Roy Del Ruth (1937)
I kept drifting in and out of a comfortable doze. I sometimes wondered if I was dreaming even when I was awake, as the story moved between its two main strands – the preparations for a Broadway show and the fortunes of a racehorse called Stargazer. According to the contemporary Variety review in the BFI programme note, this combination of plots was pretty hackneyed by the time Broadway Melody of 1938 appeared (the horse’s big race win at Saratoga finances the show). It still seemed a bit surreal, though, right down to the closing shot of the cast – in effect their curtain call – with the romantic leads (the producer and his new star) holding either side of Stargazer’s bridle. Having a doze was comfortable because the film is both agreeable and largely uninspired: you don’t worry about missing much if you lose consciousness for a bit.
The cast includes Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell in the leads, Robert Benchley, Buddy Ebsen, George Murphy, Charley Grapewin, and lots of people I didn’t know – Binnie Barnes, Billy Gilbert, Charles Igor Gorin, Helen Troy, Raymond Walburn et al. There’s also – and this is what gives the film its historical interest – Sophie Tucker, as a theatrical boarding house owner, and Judy Garland, as her teenage daughter. As a child, Garland had appeared in a number of movies as one of the Gumm Sisters and she was in two films – Pigskin Parade and a short called Every Sunday – the year before this one but Broadway Melody of 1938 provided her first significant role. The Sophie Tucker character, who was once a star herself, is trying to get a big break for her daughter and that’s what this film delivered for Garland. It includes her famous version of ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want To Do It)’, sung to a photograph of Clark Gable. It’s hard to get a sense of the impact she must have made at the time, although it’s easy to admire the detail of her characterisation, as well as the power of her voice. I still didn’t find her enjoyable, though, except in a too brief dance sequence with Buddy Ebsen near the end. He’s wonderful: a graceful, physically relaxed clown – you see it right from the first sequence when, getting a shave in a barber’s shop, he’s more and more nervous as the ‘Toreador’-singing young barber (who’s also keen to be in show business) works the razor on a strop with alarming gusto. (According to Wikipedia, Ebsen was cast as the Tinman in The Wizard of Oz but had to drop out because he developed an allergy to the make-up.) Ebsen is just as funny when he becomes Stargazer’s beanpole jockey, and stealing grain for the horse from a farmer (Grapewin). Sophie Tucker’s legendary risqué personality is under wraps here: even so, it was remarkable not only to see her but also to hear her do ‘Some of These Days’ (the song and the singer that cheer up Antoine de Roquentin in La Nausée).
The theatrical boarding house is a good pretext for incorporating some variety turns offstage, although a little of a specialty sneezer (Robert Wildhack) went a long way with me. Willie Howard is pretty hard work too, as a Russian artiste who waits at table at the boarding house, although his retinue of trained dogs are funny when they interrupt the boarders’ supper. The best and best-known songs here aren’t the ones that Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote for the film and the final numbers, at the first night of the Broadway show, are an anti-climax. Eleanor Powell – as a racehorse trainer turned hoofer – supplies the bridge between the racecourse and the Great White Way. Powell is an athletically brilliant tap dancer but, maybe because she seems an impersonal actress, that quality is transmitted to her dancing too. I liked her comic-romantic dance duet in a park, with George Murphy, better than any of her more spectacular turns. The rehearsals don’t have the show-must-go-on-if-it-kills-me power of what I think of as the echt Broadway movies of the 1930s. That lack of energy is reflected in the person of Robert Taylor, pleasant but far from driven as the producer.
29 October 2011
