Film review

  • Broadway Melody of 1938

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

     

  • Broadway Danny Rose

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (1984)

    Danny Rose is a Broadway talent agent with a list of no-hoper acts (a one-legged tap dancer etc).  The biggest – the only – name among his clients is a washed-up lounge singer called Lou Canova.  Lou is having an affair with a woman called Tina Vitale, previously a gangster’s moll.   He gets a date at the Waldorf Astoria, to sing in front of Milton Berle:  Lou and Danny see this as the last chance to resurrect his career but Lou is worried that Tina’s jealous ex-boyfriend is going to order a hit on him.  So Lou gets Danny to pretend to be Tina’s boyfriend instead …  According to IMDB, this is the only feature film that the musician Nick Apollo Forte has appeared in but he’s highly convincing as Lou Canova – much the best thing in Broadway Danny Rose.  (Forte wrote Lou’s songs, which he performs in convincing style.)  The main focus in this underpopulated film is, however, almost entirely on Woody Allen as Danny and Mia Farrow as Tina and there’s not a lot going on between them.  When their relationship turns serious in the closing stages, it’s artificial respiration – a false and clumsy attempt to give the piece retrospective substance.  Casting Mia Farrow against type as a tough cookie – with a tarty wig, dark glasses and high heels – is funny when she first appears but pointless after that.  She’s not the kind of actress capable of looking or sounding thoroughly different from what she’s normally like and she lacks the histrionic verve needed to bring a caricature like Tina fully to life.  At the same time, she’s too conscientious to rely for comic effect – as Woody Allen has sometimes successfully done – on the incongruity of her own persona and the role she’s playing.  She’s likeable here because she’s trying hard but she isn’t funny.   Allen himself is underpowered:  playing a man who’s not the brightest crayon in the box, he seems to be struggling not to let his own wit come through too strongly.

    Allen writes incidents to make up for the sparse ration of characters.  The crime caper is mildly entertaining but the mildness makes it tiresome too.   There are laughs in the film – bits of performances by the hopeless acts managed by Danny, the helium-falsetto voices after gas escapes at one point of the mob’s pursuit of him and Tina – but they’re laughs familiar from elsewhere, not distinctively Woody Allen ones.  While it’s not integral to the conception in the way it was in Manhattan, Allen’s decision to make the film in black and white seems right, at least in the Borscht Belt club sequences.  (As Bob Fosse demonstrated in Lenny, monochrome really brings out the seedy glitz of this kind of locale.)  Broadway Danny Rose is a shaggy dog story and Allen uses as a framework for it a gaggle of real life standups and impressionists (none of whom I recognised) – gathered in the Carnegie Deli, where they recall the local legend that is Broadway Danny Rose.   This opening conversation is promising – it places the film immediately and exactly – but its flavour quickly dissipates.  There’s nothing interesting in the juxtaposition of the group in the deli and the main action:  the reminiscing comics don’t, for example, have memories of Danny specific enough for the scenes that involve him either to confirm or to contradict what they say.  We learn that the Carnegie Deli menu includes a Danny Rose sandwich but it isn’t clear why Danny is a legend in his own lifetime (which we assume hasn’t ended yet).  This framing device looks like something Woody Allen added when he realised the main story couldn’t stand up on its own.

    9 January 2012

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