Best Picture of 1928-29

 

The Winner: The Broadway Melody

The Other Nominees: Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, In Old Arizona, and The Patriot

 

My Choice: The Patriot! Just kidding. It’s a lost film, so we have no idea how to judge its quality these days. To be honest, this is a very tough choice because this may be one of the weakest groups of nominees in the history of the Academy Awards. Each of them has flaws, some larger than others, but none of them are particularly ideal. The Broadway Melody has more of a storyline than The Hollywood Revue of 1929, but the fluency with the camera isn’t there yet. Alibi and In Old Arizona keep inserting singing and dancing into the plot just to make use of the newfangled sound equipment filmmakers were dealing with then, but that makes for some very distracting moments. I guess I’ll stick with the Academy’s choice for this year, The Broadway Melody. At least, the production numbers are fun and interesting to watch.

In Old Arizona (1928-29)

 

When you watch an older film like In Old Arizona, which was reportedly the first sound era Western and the first talkie to be filmed primarily in the outdoors, you get to see moments that are clearly not related to the plot and don’t necessarily add anything to our understanding of the characters or their behaviors. Those moments, however, do serve to demonstrate the novelty of that “new” invention for the movies: sound. For example, In Old Arizona features an early sequence where four guys are harmonizing the song “Bicycle Built for Two.” There are no bicycles in the film, and there’s no particular reason for these men to be singing together outdoors, and they don’t seem to show up again in the film, but it’s a way for you to marvel at how advanced the sound quality of the film is.

In Old Arizona features Warner Baxtor as the Cisco Kid, an Oscar-winning role he would play several more times in his career. We first meet the Kid as he robs a stagecoach and takes the Wells Fargo box with all of the money. He’s very apologetic and polite as he’s stealing from the stagecoach, and he doesn’t take anything from the individual passengers that he doesn’t give them something in return. It’s an interesting way to meet a character, and it allows us to see that, despite his penchant for taking stuff that doesn’t belong to him, he’s really a good person. The story upon which the film’s plot was based, apparently, treats the Cisco Kid as more of a villain, but he’s clearly meant to earn out sympathy even from the start of the movie.

Almost no one knows what the Cisco Kid looks like, which is rather tough to believe given how dazzling the costumes are that he wears. There’s a lot of work that’s gone into the stitching and details of the various clothes Baxter gets to don, and no other character in the movie is wearing such elaborate garb. Still, this kind of anonymity allows for some funny moments, such as when he’s at the barber shop and is surrounded by men talking about him and his various crimes and how dangerous he is and how they’re going to capture him. He even meets Sgt. Mickey Dunn (played, rather broadly and somewhat badly, by Edmund Lowe) in person, and they talk about women and haircuts and perfume. They also have an intriguing moment when they pat each other’s guns and talk about how big the “guns” are. The guns, of course, are strapped to belts around their waists, so you know the general area we’re talking about here. It’s very reminiscent of a similar scene in Red River, but it sadly doesn’t last very long.

Once Dunn learns from the blacksmith that he’s been talking to the Cisco Kid, the film shifts to being more about a love triangle. You see, the Kid loves a woman named Tonia Maria. He even sings, briefly, to her, perhaps one of the first instances of a singing cowboy in the movies. However, she’s astonishingly unfaithful to him; in fact, she’s getting rid of one of her lovers just as he rides up to her home. Tonia (played by Dorothy Burgess) falls very quickly into the stereotypical sexualized Latina. After she’s spent time with the Kid, she almost immediately goes to the bar in town and meets Sgt. Dunn. She flirts with him, but he initially rebuffs her advances, finding her amusing rather than attractive.

However, once Dunn realizes that she’s the Cisco Kid’s lover, he rides over to her house and starts wooing her. Naturally, he’s just leading her on so that he can find out more about where the Kid is, but she seems to fall for him very quickly. She’s offended when she finds out that he’s trying to earn the $500 reward for capturing or killing the Kid, but once he promises all of the money to her and tells her that he wants to take her back to New York to live, she makes an abrupt change in her emotions. The accent that Lowe uses throughout the film is quite horrible, by the way. It’s almost like a comic version of a New Yorker’s way of speaking.

