I ran two of the Charley Chase shorts I’d taped from TCM last Tuesday — Mum’s the Word and Dog Shy — as well as the odd “From the Vaults” feature TCM showed between them, the surviving fragments from the early two-strip Technicolor musicals Gold Diggers on Broadway and The Rogue Song. The Gold Diggers on Broadway clip features Nick Lucas in 1929 doing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” in a style surprisingly close to Tiny Tim’s infamous cover version from 40 years later, in what passed for a production number in 1929 — a stationary camera shooting a scene that blacked out (there were actually insert shots of the stagehand pulling the light switch off and on) from a scene with Lucas and the girl he was singing to to a stage set of giant tulips that opened, each revealing a chorus girl inside. There were a few bits before and aft, including a funny shot of Winnie Lightner (who played the part Aline MacMahon played in the well-known remake of this story, Gold Diggers of 1933) practicing for a number that cast her as the Statue of Liberty, but the “Tiptoe” number was by far the most interesting part of this clip. (Apparently the entire soundtrack of Gold Diggers on Broadway survives on Vitaphone discs but the film, with the exception of these few minutes, is lost.) — 4/11/05
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This is a real pity, for what we have indicates
that this was one of the best early musicals, stiffly photographed and with
production numbers shown as they’d be seen from a good seat in a theatre
instead of made truly cinematic, but with a good story, a good score, a good
cast and the always energetic direction of Roy Del Ruth — whose wife-to-be,
Winnie Lightner, has a key role. The story began life as a play by Avery
Hopwood called The Gold Diggers of Broadway, which was premiered in New York in 1919. Warners bought
the movie rights and made a silent version in 1923 (shortening the title to The
Gold Diggers), then with the musical craze
in full swing in the early years of the talkies, Warners dredged up the story
for an original film musical and shot the works budget-wise, shooting the whole
thing in two-strip Technicolor (though the word “Technicolor” wasn’t used in the
trailer — instead it was called “natural color,” which two-strip really wasn’t
since it couldn’t reproduce blue). They didn’t stretch the budget for a
big-name cast — unlike their next shot at the same plot line, Gold Diggers
of 1933, which featured Warners’ biggest
musical stars of the time (Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Joan Blondell, Ginger
Rogers) and some of their top players in the non-musical roles as well (Warren
William, Aline MacMahon and Guy Kibbee) — and the casting is a bit awkward
because neither of the romantic leads, William Bakewell and Helen Foster, could
sing or dance, so other characters had to be created to give this musical film
genuinely talented musical performers: singer-guitarist Nick Lucas and dancer
Ann Pennington.
Charles and I experienced Gold Diggers of Broadway by listening to the recent CD release of the complete
soundtrack and playing the two surviving video clips — Nick Lucas singing
“Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” (a song actually written for this film by Joseph
Burke and Al Dubin — and performed by Lucas with his own accompaniment in a
high falsetto tenor quite like the voice of Tiny Tim, who had a hit with this
song as a novelty number in 1969) segueing into a big production number in
which chorines emerge from giant tulip bulbs (a gimmick done even more
effectively five years later in Murder at the Vanities) and most of the film’s big dance finale, representing the
show the musical performers in the cast are rehearsing when they’re not
involved in offstage romantic intrigues. The plot of Gold Diggers of
Broadway will be familiar to anyone who’s
seen Gold Diggers of 1933 (which was
billed as a sequel but was actually a remake), though the Zeitgeist of the films couldn’t be more different: Gold Diggers
of Broadway was released August 30, 1929,
nearly two months before the stock market crash, and its mood is that of the
1920’s: big, brassy, optimistic, without the grim Depression gags the writers
of Gold Diggers of 1933 added to their
version. The film centers around three chorus girls in a hit Broadway show (in
this version the show is already running, not in preliminary rehearsals like
the one in Gold Diggers of 1933): Jerry
Lamar (Nancy Welford, top-billed) and her roommates Violet (Helen Foster) and
Mabel (Winnie Lightner). Violet is in nice, sweet, innocent love with Wally
(William Bakewell), a rich but sympathetic kid who’s part of a Boston banking
family, but his uncle Stephen Lee (Conway Tearle, who was not only billed
second but narrated the trailer as himself) fears both that Wally will disgrace
the family if he marries a chorus girl and that the family will be taken to the
cleaners financially by her gold-digging demands.
