Wednesday, May 8, 2024

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1928-29)

 

The Hollywood Revue, also known as The Hollywood Revue of 1929, is one of the strangest nominees for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The film has no plot, no clear connections between its various scenes at all. It is, literally, what the title suggests: a revue. Various stars and novelty acts perform as if this were a vaudeville show. I suppose this was a clever way for MGM to test its newfangled sound equipment for the movies it would make in the future, but unless you’re intrigued by how Hollywood started making the transition out of the silent era, this film really just serves as a showcase for a lot of now-forgotten performers – a time capsule, if you will.

Jack Benny, who had a very long career as a comic master, and Conrad Nagel, an actor who is not as well known today as he should be, serve as sort of ersatz masters of ceremonies, but here’s the thing: they don’t actually introduce that many acts. From time to time, they show up to talk to a star in what is really more like elevated awards show banter, and then a different act will follow without giving us any sense of who these people are. For example, the great Buster Keaton shows up at one point and performs a very energetic if erratic dance dressed as either a harem girl or Cleopatra (complete with a sort of asp), but no one mentions that it’s Buster Keaton! That sequence also features a sort of undulating visual effect to make it appear that Keaton is performing underwater. I have no idea what is or was going on, but I was fascinated.

The opening dance number actually seems to be part of a minstrel act but without blackface, thankfully. Instead, one of the first camera tricks makes the image into its negative, sort of like watching a dance through a malfunctioning x-ray. We go from the positive image to the negative and then back again. It’s an intriguing choice to begin a musical film, but it’s not consistent with the content of the song or with the dance itself, so it doesn’t really contribute a great deal to our understanding of the film. It’s just a cute effect, and it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the film.

Similarly, twice during the film, performers either shrink or grow bigger thanks to camera effects. The first is when Nagel and singer Charles King (another performer whose star had dimmed since the early sound era) are talking about how actors cannot really sing as well as “true” singers can, only to have Nagel start singing “You Were Meant for Me” (a song associated with King and The Broadway Melody) to Anita Page, one of King’s co-stars from The Broadway Melody. King seems to shrink to tiny size as a result of his embarrassment for having been so wrong about actors like Nagel. Of course, the irony is that Nagel’s voice is dubbed. It’s not actually Nagel singing, it’s King himself!

The second time this effect gets used involves Bessie Love, another co-star of The Broadway Melody, Oscar’s second Best Picture winner. She’s so small, you see, that she can fit inside Benny’s pocket. She walks into his hand and, when he places her on the floor, she grows to her normal size – right before our very eyes. Camera tricks like this had been a staple of films for decades by this point, so the addition of sound doesn’t really make these moments any more spectacular than they might otherwise have been. By the way, Love then begins what can only be described as a very energetic, acrobatic dance with a troupe of male dancers that must have left her as exhausted as she pretends to be at its end.

The Hollywood Revue does feature some very good performances. Joan Crawford sings “Got a Feeling for You” and dances the Charleston in a way that reminds you just what an all-around talent she was. Her version of dancing is perhaps more, um, muscular than you might think is necessary, but she had a star quality even this early in her career. Unfortunately, the film’s camera can’t seem to keep her in frame. Her feet are sometimes not visible when she’s dancing, and the top of her head is not fully visible when she sits atop a piano at the end of her number. I will readily admit that these deficits could be the result of the print that I watched, but since so much of the version I saw had these kinds of mistakes, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t present in the best possible print.

Marie Dressler does a comic number dressed as a queen, and she’s just as prone to overreacting (or overacting) here as she ever was. Polly Moran is deadpan funny as a princess in that sequence, by the way. Laurel and Hardy, in their first appearance in a sound film, perform a magic act filled with comic mishaps, such as Laurel accidentally revealing how a trick works. Even Marion Davis appears, dressed as a bellhop amidst a group of male dancers in military costumes. Davies doesn’t have the strongest singing voice and she’s mostly an okay dancer, but she displays a great deal of enthusiasm. One of the most fun performances is an adagio dance with three men and a single woman. That woman is very strong and tough. She gets thrown around a lot and always seems to be up to the task.

