Sweet Music (Warner Bros., 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 8) there were a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies I wanted to watch, a 1935 Warner Bros. production called Sweet Music and a 1921 Goldwyn Pictures silent called The Ace of Hearts. Sweet Music was actually a vehicle concocted for inexplicably popular radio singing star Rudy Vallée, and though its director, Alfred E. Green, was a decently talented hack, it’s definitely a Schreiber rather than an auteur movie and the Schreiber is Jerry Wald. Wald wrote the original story and collaborated with Carl Erickson and Warren Duff on the script, which is an appealing fusion of musical and screwball comedy. Vallee plays egomaniacal bandleader Skip Houston, whose rather nasal-voiced singing and the not particularly amusing antics of his band have somehow made him an enormous radio star. As the film opens he’s performing a university gala (for some reason Vallée’s real-life popularity was particularly strong among college audiences; he made a specialty out of recording college songs and in the opening sequence his band is shown performing in front of a backdrop festooned with college pennants). The opening shot is of a neon-lit silhouette of a trombone, like Busby Berkeley’s famous neon violins in the “Shadow Waltz” sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, and the trombone player turns out to be a member of a real-life aggregation called The Frank and Milton Britton Comedy Band. Milton’s real last name was Levy and Frank’s was Wenzel – they weren’t really brothers but posed as such – and like Spike Jones they formed a band that played “straight” jazz for a number or two and then did slapstick antics. The Wikipedia page on them says they played trombone and cornet, but doesn’t specify which played which. Whichever Britton played trombone really goes to town on this, including doing a remarkably good airplane impression.

The band’s next gig is in Chicago, where Skip publicly insults dancer Bonnie Haydon (Ann Dvorak), who’s under contract to the theatre where they’re performing and so Skip has to put up with her horning in on his act. The two trade insults in front of the audience, and she gives as good as she gets. They get an offer to come to New York to appear in the Frolics, arranged by Bonnie’s manager “Ten Percent” Nelson (Ned Sparks), but they only last one performance before the show is closed down. Skip’s agent Barney Cowan (Allen Jenkins) arranges for him to do a radio show sponsored by Selzer’s Cigars, owned by two Jewish brothers named Sidney and Sigmund Selzer. The Selzers are played by Joseph Cawthorn and Al Shean; Cawthorn is just another character actor but Shean is a major figure in American comedy. He was not only a vaudeville star in his own right as part of the comedy team of Gallagher and Shean – though he was really Jewish and his birth last name was Schönberg, like the composer – he was also the uncle of the Marx Brothers and their first writer. The Marx Brothers never actually decided that Harpo should be mute; Shean just gave him fewer and fewer lines every time he rewrote the act, until in one version Harpo was down to just three lines. On opening night a critic reviewed that act, praised Harpo’s pantomime but wrote, “The effect is spoiled when he speaks.” The next day, Shean cut Harpo’s three lines and Harpo never again spoke on stage. The Selzers grimly tolerate Bonnie’s performances until they get so many letters complaining how terrible she is and demanding she be fired that they give her the ax. Skip wants her to stay on – by now their initial hatred has blossomed into love and he’s not only dating her but wants to marry her – but Cowan hits on the idea of softening the blow by telling Bonnie that Skip is in love with someone else and wants her on the program instead.

The someone else is Helen Morgan, playing herself and singing a rather gloomy song called “I See Two Lovers,” and she’s relentlessly photographed by James Van Trees to look as ugly as possible. Morgan was 11 years older than Ann Dvorak and looks even older than that – she could easily have been Dvorak’s mother – and we get the impression that if Skip had really jilted Bonnie for Morgan he’d be trading down big-time. Helen Morgan made two genuinely great films, Applause (1929) and Show Boat (1936), but there she was not only featured but had great directors (Rouben Mamoulian and James Whale, respectively). In Show Boat, which TCM showed just before Sweet Music, Whale and cinematographer John Mescall made Morgan look younger than she had in her previous films like Marie Galante and Sweet Music, and she’d responded with a great performance, but here she just sings one song in her highly dated lugubrious “torch” style at a time when more sensitive and musicianly singers like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Judy Garland were obliterating that approach to music. Meanwhile Skip is getting gloomy because his contract with the Selzers forces him to continue the program even though Bonnie has been fired. As one of his crazy publicity stunts Barney Cowan hits on the idea of hiring Lulu Betts (Alice White, who’d been a semi-major name in Warner Bros. musicals in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s but had tumbled down the ladder into dumb-blonde character roles) to jump in a lake – literally – and pose as an abandoned ex-girlfriend of Skip’s attempting suicide out of unrequited love for him. The plot backfires when Lulu’s gangster brother “Dopey” Malone (Robert Armstrong, once again ill-used; one would have thought his star turns in King Kong and its sequel Son of Kong would have made him a major star, but no-o-o-o-o) holds a gun to Skip’s head and announces he’s going to make him marry her – though he’s talked out of it and Lulu marries Barney instead.

With Bonnie, Lulu, Barney and Nelson all out of work in New York, Barney hits on the idea of the four of them doing a radio comedy program called The Happy Family that turns inexplicably popular. Given their choice of sponsors, the revenge-minded Bonnie picks Selzers Cigars, and the show is a success until Barney cooks one of his stupid publicity stunts that goes horrendously wrong. His idea is to have “Dopey” stage a fake kidnapping of his radio-star sister, but instead “Dopey” punches Barney in the mouth and Barney is unable to work for three months. Ultimately it all ends happily, with Skip and Bonnie reuniting for a big benefit show in which they do the big number they were supposed to do in the Frolics (ya remember the Frolics?), after which Skip plans to take a job at the (real) Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood and proposes to Bonnie on condition that she give up her show-business ambitions and be just a wife and mother. Despite the annoying sexism of the ending – of course I’d much rather have seen them become a professional and personal couple, with them trading Burns-and-Allen-style insults as part of their act – the song that sends them off is “Fare Thee Well, Annabelle,” one of my favorites, which I first heard from The Boswell Sisters in their incandescent recording from London on July 19, 1935 (available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLhZ7Qm5SE).

Overall Sweet Music is a really fun film, and for all the unattractiveness James Van Trees gives to Helen Morgan, I give him a lot of credit for reviving the iris-out, a charming visual effect that was a basic transition device in the silent era but pretty much disappeared once sound came in. Though it might have been an even better film with Preston Sturges directing (Sturges actually cast Vallée in some of his Paramount comedies and found genuine acting skill in him) and/or with Warners’ other male singing star, Dick Powell, playing the lead (though Powell’s singing style is almost as dated as Vallée’s, he was a much better actor even before his remarkable transition from musicals to films noir with his incredible performance as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet), Sweet Music is quite good as it stands. One thing it captures quite ably is Rudy Vallée’s notorious egomania; when he was working in New York on the 1929 Paramount film Glorifying the American Girl, he gave autographed photos of himself to all the crew members. He’d made himself so obnoxious to them that they responded by posting the photos in the studio urinals, so they could literally piss on Rudy Vallée (or at least on his image)!