 The Best Picture Our Columnists Reflect on Oscar's Best Films |
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(1928-29) |
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 From left: Anita Page, Charles King, Bessie Love in the 1929 musical |
America fell in love with musicals as soon as the talkies arrived
By
RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
ONE HAS to make a few allowances when looking at a movie made more than 70 years ago. That's surely the case with "The Broadway Melody," the first "talking picture" to win the Best Picture Oscar--which it did in only the second year of the Academy Awards.
First you've got to understand that America went nuts for musicals at the dawn of the sound era because they were something entirely new for moviegoers. Phonograph records and radio had made music a hot ticket everywhere in 1920s America, but until the movies had soundtracks there was no effective way to film any of the great Broadway musicals of the era nor feature the great recording stars on film.
So, Hollywood made a slew of musicals, often filming them in primitive fashion for a variety of technical reasons. For one thing, they didn't have the mobile microphones that came along in the 1930s, so they often set up the camera in front of a traditional proscenium arch theater stage and had the singers and dancers just stand in front of it and do their thing.
They also had to leave their cameras in a fixed position because they had to build large soundproof containers around them, so the camera noise wouldn't be picked up on the soundtrack. Result: Those early musicals had a terribly stagebound look.
All of this is true of "The Broadway Melody," the first big movie musical, but it had so many other positive things going for it that people loved it anyway.
Take the songs by Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed and Willard Robinson. One of them is an evergreen standard we still hear constantly: "You Were Meant For Me." Two others are likely to be familiar to moviegoers born 50 years after "The Broadway Melody" premiered: "Pagan Love Song" and the title tune, which is performed over and over again in the movie--once even as background for a tapping toe-dancer.
The other big plus was the three leading actors, who would become the first MGM musical stars: Charles King, Bessie Love and Anita Page. No, they're no longer familiar names, but all three were young and vigorous and really threw themselves into their roles.
The storyline is simple: An up-and-coming singer/composer named Eddie Kearns (Charles King) has landed a featured spot in the latest Broadway show by the legendary "Mr. Zanfield" and he wants his fiancee, "Hank" Mahoney (Bessie Love) and her little sister, Queenie (Anita Page), to help him put over his new song, "The Broadway Melody." But the Mahoney Sisters' audition is sabotaged and Zanfield cuts them from the number, so their Broadway future now seems dubious.
Meanwhile, Eddie is blown away by how gorgeous Hank's "little" sister, Queenie, has turned out since she grew out of the awkward stage. Before he can help himself, he's falling in love with Queenie, who's also getting a big rush from a millionaire Stage Door Johnny (Kenneth Thomson). How the tangled love affairs are straightened out keeps the whole show going between production numbers.
At about 31, petite and spunky Bessie Love was the best-known of the trio when the movie came out in 1929. She had been a silent movie actress since D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" in 1916 and was the leading lady in the silent version of "The Lost World." An all-around entertainer, she plunged into the musical numbers with zest, though her dancing leaves a great deal to be desired. King, then about 30, was a seasoned Broadway performer with a distinct East Coast urban persona. Of the three, he's the real musical player. Page, who was only 19 then, was a shapely blonde with a rather zaftig figure and quite beautiful features. She looked like the sort of statuesque beauty that Flo Ziegfeld might have turned into a "Ziegfeld Girl" for his chorus line, so she seems quite natural in this setting.
Because every new picture was making musical history of one kind or another, "The Broadway Melody" is loaded with innovations. It was the first musical to use pre-recorded songs for the singers to lip-synch while scores of retakes were done. That became the standard practice in all musicals thereafter. It also may have been the first film in which a song was used to advance the storyline: King sings "You Were Meant for Me" to Page, revealing for the first time that he loves her rather than her sister.
King's frisky performance is always enjoyable, even if you think his character is something of a butthead for choosing the slightly-dippy Queenie over her much smarter, savvier sister. He's from the old school, though, so you can be sure he'll find a way to touch his chest on the left side when the title song says "a million hearts beat quicker there" and sort of act out everything else as if playing to the moviegoers in the back row.
Bessie Love gets the meatier dramatic scenes, though, because she's called upon to make sacrifice after sacrifice for her baby sister. Result: She was nominated for Best Actress, but lost out to Mary Pickford.
The best scenes in "The Broadway Melody" are the ones shot backstage with lots of theatrical hubbub going on. This looks and sounds authentic--and King's first rendition of the title tune is the best because he does it with just a pianist, like a song-plugger, for "Mr. Zanfield."
Filmed before the Hollywood Production Code set moral standards, "Melody" has some reasonably sexy scenes with both Love and Page in their undies--and one charming bit where Page is actually in the bathtub. Otherwise, you can still see lots of leftover stuff from the silent era, including title cards like "The Birthday Party at the Girls' Apartment" that really don't seem necessary in 1929.
Don't look at this film expecting great dialogue either. You're likely to groan when Eddie tells Hank, "You're sure regular, Hank!" or the Stage Door Johnny--you can tell he's bad because his hair is slicked down--asks naive Queenie, "How would you like an apartment all your own--say, on Park Avenue?"
And awards or not, some of the musical numbers are just plain painful, such as "Wedding of the Painted Doll," featuring chorus girls who all resemble the Duchess of York before Weight-Watchers and a high-voiced male singer who suggests the Italians weren't the only society to have castrati.
In the grand scheme of things, "The Broadway Melody" was an extremely important film because its immense popularity inspired MGM to go full speed ahead into the making of musicals. Ultimately, that effort was put under the supervision of the film's lyricist, Arthur Freed, who built the fabled "Freed unit" at MGM--the most successful musical production entity in movie history.
Charles King starred in many other musicals before returning to the stage, but few of them are seen today. He died at age 50. Anita Page made about 30 more pictures of declining quality and finally retired at age 26 after "Hitchhike to Heaven" in 1936. She enjoyed a long and happy marriage to a Navy admiral and raised two daughters. Bessie Love became a Broadway star in 1931, then moved to England in 1935, where she had a long, prosperous career as a character actor, appearing in such films as "The Barefoot Contessa," "Isadora," "Sunday, Bloody Sunday" and "The Rtiz." She died in 1986.
Critics don't look back on "The Broadway Melody" as one of the great films of Hollywood's past, but it was a very important one at a time of great technological upheaval in Hollywood history and certainly merits our attention even after 72 years.
OTHER NOMINEES THAT YEAR: "Alibi," "The Hollywood Revue," "In Old Arizona," "The Patriot."
OSCAR TRIVIA: Total cost of "The Broadway Melody" was $350,000--less than some people pay for a house these days. It grossed $4 million--a gigantic windfall for MGM in the year of the stock market crash that triggered The Great Depression....Jed Prouty, who played the Mahoney sisters' stuttering "uncle," is best remembered for the "Jones Family" movie series, in which he was teamed with Spring Byington. There were 17 of the films, starting with "Every Saturday Night" (1936).
© 2001 by Ron Miller.
You can comment on this columnn or contact Ron Miller with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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