When I went to see Charles I took along the tape I’d made years ago of the film Hollywood Revue of 1929, a movie that’s basically an historical curiosity today though it’s got some moments that hold up vividly — notably an outrageous acrobatic dance by Buster Keaton in drag as “Neptune’s Daughter” and good song-and-dance numbers by Joan Crawford and Marion Davies. The main problem with it is the horribly uncreative nature of the photography; every ensemble production number is shot from straight-on, with the camera shooting into a proscenium set and (except for a couple of surprising overhead shots) giving us no more than what we could have seen from a good orchestra seat in a live show. One can readily imagine why audiences had grown so tired of musicals that by 1931 Hollywood had virtually stopped making them until the spectacular success of 42nd Street in 1933 brought them back — as Arlene Croce wrote in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book, “A dull, static musical is no more escapist than a documentary on breadlines.” The Hollywood Revue of 1929 had some moments of genuine charm, though the technical crudity had to be seen to be believed. At one point we see a totally out-of-focus shot of a chorus line — and only later, when Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards steps out to sing a song in front of them and he is in focus, do we see why. Joan Crawford’s “Got a Feeling for You” is a good hot-cha number of the period, but it’s undone by the unfamiliarity of the pre-recording process; in MGM’s previous musical, The Broadway Melody, pre-recording had been inadvertently introduced in the number “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” (production head Irving Thalberg wanted a retake of the number and his brother-in-law Douglas Shearer, who headed MGM’s newly organized sound department, suggested that to save money on the retake instead of recording the whole number over again, they use the same soundtrack record and just redo the visual part), and Hollywood Revue was mostly pre-recorded, but Crawford apparently wasn’t told that she was supposed to move her lips to the recording in order to make it look like she was singing. She got the idea in the first chorus — in which she was just leaning into the curve of a grand piano and singing — but in the second chorus, in which she was supposed to be singing and dancing at the same time, she frequently forgot to move her lips when she was supposed to be singing. (When Fred Astaire came to Hollywood he insisted that he would not be shown singing and dancing at the same time; he would sing the song and then he would dance to it, as he would on stage — he realized that no one would believe he could possibly sing and dance simultaneously without running out of breath.) And there are all too many instances where we see members of a chorus line clapping their hands in time to a song but we don’t hear them doing so!
What survives about this film is some good gag sequences —
notably the Keaton number, Laurel and Hardy’s bungled magic act and a charming
sequence in which the film’s host, a then-unknown comedian named Jack Benny,
whom Thalberg pulled out of a nightclub gig, gets his clothes torn off by
William Haines (when Haines joked that Benny’s clothes were totally out of
fashion, Charles joked, “Listen to him.
He’s Gay. He knows about these things”) — and the two sequences in
two-strip Technicolor (not the best-preserved
two-strip I’ve ever seen, but among the better surviving examples). One is a
sequence in which John Gilbert and Norma Shearer perform the balcony scene from
Romeo and Juliet, first come
scritto and then in 1920’s youth slang —
surprisingly, given their later reputations, it is Gilbert who comes off better
in this scene, looking natural and speaking with a somewhat stilted but still
appealing voice, while Shearer gestures with majestic phoniness and speaks her
lines as if she hasn’t a clue as to what they meant. The other is the musical
number “Orange Blossom Time” (shot as primitively as all the other big numbers
in the film, but given a major
lift by being in color — in the original release of this film some theatres
actually wafted orange-blossom perfume through their interiors when this film
was shown, and audience members with hay fever complained they were allergic to
the movie!) and a final reprise of the song “Singin’ in the Rain” (this was the film for which it was originally written!)