The Cisco Kid overhears the plans that Dunn and Tonia make, including her desire to have Dunn kill the Kid rather than capture him. He’s heartbroken over this realization that she’s never really loved him (although she certainly liked the gifts he brought her), but he plans his revenge, and it’s a strange one. He intercepts a note she’s written to Dunn and changes it so that it seems he will be dressed up as Tonia and she will be dressed as the Cisco Kid. I’m not sure what prompts such an idea, but the alleged cross-dressing has its expected outcome. The Kid escapes after Dunn shoots and kills Tonia, who he thinks is the Cisco Kid wearing a white mantilla. I know, it sounds very odd, and it is very odd.

The film, being a product of its time, traffics in some offensive stereotypes about Mexicans and other Spanish-speaking people. Several sequences involve dialog that’s in Spanish, and it’s not translated for us on the screen. Instead, their speech ridiculed by the whites in the film. The white characters also use several derogatory terms for the Latinx people in the film (mostly women, by the way). Lest you think the film is only racist about the Latinx population, it also features a short image of two Asian characters talking rapidly during a sort of rally to get the townsfolks fired up about forming a vigilante posse to go after the Cisco Kid. Both of these characters are dressed like Hop Sing on the old Bonanza TV show. It’s tough to watch, but when even the central character of the Cisco Kid speaks with broken English despite the fact that his parents are both well educated, and one of them is from San Luis Obispo, you know the film isn’t going to treat all of its characters with dignity. Having white actors portray the Cisco Kid and Tonia Maria doesn’t help either, of course.

The film, as I mentioned earlier, was filmed mostly outdoors, and we are treated to some beautiful desert scenery. The opening sequence involving passengers boarding a stagecoach was clearly filmed at a mission (reportedly, the one at San Juan Capistrano), and lovely Joshua trees populate the landscape. The filmmakers have paid a great deal of attention to the look of the film, and even the interiors are shot with a good eye for art direction and set decoration. In Old Arizona harkens back to the early days of sound film and the various ways that the industry was trying to take what it had accomplished during the silent era and apply some of it to the new techniques of moviemaking. It’s good to see that the visual was not always abandoned at the service of the auditory.

Oscar Win: Best Actor (Warner Baxter)

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director (Irving Cummings), Best Writing, and Best Cinematography

Alibi (1928-29)

 

Alibi is a transitional film from the silent era to the sound era, and it manages to include some of the worst and the best elements of both periods of moviemaking. The sound quality at times is so bad that I couldn’t quite tell the name of a character, but at other times, we are able to hear a little bird chirping in a cage. The camera moves in ways that were common for silent films, with zooms and pans and such, but it also remains remarkably static when filming what seem to be an endless number of dance numbers involving chorus lines. The industry’s initial issues with sound recording and camera movement would be worked out eventually, so we have films like Alibi to thank for letting us see how rocky the transition was during those years.

The plot involves a gangster named Chick Williams (the handsome Chester Morris) who’s released from prison, only to fall back into his criminal ways. Of course, he tells his girlfriend (and future wife) Joan Manning that he’s completely clean. She was even with him on the night that some members of his gang committed a robbery and killed a police officer. In other words, she’s his alibi. Given that she’s also a policeman’s daughter and is also romantically entangled with a police detective, having such a solid alibi would seemingly clear Chick from any suspicion.

However, Joan’s father and the detective still suspect Chick’s involvement. Chick claims that the police planted guns on him in order to send him to prison for the last crime, and Joan (played ably by Eleanor Griffith) seems convinced enough that she agrees to marry Chick over her father’s objections – oh, and over the objections of her other boyfriend, the police detective, too. The police become very dogged in their attempts to find a connection between Chick and the murder of the police officer. Doing so, of course, gives Chick ample opportunity to claim that he’s being framed again.

The film displays a visual flair that was common among some of the best silent films. There are all sorts of interesting camera angles and intriguing uses of lighting to highlight (and obscure) objects on the screen. The styling is very Art Deco, and both the interior and exterior sequences are dazzling to observe. We also get lots of images of watches during the film, so many close-ups of watches, but they’re all important to the question of whether or not Chick could have made it to the scene of the robbery during the intermission of the play he attended with Joan. We even zoom in on a set of fingerprints at one point. It’s a shame that some of the visual acuity would be lost in the first years of sound films because of the difficulties associated with making sound pictures, but you can watch Singin’ in the Rain (1952) if you want a more entertaining depiction of that transition.

Alibi also keeps interrupting the plot with those aforementioned dance numbers. They don’t really contribute anything to the storyline, but I suppose it’s a way to use music and the sounds of tapping feet to demonstrate sound techniques. It’s also perhaps useful to place the action of the story in the night club where the gangsters hang out. However, given how badly the dance sequences are staged and how rigid the camera is during those numbers, it makes you wonder if they were truly significant enough to stay in the completed film. It might be better just to concentrate on the crime drama unfolding on the screen.

