I’m very fond of Broadway Gondolier. It’s probably more responsible for my getting into this blogging project than any other film. I recorded it from TCM one night many years ago for later watching. When I got around to seeing it, I was thoroughly charmed. I’d never heard of it before — but that’s no news, I knew so little about the zone. So imagine my frustration at discovering that it is almost impossible to find, unless you catch it on TCM’s esoteric rotation. There are no official DVDs of it. It doesn’t stream. Shady back alleys of the Internets advertise pirate one-offs. I saw one based in Pakistan.
It’s a mystery, because I think it’s one of the best of the Hollywood light comedies of the 30s, and especially of the Dick Powell-Joan Blondell pairings. It’s funny and warm, but also sneakily original. The plot I’ll get to later. It has some fine Dubin-Warren songs, a daffy role by Adolphe Menjou, Powell singing Rigoletto and “Lulu’s Back in Town,” Warners’ superb music organization, and interesting cinematography (well, I can imagine it — the print is lousy) by George Barnes, Gregg Toland’s mentor who later did Spellbound and Rebecca for Hitchcock. It’s not clear which writers are responsible for what, but E.Y. Harburg, a legendary songwriter (he wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”) and Hollywood company writer, had a big role in it. (Fyi, Harburg was later blacklisted.) It also features one of the first racially integrated musical performances in a Hollywood film — predating the usual suspect (Hollywood Hotel) by a couple of years. (I believe Powell’s Twenty Million Sweethearts from the previous year was the first.)
It’s directed by Lloyd Bacon. Bacon isn’t highly admired, maybe because he had to churn films out on tight time- and money-budgets. But he did the non-musical parts of 42nd Street and Footlight Parade — I think he’s underrated. There’s nothing very original in the direction, but it compares well with Sandrich and Leisen. So why does it seem like Broadway Gondolier is being blacklisted? I can’t find the answer.
The pairing of Powell and Blondell is also interesting because this is the film when their famous Hollywood romance begins — and I think you can feel it. (They were married the next year.) A nice case of what the Hollywood studios called “doubling.”
So, what’s good about it? The story, for one. A New York cabbie aspires to be an opera singer. He sings for two drunken music critics, who love it so much they decide to push his career by recommending him to the head honcho of a “much better medium” than opera, namely a radio station that broadcasts The Flagenheim Cheese Hour. The in-cab performance creates a traffic jam where they are accosted by a cop who turns out to be — so rare in musicals, where cops always represent the interruption of lyrical fun — an opera lover.
Said Flagenheim Cheese Hour has a most fetching, and practical, theme song.
Does this sound like the beginning of a Preston Sturges scenario? It does to me. I like to believe that PS had this film in mind when he cast Powell for Christmas in July, five years later. When Dick and his voice teacher da Vinci (Adolphe Menjou) come to cash in on the critics’ recommendation, they meet Alice (Blondell) at the gate. Up to this point in her career, Blondell had played wisecracking and designing women. This is the first time her persona has authority at her back. It’s a leap in her comedy. For the first time, her sarcasm isn’t defensive. It’s not a way of avoiding saying no, it’s a way of emphasizing it.
Dick gives Alice a free ride home, and Alice — lovestruck (it’s been building) — offers him a break. The camera and lighting here flow beautifully into the Capraesque at its most romantic.
The gig turns out not to be crooning, but making barnyard noises for a kids’ radio show. I love the construction here. There are so many groups in play, all with their own expectations and agendas.
Dick decides that he can’t get an opera break as a Bronx cabbie, so he goes to join da Vinci, who has since returned to Italy. It turns out that da Vinci, far from commanding performances at La Scala, is now a lowly gondolier in Venice. Dick determines to become his disciple again as a gondoliere. Then, as chance would happen, Mrs. Flagenheim and her gigolo (how on earth did this film get past the Decency League?), with her secretary Alice in tow, happen to be in Venice and hear the unmistakable voice of Dick on the canal.
The zigzag scheme is that Dick (now Purcelli, not Purcell) will take Broadway by storm by pretending to be an echt natural gondolier tenor — he never would have been able to do it as an American cabbie. His arrival at the New York pier is pure Preston Sturges.
In time, Dick’s suspicious rival for Alice’s affections (William Gargan) discovers the truth and confronts Dick in a fine dramatic shift. The film keeps a nice balance between Capra and Sturges, well before either one fully developed their style.
Under so much moral pressure, Dick can’t take it any more, and announces the truth about himself on air.
Naturally, it turns out that the radio audience doesn’t care whether he’s a gondolier or a cabbie, they love the voice. Since Dick has quit and vanished, the studio puts out an all-points to find him and drag him back to the broadcast. In a sweet bookend scene, Dick drives into an accident and encounters the very same cop who sang a duet with him at the beginning of the film. He’s been found, informed of his new, honest status, and sings for the people.
One of the most interesting sidelights of this movie is one of Dick’s radio performances. It’s when the Warren-Dubin classic “Lulu’s Back in Town” was first performed. He sings a nice, old-style version for a few verses (listen to the saxes imitate a calliope) — and then, in a cut that embodies segregation itself, the scene shifts to The Mills Brothers singing the tune in a slightly higher key, and in cool style. It’s the shift from 20s jazz to 40s in the blink of an eye. The Mills Brothers and Fats Waller would both have hit versions of the song that same year.
This is, I believe, only the second time Black and white musicians performed on the same screen together in a Hollywood film. The white guy dominates, of course, but in 1935 there was no reason for this to happen but respect.
I do hope Broadway Gondolier becomes available. It’s so good, every day it’s buried creates a bigger hole.
Bonus tracks: here’s Fats Waller’s hit version.
And Art Tatum, same year:
And finally, Monk’s version, which was the first one I heard.