Several of the musical numbers are reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies. The film’s “second act” begins with what is called a “Tableau of Jewels,” and it is staged like a hybrid of a Follies act and a Busby Berkeley number, with rotating sets and women in skimpy costumes. By the time a dancer (Beth Laemmle?) emerges from a large clam shell in a costume that barely has her nipples covered, you realize why the movie industry came under such scrutiny for its racy content back in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film features some very strange performances. Cliff Edwards (who was sometimes billed as “Ukelele Ike”) performs in front of a chorus of people (allegedly) playing ukeleles too, but to characterize what he does as singing would be, to put it kindly, a bit of an overstatement. This isn’t the Edwards voice that was used to such great effect as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” No, this is more like high-spirited caterwauling. Then there’s the appearance of William Haines, an early star who left Hollywood rather than pretend not to be gay. He does some sort of strange “comic” skit involving him tearing off parts of Jack Benny’s tuxedo to no apparent purpose. Then a comedy duo named Dane and Arthur show up, dressed for some unknown reason in sailor suits, and proceed to mess up Benny’s performance by trying to unroll a carpet.

I did like the novelty song “Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out,” a tribute to the great star of many horror films, but it’s staging is just bizarre. It begins with a group of ten women who are in bed. The singer Gus Edwards (not to be confused with Cliff) shows up and the pajama-clad women all gather around him to listen and be… frightened? Then various characters in monster masks and costumes, some of them clearly roles that Chaney played, enter and an unusual dance sequence begins that at one point features overhead shots like a Busby Berkely number. It’s such a shift from the other numbers and skits in the film that it really does seem out of place.

Perhaps the oddest (and worst) series of scenes, however, involves two trios of performers. First up are Charles King, Gus Edwards, and Cliff Edwards doing a number called “Charlie, Gus, and Ike.” They sing and play a gigantic xylophone and then start performing as stereotypical Italians (with Edwards in drag). It’s truly an awful song. Then Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, and Bessie Love, show up and sing a song called “Marie, Polly, and Bess,” which – as you might have guessed – is similar in content and quality to the song done by the men’s trio. Then both trios merge to sing together. It’s an unwatchable mess by that point.

The largest issue with Hollywood Revue is, however, the camera. It’s very static. Silent films had already mastered the moving camera, but to accommodate all of the new sound equipment and to reduce the noise generated by camera movement, films like this seem to have nailed the camera to a single spot and just filmed whatever was in front of it. This leads to a very dull series of choices. We see a few images in close up and a few where the shot is mid-range, but the most dominant view is the wide shot that allows for all of the dancers, for example, to be on screen at the same time. The most daring camera work comes in the final sequence when it pans from one star to the next so that we can see each individual for a second or two on screen. That’s about it for innovation. Of course, you could argue that having the camera remain stationary helps to replicate for the audience the experience of being in a theater watching vaudeville show. I’m not confident that was the intention, though.

Aside from being an early sound film, Hollywood Revue is also one of the first sound films to feature color instead of being completely black-and-white. A couple of sequences were shot in an early form of Technicolor. The first features movie stars Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and reciting the beautiful language of Shakespeare. Then Lionel Barrymore, playing the part of their “director” for the scene, tells them that the New York “office” doesn’t like the antiquated language, so they try it again in contemporary slang. There’s even a moment involving pig Latin! By the way, Gilbert sounds just fine; his voice is not at all high-pitched like the rumors have suggested. Why he didn’t become as big a star in the sound era as he had been in silent films was certainly not truly due to his vocal qualities. The next color sequence involves King singing “Orange Blossom Time.” This number includes a sort of ballet although it really seems more like the Rockettes than a ballet at times. That’s not a criticism, by the way; the dancers are very talented. It also features a group of women in swings descending from the heavens, their reflections gleaming in the shine of a highly polished floor. It’s quite an effect.

The final sequence of the film is also shot in color. The whole cast lines up in front of an ark (for some inexplicable reason) to perform “Singing in the Rain,” which would become the unofficial anthem of MGM over the years. They’re all wearing raincoats, but not all of them are doing a very good job of lip synching. We start with a wide shot of everyone before the camera starts panning to closeups of the individual faces. Then, as has happened throughout the film, the curtains close, ending our theatrical experience. Apparently, Hollywood Revue was filmed after hours so it wouldn’t interfere with any of the movies the stars were in during the day. I’m not certain it was truly worth the extra hours it took, and how it was deemed worthy of Best Picture consideration is certainly a head-scratcher.

Oscar Nomination: Outstanding Picture

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