Plot Intro
Eddie Kearns, enthusiastic Broadway entrepreneur, has a new revue to perform on stage in New York City. He has employed the two Mahoney Sisters to star in it - he is betrothed to the elder, but falls in love with the younger. As the production rehearses, he and the girls must navigate a complicated love triangle, a tyrannical theatre manager, greedy and lecherous investors, backstage rivalries and the limited movie-making technology of the late 1920s.
Every now and then, a film comes along that brings a new technological innovation into the mainstream. Toy Story established 3D animation, Gone With the Wind established Technicolour, and The Broadway Melody established the Hollywood musical. Though not the first film with recorded sound (that title is given to 1927’s The Jazz Singer), it set a benchmark for how extensively and expensively sound should be used in film, and paved the way for similarly-styled musicals such as Chicago, A Chorus Line and The Producers. At the time, this would have been a feast for the eyes and ears, like seeing a grand Vaudeville show- but in your local movie theatre.
Now here’s the bad news- the film is as outdated and antediluvian as patterned carpet. There are awkward cuts and pauses lasting longer than they should; cue cards announcing the setting and timing of each scene like a silent film; and fight scenes that are ropey at best.
The script and acting is basically that of a substandard stage musical put on by students. It lacks so much subtlety that even Bonnie Langford would have given it a miss. Cries of “Oh gee whizz!” and “Hey, that little ditty sure is swell!” as well as a few thigh slaps, hand-to-mouth gasps and over-enthusiastic dancing permeate the drama. At one point the heroine is complimented for being “regular”. I had no idea that having clockwork bowels was considered admirable in the ’20s.
A minor saving grace (if I were to be fair-minded) is the variety of minor characters who get some decent one-liners. An effeminate costume designer at loggerheads with a buxom, matronly dresser; a pair of money-hungry investors who bear a resemblance to Laurel and Hardy; a grumpy electrician; a narcissistic tenor; and a stuttering agent all get unfairly brief moments to shine. Ideally the film would have given them funnier and more frequent lines, transforming the film into a high-energy, fun-filled comedy-musical about the chaos of creating entertainment. But alas, my advice will go unheeded because most of the cast and crew are dead by now.
I am well aware of the fact that we will be hitting some duds on our Oscars journey, and this appears to be our first. The Broadway Melody may have some interest for film historians but it’s now dusty, badly edited, and overshadowed by the far more polished musicals yet to come.
Fun fact: Follow-up films with the same title were made in 1936, 1938 and 1940. But with new characters, actors and storylines, creating a sort of tenuously-connected franchise.
Highlight
A camp costume designer who gets all of 5 lines but delivers all of them with Nathan Lane-esque gusto.
Lowlight
A so-called “fight scene” in which a punch misses by about a mile, but the punchee still throws himself several metres.
Mark
2/10
When I heard that the second film of our project was the 1928/29 movie musical The Broadway Melody, I was delighted. I’m a lover of anything glittery and musical, and the idea of seeing the one of the first ever silver-screen musicals was exciting. Yes, the old film style of acting was going over the top, but over-acting is one of the joys of an old-school song and dance film. This was going to be great.
Only, it wasn’t. It was terrible. The whole thing was badly put together with the film’s footage jumping constantly so you could see where different takes of the same scene had been roughly glued together. The occasional joke was delivered with such appalling comic timing that what could have elicited a chuckle only fell flat. The storyline was trite and ended up forcing some sort of ‘happy ending’ which made zero sense and left the audience to bewilderedly fill in the gaps after the film’s end.
Trying to find something decent in this car-crash of a movie to write about is a challenge. Of all the posturing actors, the lead female called ‘Hank’ (apparently a contraction of the name ‘Harriet’) is played by Bessie Love who at least attempts to portray her character with conviction. There are some huge vaudeville theatre scenes that were originally shown in basic Technicolor and would, I’m sure, have wowed the audiences of the time. And there are some ideas of a story that could be better told - the wider scenes with an arrogant actor demanding a spotlight, and the camp costume designer having a bitch-off with the dancers’ minder hint at a far better film.
I think what this film truly represents is the rocky transition from silent film to talkies. They are continuing to act in the silent film style which becomes pantomime-like when you can actually hear them. Having said this, I longed for the charisma of last week’s Clara Bow in Wings: this film needed someone with her magnetism to lift this into something actually watchable. The director appeared to be asleep, while it was clearly edited by a monkey on steroids. There are a number of scenes where actors stare meaninglessly at the screen for around a minute before it randomly cuts to another scene somewhere else. And there’s a character who, it took me half the film to work out, is supposed to have a stutter. Colin Firth he ain’t.
This is a film that should probably be put in a skip ‘by accident’ and forgotten about. Oh, and the music (what there is of it) is bland, vapid and forgettable.
Highlight
It ended.
Low light
Out of a parade of options, the astonishingly bad editing takes the crown.
Mark
0.5/10
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