The film is based upon a play entitled Nightsticks, and I never knew until I watched this film that the police during that era used their nightsticks as signals to each other. Watching them tapping a distress call to other police officers was rather enlightening. Also, I was not aware that the police used Tommy guns. The Motion Picture Production Code would ban images of such weapons just a few years after the release of Alibi, so it’s intriguing to see them on the screen.

Joan Manning Williams is an intriguing character; she’s caught between a criminal and a police detective, making for a most unusual love triangle for the time period. She almost immediately believes Chick because, of course, she was with him on the night of the fatal robbery. She also loves him more than she does the police detective, or is she really more intrigued by his reputation as a gangster? Maybe she’s fallen in love with him because she sees someone whose life has been tragically altered by police suspicion? It’s never easy to tell, and Griffith is very good at playing with the ambiguity.

Interestingly, the police have infiltrated Chick’s gang with an undercover agent played by Regis Toomey. I think Toomey’s character is called Danny McGann when he’s a police officer, and he’s Billy Morgan when he’s with the gang, or maybe it’s the other way around. Again, the plot and the sound quality don’t do the audience many favors in this regard. Toomey has to play a drunk for much of the picture, and he’s very adept at it. When we as viewers realize that his character has also been performing as a drunk for most of the movie, it’s a nice meta moment, as people like to say. Toomey also gets quite the extended and effective death sequence for a supporting character after Chick shoots Danny/Billy in an attempt to escape.

The film’s ending is typical of crime films from this era. The bad guy has to pay with his life for the crimes he’s committed. Joan accidentally tips off the police as to Chick’s whereabouts, and he gives a big speech about what happened on the night of the killing—just so we as an audience get a sense of closure, I guess. There’s a standoff between him and the detective, but in what seems like the silliest scenario imaginable, Chick flicks off the light switch and escapes to the roof of the building. He dies by falling when he tries to jump from rooftop to rooftop. It’s not the most elegant way to get rid of a murderer, certainly, but it’s an effective enough way to end the movie.

Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Actor (Chester Morris), and Best Art Direction

Street Angel (1927-28; 1928-29)

 

Street Angel earns an odd footnote in the history of the Academy Awards. Its star, Janet Gaynor, won an Academy Award for Best Actress in the first year of the Oscars for three films, one of them Street Angel. In the second year of the Oscars, the film itself was nominated for two other awards. Did all of the Oscar voters just forget that they had given the movie an Oscar the year before? Here Gaynor plays a poor young woman in Naples named Angela, who tries to turn to prostitution as a means to make some fast money. She needs the cash for medicine for her mother and for food. She’s caught by the police before she actually succeeds at solicitation, but she escapes and joins a traveling carnival as a way to evade a year in the workhouse. They sure knew how to make plot twists in those days, didn’t they? During her travels, Angela meets a poor but very talented painter, Gino, played by Charles Farrell, Gaynor’s costar from 7^th Heaven. They fall in love, but she spends too much of her time fearing that she will be found by the authorities and have to serve her sentence, and she doesn’t want him to know that she was arrested for solicitation. There’s a subplot involving a lovely painting that Gino does of Angela, but it’s an odd one. For some reason, the guy who buys the painting wants to change it so that it looks like an Old Master, and he can earn far more money reselling it. It’s some form of art fraud, I guess. The performances by Gaynor and Farrell are quite good, but most of the cast is stuck using stereotypical Italian hand gestures, and that gets weary after a while. The camera work in the film is outstanding, particularly when it follows a character through the part of Naples where much of the story is set. There’s also a lot of soft focus throughout the film, which keeps things pretty hazy even when there isn’t a fog settling in over the city. The film also makes very effective use of shadows, such as the larger-than-life ones that populate the entrance to the workhouse. It’s quite understandable why it was nominated for its art direction and cinematography. They’re the strongest parts of the film other than the acting by Gaynor and Farrell. You pretty much can guess how the film will end. Angela’s going to be caught, but there will be a reunion after an initial misunderstanding. Today this film is best known as one of the three for which Gaynor won the first award for Best Actress, but it is also a quite beautiful silent film. If the plot is a bit hackneyed or strange, it might have seemed quite fresh at the time of the film’s initial release.

