war Paris dramatized the lyric and added to the emotional impact).

Unfortunately, on the way home Eddie and Dixie get into another round of the same arguments that broke them up in the first place, and Eddie stops the car in which he was driving Dixie, Marilyn and her song-plugger boyfriend, Joe “Red” Willett (Red Skelton, who as I wrote in my previous post really should have been given more to do in this film; he’s billed sixth, not seventh as I wrote earlier, and it’s arguable Freed and his fellow MGM producers agreed with me because in Powell’s next film, Ship Ahoy, she and Skelton were the romantic leads) and strands them in the middle of nowhere. In their second divorce hearing, lawyer Blanton asks Dixie how they got home, and she makes a thumbing gesture with her hand to indicate they hitch-hiked. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – this time Judge Murdock appoints himself the defender of traditional morality and refuses to grant Eddie and Dixie their second divorce, saying that in the good old days people got married and stayed that way. The film ends the way you’d expect it to, with Eddie and Dixie once again both professional and personal partners, while Marilyn and Red pair off as well. Eleanor Powell gets two spectacular dance sequences in the film; one is a duet with her dog Buttons on “Oh, Lady Be Good” (according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, Powell was dissatisfied with the dogs the studio offered her for the sequence and bought a dog herself from a prop man; apparently she taught the dog herself, though the credits list Jack Ackerman as the film’s dog trainer: today he’d be called a “dog wrangler”) in the set representing her apartment. The other is her big final number, set to “Fascinating Rhythm” and designed and directed by Busby Berkeley. He really went to town on this one, including three grand pianos each occupied by a young Black man (together they were the Berry Brothers, who seem to have been MGM’s attempt to recruit their own Nicholas Brothers; they’re one of the most entertaining elements in this film). He also went to town with his typically arduous working methods; as Hugh Fordin wrote in The World of Entertainment, his biography of Arthur Freed, Berkeley was given an ultimatum by Freed that he had three days to rehearse the number and one day to shoot it. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set,” Fordin said. “Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” But the result was typically stunning and showed off Powell’s skill at dancing with her entire body, not just her legs.

This time around I liked Lady Be Good a lot better than I had the time before; I found myself enjoying the film for what it was and not wishing for what it could have been with a better director and cast (like Leo McCarey, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who had made a similar story at Columbia in 1937 called The Awful Truth; Grant and Dunne played a divorced couple who get back together and Dunne was not only a better actress than Ann Sothern but a better singer as well; she had auditioned for the Metropolitan Opera as a mezzo-soprano in 1929 but decided to sign a film contract with RKO instead). It’s a pretty dorky film at times and Freed would go on to bigger, better and considerably more sophisticated productions like Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, but Lady Be Good is a lot of fun on its own merits and genuinely entertaining.