which featured all the cast members standing and waving to us in front of a
painted backdrop ostensibly representing Noah’s ark. (The brief shot of Joan
Crawford in this finale was the only color footage of her until 1953, when she made her first color film, Torch
Song.[1]) Earlier this great song was performed by Ukulele
Ike and the Brox Sisters in front of a really simple stage set, with rain
pelting them from all angles — a far cry from the engaging performance of Gene
Kelly in the Singin’ in the Rain
movie made 23 years later at the same studio! — 7/6/98
•••••
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a film we’d recorded
from the first night of Turner Classic
Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to Joan Crawford, the musical The
Hollywood Revue of 1929. It was part of an
odd cycle of films made in the early days of sound, in which virtually every
major studio tried a plotless “revue” movie — “revue,” so spelled, was the name
in the 1920’s (and later) for a Broadway show that didn’t have a plot but was
simply a succession of musical numbers and comedy scenes alternating with each
other. Fox made the Fox Movietone Follies of 1929, Warners made The Show of Shows, Paramount made Paramount on Parade (a film generally considered wittier than the rest
of them but one partially lost because the sequences originally shot in
two-strip Technicolor no longer exist in any form, either the color originals or black-and-white
print-downs), Universal made The King of Jazz — which at least had the unifying element of Paul
Whiteman and his orchestra in some of the most dazzling production number ever filmed (it was directed, stunningly, by John Murray
Anderson, who as director of most of the Ziegfeld Follies was intimately familiar with the revue format) — and
MGM made this one. The Hollywood Revue of 1929 has some other distinguishing features; for the
comedy MC (there was also a “straight” MC, actor Conrad Nagel, who as the first
important male star who proved he had a recordable voice ended up in so many
movies in the early days of sound he once complained that he and his wife could
no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment since they couldn’t find
a film playing anywhere that he wasn’t in) MGM production chief Irving Thalberg
discovered a young nightclub comedian named Jack Benny. The result was an oddly
refracted performance in which Benny’s later radio character can be glimpsed in
embryo, before his radio writers fused its elements — his cheapness, his self-denigration,
his ego, his terrible violin playing (though off-stage, off-screen and off-air
Benny was a capable pop violinist — he jammed with jazz great Joe Venuti and
Venuti said he had to work hard to keep up with him) — into the devastating and
hilarious character that ensured his popularity on radio and TV for decades. The
Hollywood Revue of 1929 was also the first
musical ever made in which all the songs were pre-recorded before filming;
pre-recording had been invented accidentally on MGM’s previous big musical, The
Broadway Melody, when Thalberg had decided
the number “The Wedding of the Painted Doll” wasn’t good enough and ordered it
reshot. Douglas Shearer, head of MGM’s sound department (and, not
coincidentally, Thalberg’s brother-in-law), said there was nothing wrong with
the soundtrack, so to save money on the retake he suggested they use the same
recording and just redo the visual part. (There wasn’t a synchronization
problem since the number was simply a dance; there was a singer, but he was
off-screen.) So Thalberg ordered all
the numbers in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 to be pre-recorded — which threw some of the performers, particularly
Joan Crawford. Having established herself as a major star the previous year
with the film Our Dancing Daughters,
Crawford was quite naturally assigned a number, “Gotta Feelin’ for You,” in
which she would both sing and dance. For the first chorus she just sang — and
she remembered to move her lips in synch to her pre-recording — but for the
second chorus, when she was supposed to be shown singing and dancing, she was concentrating so hard on her dance
she forgot to move her lips as she “sang” on the soundtrack.
Like a lot of
early musicals, Hollywood Revue
is a rather lumbering, uneven piece of entertainment, sometimes spectacular,
sometimes almost grueling to watch, and in general the numbers are more fun
than the comedy routines. One begins to wonder if the comedy scenes in stage
revues were really this dull and produced so few laughs — and then one remembers
that among the people who shot to stardom in revues were W. C. Fields, Eddie
Cantor and Bert Williams. Alas, aside from Benny (and he, as noted above,
hadn’t really created his character yet), no one in this cast was as talented a laugh-maker — except Buster
Keaton, and his routine is a
wordless dance sequence in which he’s supposed to be playing the beautiful
princess, daughter of Poseidon, who emerges from an oyster shell and does a
wild dance, supposedly underwater, with a string of sausages (representing a
sea serpent). It’s one of the most delightful scenes in the movie! Laurel and
Hardy are also in it, doing an incompetent attempt at a magic act — it was
interesting to watch this a day after seeing Lost in a Harem, made by the same director (Charles F. Riesner) 15
years later, and showing Abbott and Costello as similarly incompetent stage
magicians. One problem with Hollywood Revue is the form in which it’s survived; as late as 1962
Laurel and Hardy’s biographer, John McCabe, reported that all the extant prints
had the sound on Vitaphone discs and the film couldn’t be shown until MGM
transferred its soundtrack to film. Sometime in the early 1960’s someone did
just that — and did as wretched a job with it as Warner Bros. had done with
some of their Vitaphone films.
The problem was that a film soundtrack took over the left one-ninth of the
picture area, and rather than re-center the image or (better yet) letterbox it,
whoever slapped a film soundtrack on this simply stuck it over the left
one-ninth of the screen, turning what Riesner and cinematographers John Arnold,
Maximilian Fabian, Irving Reis and John M. Nickolaus clearly intended as
symmetrical compositions into annoyingly off-center ones. What stands out in Hollywood
Revue are the Keaton and Laurel and Hardy
sequences, the meeting between Jack Benny and Lon Chaney (actually, according
to one imdb.com “trivia” poster, Gus Edwards — famous vaudevillian who toured
with a children’s act for years and wrote the song “School Days” to introduce
it — stood in for Chaney in this scene because Chaney refused to do the movie
unless he was paid his full star salary) in which Benny shakes “Chaney’s” hand
and ends up holding his disembodied arm, and at least some of the musical
numbers.
The song “Singin’ in the Rain” was written for this film as a feature
for Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, the Brox Sisters and the Rounders (a male
vocal group), but anyone who associates that song with Gene Kelly and his
marvelous solo dance through a rain-drenched street is going to be disappointed
by this sequence. It’s just a bunch of people clomping around on a relatively
simple set, singing the song as a blatantly artificial downpour drenches them
(the one in Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain routine was artificial, too, but it didn’t look it), and though
Ukulele Ike actually swung within the limits of his rather silly act, the Brox
Sisters are so dreadfully dull one can’t help this could have been filmed a
couple of years later when the Boswell Sisters would have been available.