So Stephen comes to New York
with the family attorney, Blake (Albert Gran), in tow — only when he visits the
apartment where the three chorus girls live and Jerry answers the door, he
mistakes Jerry for Violet. Jerry decides to continue the impersonation and
decides to make herself seem so creepy that Stephen will let his nephew marry anyone else — and there Violet will be. Only Stephen ends up
falling for Jerry himself, and Blake similarly goes for Mabel, so the curtain
falls with three happy if rather mismatched couples and a big musical finale
representing the big climax of the show the chorus girls have been working in
all movie. Obviously it’s difficult to judge a movie that exists only in such
fragmentary form — rumors persist that it will be reconstructed much the way
the silent London After Midnight was
from the surviving production stills, with the extant footage spliced in at the
appropriate points — and Charles and I didn’t make it easier because,
responding to a bit of mistaken information on our source for the visual clips
(the bonus features section on the Warner Home Video release of Gold Diggers
of 1937), I played the clip of Nick Lucas
singing “Tip-Toe Through the Tulips” at the point where Lucas sings the song
for the first time (at a nightclub where the principals are partying) instead
of the second time (when he performs it as part of the show); the DVD had
identified this clip as from reel six of the film when it’s actually
considerably later. At the same time Charles and I both had a sense of relief,
after sitting in the dark for over an hour listening to disembodied voices,
from actually having something to watch!
What there is of Gold Diggers of Broadway
is actually quite good: the script by Robert Lord (who’d have his name on a lot of important Warners’ films in the 1930’s) is full of
snappy dialogue (some of it quite daring even for the so-called “pre-Code”
era), good in-jokes and a nice running gag for Lightner, who’s obliged to come
on in a Statue of Liberty costume, carrying a torch and declaiming, “I am the
Spirit of Liberty and the Progress of Civilization!” — only she keeps blowing the
line. The two film clips that exist show how splendiferous this production’s
budget really was — the finale takes place on a set that’s supposed to
represent Paris (the Arc de Triomphe and the front of Nôtre-Dame Cathedral are
clearly recognizable) but whose buildings are at such extreme (and unrealistic)
angles to each other both Charles and I thought, “Ah, The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari — the musical!” — and also how
Del Ruth was able to avoid the static feeling of a lot of early talkies even
though within a year directors like John Murray Anderson in The King of Jazz and Busby Berkeley in Whoopee would develop ways to do production numbers on screen that
broke the stage frame once and for all and took advantage of what film could do
— not only soar over chorus lines and
show them in the overhead kaleidoscope formation Berkeley became famous for but
expand the landscape over which a number could take place far beyond what was
practical, or even possible, on stage.
Gold
Diggers of 1933, though in black-and-white
(Berkeley’s first film, Whoopee, had
been in two-strip but he wouldn’t get a chance to work in color again for
another 13 years, until The Gang’s All Here), is a better film — the script is more mordant, the cast
is stronger (and it helps that the principal musical talents, Dick Powell and
Ruby Keeler, also play the juvenile leads) and the numbers have Berkeley’s
staggering imagination going for them — in Gold Diggers of Broadway the numbers were staged by Larry Ceballos (incidentally
Conway Tearle pronounced the “l”’s in his name when introducing him in that
extended trailer — I’d always assumed the “l”’s were silent, Spanish-style),
who according to the American Film Institute Catalog was originally assigned to direct the numbers in the 1933
musical Footlight Parade and sued
Warner Bros. for breach of contract when Berkeley replaced him, and the two
surviving production numbers (as well as an incredible still showing Nick Lucas
singing the song “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine” in front of a set of a
giant palette, with chorus girls poking their heads through holes in it, while
Ann Pennington dances in front of him) show him as perfectly competent and
imaginative but still awfully stage-bound. Still, Gold Diggers of Broadway seems like a quite good movie, better than the common run
of musicals of the period, and though it’s great that it hasn’t been entirely
lost, it’s still frustrating that we have to watch/listen to it in this
piecemeal fashion and try to reconstruct in our own imaginations what the
original 1929 audiences got to see and
hear!