Oscar Win (1927-28): Best Actress (Janet Gaynor)

Other Oscar Nominations (1928-29): Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography

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

The Patriot (1928-29)

Sadly, The Patriot is a lost film, one that has been missing for about seventy years now. Only fragments of the film are still known to exist, and the UCLA Film and Television archive has only about one-fourth of the film’s (reported) original footage. No complete copy is known to exist, but the trailer can be viewed here on YouTube. So many films from the silent era are gone—for various tragic reasons—but The Patriot is the only nominee for the Academy Award for Best Picture that no longer exists in any complete form.

The basic plot can be pieced together through various descriptions in books and online. In 18^th Century Russia, Czar Paul I is a weak, mad, volatile ruler who trusts only his Prime Minister, Count Pahlen (Lewis Stone). Pahlen has so much influence over the czar that even when the leader’s son, Crown Prince Alexander (Neil Hamilton), tries to warn his father about a plot to take control of the country, Paul I imprisons his own son. Pahlen himself—the so-called “patriot” of the title—has been plotting to rid the country of the czar because the ruler has become so crazed in his actions and attitudes. Pahlen claims to be looking after the greater interests of the country in his conspiracy to overthrow the czar.

Pahlen enlists the reluctant aid of his mistress, Countess Ostermann (Florence Vidor), and Stefan (Harry Cording), a guard whom the czar has brutally whipped for not having enough buttons on his gaiters—certainly an odd reason for attacking another person but undoubtedly meant as a sign of the czar’s madness. The Countess, upset that her lover is using her as a pawn in his conspiracy, tells the czar of Pahlen’s plot, but Pahlen reassures the czar long enough for Stefan and the other guards to kill Paul I. Stefan then shoots Pahlen, and the Countess tells her lover before he dies, “I may have been a bad friend and lover—but I have been a Patriot.” The shift from thinking of Pahlen as being patriotic to seeing the Countess as the “real” patriot must have been quite a moment in the film’s narrative.

The Patriot was the only silent film nominated for Outstanding Picture for 1928-29 and the last silent film to be nominated until 2011’s The Artist (which, to be fair, is not a fully or “true” silent film). The Patriot was filmed without dialogue and had sound effects added later. By this point in film history, silent films were becoming increasingly rare as the studios attempted to respond quickly to the growing desire of audiences to hear as well as see their favorite performers. So many films from this period have disappeared due to a lack of interest at the time in preserving a style of filmmaking that was on its way out. The studios and filmmakers had no idea just how much later generations would like to see their artistic achievements from the silent era.

The loss of The Patriot means that we do not get to experience the performance as Czar Paul I by Emil Jannings, who won the first Oscar for Best Actor the year before for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. We also don’t get to see the only Oscar-nominated performance by Lewis Stone, who is probably better known today for playing Judge Hardy in all of those movies with Mickey Rooney. It was also the first film directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch to garner him a nomination for Best Director, an honor he never received despite some marvelous comedies and musicals he directed later in his career. Finally, the surviving trailer and set photos clearly indicate why The Patriot was nominated for Best Art Direction with its massive and impressive sets. At a budget of nearly a million dollars, it was a huge and very expensive production.

Oscar Win: Best Writing

Other Oscar Nominations: Outstanding Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Lewis Stone), and Best Art Direction

The Broadway Melody (1928-1929)

The first sound film to be awarded Outstanding Picture, The Broadway Melody is a backstage musical about two sisters who have been performing the vaudeville circuit and have now come to New York to become successful on Broadway. One of the sisters, Harriet “Hank” Mahoney (Bessie Love), has a boyfriend waiting for her there, the song-and-dance man Eddie Kearns (Charles King). Her younger sister, Queenie (Anita Page), starts to get all of the attention, leaving Hank to make a few difficult choices about her future. The plot isn’t really the most important or even the most outstanding element of the film, though. This film is really more about showing off the new sound technology.

The plot offers a bit of a new wrinkle on the old love triangle storyline. You see, Eddie falls in love with Queenie almost immediately after seeing how much she's grown into a beautiful woman. And the producer of the show in which they perform picks Queenie to be a featured player after the accidental fall of another girl from a high perch on a boat that's part of a set. Everyone talks about how talented Queenie is, but really all she does in the number is stand and point. Well, I guess some people have it and some don't. Queenie also catches the eye of one of the show's financial backers, Jacques/Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thompson), who begins showering her with diamonds and promises of even greater riches. It takes Hank to realize that she must give up Eddie so that Queenie can be "saved" from the clutches of the unscrupulous Warriner.

