GROSS/22 1929 BONUS - The Broadway Melody - expanded edition
Harriet and Queenie are dancers, singers, devoted sisters. They've made it to Broadway, but it's tough. There's a story that could be by Jane Austen, and more terrible dancing.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE BROADWAY MELODY, HARRY BEAUMONT, METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER, 1929, 100 MINUTES.
Listen, the first time I sent this out I promised to keep it short. Well, I’m sorry, it got long again. I’ve added some stuff about the love story element of the scenario, which I find fascinating. It really tells us something about the harsh regime that governed relationships in this era, when life for most was still hard.
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A trial run
The Broadway Melody is the first MGM musical. It’s a trial run. Sound is experimental at best. Recording big casts, bands and stages full of dancers was hard with the acoustic kit they had. Scenes were shot and re-shot to get the sound right, sometimes dumped all together. And they still didn’t get it right.
The Tin Pan Alley scene at the beginning is a joy, though. A Brill Building office is packed with wannabes - pianos and jazz quintets and hoofers in the corridors. We’re still in pre-code, pre-crash, prohibition America. Everything’s mean. We can smell the sweat and the desperation. There’s no safety net here. And for the young artists trying to make it here, the downsides include a handsy Park Avenue playboy-brute called Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thompson) who patrols the dressing rooms and stage doors looking for newly-arrived talent. He’d set off every #MeToo alarm in New York if he even crossed the state line today. We know from first meeting him that he won’t just make Queenie Mahoney (Anita Page) unhappy, he’ll ruin her life. And her big sister Harriet (Bessie Love) knows it too.
Still can’t dance
I’m here to tell you that, even here, in this big budget MGM musical that’s full of dancing from beginning to end and that won the very first Oscar for a musical film, nobody can dance. I observe some improvement over, for instance, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, but we’re still years from the military-precision extravaganzas of the late thirties and forties (don’t take my word for it - watch the clip above). Choreography is mechanical, the chorus line is a barely coordinated shambles, our leads can do little more than wobble their upper bodies and flap their legs. I think this wobbling and flapping must have been taught in Vaudeville School.
There’s something I want to say about body shape too, delicately. There are no athletes here, no gym rats, no hyper-evolved corn-fed hunks or beanpoles. Curves in the chorus, a little belly on the leading man, upper bodies are, well, just upper bodies. Even the hearthrobs are chunky. These bodies are what we’d call ‘real’. They belong to human beings, hard-working perfomers reliant on coffee, cigarettes and the corner diner. Nobody here has even heard of a personal trainer. Abs haven’t been invented yet. And Hollywood has not yet begun its wholesale reconfiguration of the human body, its programme to create supermen and women from comedians and soap stars and random dweebs.
Epic sacrifice
The story that runs under all the terrible dancing is raw melodrama - a sacrifice narrative from Jane Austen or from the weepiest of weepies. I’ll have to give you some detail on the shape of this sacrifice: big sister Harriet (everyone calls her Hank) gives up the love of her life, her whole future, to keep her little sister Queenie out of the hands of Jack Warriner, the playboy-brute. Hank’s fiancé Eddie Kearns, the up-and-coming singer, and her sister Queenie have been in love since Hank introduced them in the first reel. Queenie really doesn’t want to hurt her big sister so she’s been trying to distract herself from Eddie by going with Jock Warriner, the playboy-brute. But Hank realises she cannot keep Queenie from Warriner and his ghastly drunk and stupid friends without making this awful sacrifice.
On the spur of the moment, watching Queenie getting into a cab with the brute again, Hank decides to lie to fiancé Eddie, convincing him that she doesn’t love him - that she’s just been using him, in fact - so that he’ll run to save Queenie from the brute. She frees Eddie to admit that he loves Queenie (he doesn’t take much encouragement, of course, because, although Eddie is not a brute, he is a heel).
I say Jane Austen because this is all so inevitable, so crushing and life-disfiguring. Nothing optional about this sacrifice, nothing partial or temporary about this big sister’s loss. Hank must suffer because that’s the way it is. The sisters can’t both be happy. The obligatory, grating happy ending that comes after Hank’s sacrifice isn’t very happy at all, of course. It’s just more evidence of what she’s giving up. Now we’re crying.
Hank’s raw heartbreak secured Bessie Love an Oscar nomination. She deserved to have won it - more than the movie did anyway. Her tearful dressing room breakdown feels out of time, like something from a much later women’s picture, not like the conclusion of a song-and-dance film - watch the whole scene above. Her sacrifice is momentous - bringing to mind Barbara Stanwyck’s in Stella Dallas, when a poor mother gives up her only daughter to secure her happiness with a rich family.
There’s love in this movie, but it’s love of the old-world, negotiated kind. It’s all economics, survival and grim, familial obligations. No one here follows their heart. In fact, in Hollywood no one will follow their heart for decades. The luxury of following your heart is a post-WW2 thing, a Me Generation thing. A boomer thing.
The Broadway Melody was a huge hit and, remember, most people seeing it would be comparing it with the silent cinema and this would certainly be the first time they’d seen a sequence of musical numbers on film. It filled the Astor Theatre - appropriately on Times Square at Broadway - for a whole year.
I should mention the music, which is good - and we have here a sequence of specially-composed numbers, not a slap-dash mixture of existing songs and new stuff. This is evidence of the rapid evolution of the form now that sound is here - music is integral to the production, as it would be for a real Broadway show. In the Tin Pan Alley clip at the top, once the wannabes all quieten down, we have Charles King as Eddie Kearns, the talented heel, singing the title song with its composer, Nacio Herb Brown, at the piano. The song came back for the subsequent remakes, although they all have different stories. There’s also You Were Meant For Me, which went on to become a standard. Here’s a nice post about the music.
The movie won the first Best Picture Oscar for a musical and the first Best Picture Oscar for a talkie (the category was called Outstanding Picture at the time) but you need to remember that this was at only the second Academy Awards, the whole thing having been set up in the year of the film’s release.
Jock Warriner is obviously Jack Warner, rival studio head, but I can’t figure out why. Was he a playboy-brute?
The Tin Pan Alley office in this movie couldn’t actually have been in the Brill Building, which wasn’t even built yet, but you know what I mean.