“Singin’ in the Rain” is briefly reprised for a bizarre final shot in which the
entire cast is posed in front of a painted backdrop representing Noah’s ark —
and among the people visible in the group shot is Joan Crawford, filmed in
color for the first time in what was the first of three films she made in which
she was shown in color sequences
(the other two, both from a decade after this one, were The Women and Ice Follies of 1939) well before her first all-color film, Torch Song (1953). Hollywood Revue contains two big scenes in two-strip Technicolor,
including a sequence with Norma Shearer and John Gilbert doing the balcony
scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, first come scritto and
then, after director Lionel Barrymore (playing himself at a time when he was
attempting a transition from acting to directing for real) receives a memo from
the front office saying they want to rename the film The Neckers and update the dialogue, in up-to-date 1929 slang.
Though an imdb.com “trivia” poster names this as “one of the films cited as
contributing to the collapse of John Gilbert’s career after audiences heard his
high-pitched speaking voice,” Gilbert actually seems perfectly credible,
throwing himself into Shakespeare’s dialogue with surprising gusto (especially
since the problem with Gilbert’s subsequent talkies wasn’t that he had a
high-pitched voice but he didn’t seem to get the whole concept of acting with one’s voice, of varying one’s inflections to
convey emotions) and managing to make the 1920’s slang version (with lines
like, “You’re the pansies in my garden, the cream in my mocha and java, the
berries in my pie”) genuinely amusing. It suggests that Gilbert might have
transitioned to sound just fine if Thalberg had done for him what Sam Goldwyn
had done for Ronald Colman — shifted him out of heavy-breathing romantic drama
and given him a modern-dress comedy-thriller instead. Certainly Gilbert is a
lot better in the Romeo and Juliet
sequence than Shearer, who’s even more stylized and more clueless about acting
Shakespeare than she was when she filmed the whole role seven years later (also
at MGM with her husband Thalberg producing) — she seems bent on gumming every
one of the Bard’s lines to death — and spits out the “modern” dialogue as if
she’s simply a straight person setting up Gilbert’s gags.
The other big
Technicolor number is the film’s last major song, “Orange Blossom Time,” a
pretentious song set in a garden but featuring the movie’s most spectacular
choreography, including at least one overhead shot in which chorus girls
arrange themselves in a kaleidoscope-like formation. This is usually associated
with Busby Berkeley, but quite a few 1929 movies used this gimmick — including
the original Rio Rita, The Cocoanuts
(the Marx Brothers’ first film) and MGM’s next big musical, Lord
Byron of Broadway — a year before Berkeley
came out to Hollywood to do the numbers for Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee. “Orange Blossom Time” is also a precursor to the
brief vogue for “smellies” three decades later — Michael Todd, Jr. introduced
“Smell-O-Vision” in a film called Scent of Mystery in 1960 and a rival producer tried another scent
process, “AromaRama,” in a documentary about China called Behind the
Great Wall (it was introduced by newscaster
Chet Huntley in a scene in which he was shown cutting open an orange, and
orange scent was wafted through the theatre’s air-conditioning system) — some
theatre owners wafted orange-blossom perfume through their houses during the “Orange Blossom Time” number and
hoped it would add to the atmosphere. It added too much to the atmosphere for
patrons with hay fever or sinus allergies, who complained that there was something about that movie that was making them allergic! The
Hollywood Revue of 1929 was sufficiently
well promoted that there were quite a few contemporary records of its songs —
Paul Whiteman recorded “Orange Blossom Time” (with a vocal by Bing Crosby
that’s considerably more pleasant than the one by Charles King in the film) and
“Your Mother and Mine,” Frank Trumbauer and Leonard Joy both recorded “Gotta
Feelin’ for You,” Trumbauer also recorded “Nobody but You” and Cliff Edwards
recorded “Singin’ in the Rain” both when the movie came out and again in the
1950’s (the first time with a band behind him, the second time with only his
vocal and ukulele). But the vogue for revue movies didn’t last, and when
producer Harry Rapf decided to go to the well again with one called The
March of Time in 1930, his superiors pulled
the plug on it in mid-filming, leaving a brief clip that was used in Broadway
to Hollywood (1933) and some elaborate
musical numbers that got recycled as shorts like The Devil’s Cabaret (1934) and a “Lock-Step” number, a chorus line set
in a prison, that eerily anticipates the title song in Elvis Presley’s 1957
musical Jailhouse Rock but wasn’t
seen until That’s Entertainment III
in the 1990’s. — 1/13/14
[1] — Not true: she’s also seen in color in two other
part-color films, both made in 1939: Ice Follies of 1939 and The Women. (M.G.C., 3/12/07)