There is a certain quaint novelty to the film even today, despite movie musicals having grown considerably in quality since its initial release. Certainly, the backstage romantic triangle (well, quadrangle) is no longer a new plot device, but it might have been unique at the time to involve such close siblings in the mix. The incorporation of musical numbers into off-stage moments was also a very recent development in film. You can tell that the studio hasn't quite gotten the hang of making a sound film yet. The ability to hear the dialogue is wildly uneven at times, and during one of the tap dance numbers, the camera doesn't even show the feet of the dancers. Given that the camera had to be stationary in order to keep from making too much noise on the soundtrack, it's also disconcerting when characters sometimes just walk out of the frame or out of focus. And, to add to the overall effect of the newness of this medium, the film still uses intertitles to announce shifts in time and place. The Broadway Melody is obviously a transitional film from silents to sound, and all of the details that would need to be worked out are clearly in evidence here.

The song that provides the movie's title appears several times. My very unofficial count was five times. There are other songs, including a couple of renditions of the lovely "You Were Meant for Me," but "The Broadway Melody" is the star, and from the opening sequence to the end of the film, you'll never too far away from hearing some version of it. Interestingly, the lyrics for the songs in the movie were written by Arthur Freed. Perhaps only lovers of MGM musicals will recognize the name, but later in his career, Freed would be in charge of the musicals that came out of this greatest of all movie studios. How intriguing to see his name in the credits at the start of his career in "talkies."

Interesting, in the film’s plot, Eddie writes “You Were Meant for Me” for Queenie, not his fiancée. He clearly has already fallen in love with the younger sister, but he’s noble enough (?) to stay with Hank until, well, she dumps him so that he can actually be with her younger sister. We’re, of course, meant to see that the two sisters are very different from each other. Queenie is meant to be the beautiful one. She’s very sweet and rather naïve. She also has blonde hair, but her sister Hank has darker hair. Even in the late 1920s, Hollywood was setting up that dichotomy. Hank is also the more sensible one. She is smart and hardworking, and she tries to protect her younger sister. Hank also has quite a temper and is often ready to fight. For example, because this film is set in New York, there’s a bit of snobbery about vaudeville performers coming to Broadway. Hank and Queenie’s audition is sabotaged by a jealous chorus girl, and Hank wants to punch the girl.

The film actually begins with an attempt by Eddie to sing his new song “The Broadway Melody.” However, there's so much noise at the music publishing company—what with different songs in different styles being performed at the same time—he has to quieten them all down so that he can be heard. Everyone loves the song and wants to sing it, but he has plans to save it for the Zanfield Revue. If there's anyone who can't figure out that the film is playing off the Ziegfeld Follies, perhaps you should go back and study your musical history before giving this film a viewing. In fact, the musical numbers in The Broadway Melody could almost be considered a spoof of some of those ostentatious productions that Ziegfeld presented in his shows.

All that cacophony at the beginning of the film was certainly intentional. It was a clear way to tell the audience that “sound is here!” so you’d need to get used to lots of noise. Having the first big scene involve the musical theater industry and lots of people singing over each other is a rather smart way of letting everyone know that movies will not just be talking; they’ll also be singing (and dancing and…). The Broadway Melody was reportedly the first musical that fully used sound, and it was also the first musical produced by MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), starting a tradition that lasted for many glorious years at that studio. Of course, that means that in order to get even more musical moments into the film, the plot has to grind to a complete halt at times. That way we can see a full performance of “Truthful Parson Brown” by a quartet and a fully-staged production number in the Zanfield Revue called “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.” Neither of those numbers adds anything to the plot, but they do serve as showcases for what movies could potentially accomplish in terms of spectacle. Oddly enough, the Mahoney sisters have a number that we watch briefly before it’s cut from the show, only to have it followed by a very long solo by another dancer!

I can't end this posting without mentioning the homophobia that is evident in the film. The costume designer for the Zanfield show is portrayed as very effeminate, and he's the subject of ridicule each time he appears on the screen. He giggles over an ermine coat, and he’s subjected to a lot of teasing (bullying, really) by Zanfield’s “yes men” and investors. After complaining about how the chorus girls are not careful with his costumes, especially the enormous hats, he explains that he designed the clothes, not the doors to the theater. The response from the matron who oversees the chorus is that if he had, they'd all be lavender. Unfortunately, that must have been riotously funny to the movie audiences of 1929. It's sad to see an early stage in the genesis of such a stereotype, one that is unfortunately still too often evident in the movies.

Oscar Win: Outstanding Picture

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Actress (Bessie Love) and Best Director (Hugh Beaumont)