Variety-show comedies were extremely popular in the 1930s, even before they hit their peak during the war years. They were patterned on vaudeville, music hall, and cabaret stage shows that included a lot of different kinds of acts — hence “variety” — and could be built into spectacular star vehicles in New York, Paris, and London. Cinema expanded the possibilities of the spectacle so much that variety-show movies became the main consolidator of the different entertainment media dominating the amusement ecology of the period. Radio stars, floorshow dancers, chorines, specialty clowns, stand-up comedians, magicians, famous athletes, animal acts and the like could all appear on the same screen practically anywhere in the world. And not just from the U.S. There were musical variety movies in Nazi Germany (like Es leuchten die Sterne [1938]) and Stalinist Russia (like The Circus [1936]). Narrative continuity was a low priority, not only because it isn’t easy to tell a good story with so many diverging performances. A tightly-made structure is actually an enemy of the affect of variety-musicals. Their affect is dreamlike. All great theorists of comedy have noticed that it thrives when reasoning gets sleepy. Well-made comic plays sometimes make this dreaminess — or drunkenness, or craziness, or absent-mindedness — a central mechanism of the plot. 19th century French farce would turn tight dramatic construction into a kind of craziness in its own right. But the variety tradition didn’t need no stinkin’ reason. Its art lay in connecting things that come from different worlds without reducing any of them to a sensible pattern.
MGM made a series of high-glitz variety films intended to evoke the golden age of vaudeville on Broadway, the BROADWAY MELODY series. The original Broadway Melody was released in 1929; historians treat it as the first true sound musical. Broadway Melody of 1936 was intended as a tribute both to Broadway’s golden age and also to that founding movie. It was followed by two others, Broadway Melody of 1938 and Broadway Melody of 1940, on the model of Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers series. The films all starred Eleanor Powell with different, sometimes overlapping leading men (Robert Taylor in ’36 and ’38, George Murphy in ’38 and ’40, and Fred Astaire in ’40) and directors (Roy Del Ruth for ’36 and ’38, Norman Taurog for ’40.) They included very little screen time for plot, which became increasingly arbitrary with each film. Audiences knew that they were mainly star vehicles for Powell, who was supposed to be the female Astaire.
For a long time I’ve been fascinated with the idea that films that well-educated audiences think of as uneven or inconsistent messes are just made according to a different aesthetic. Sometimes I feel that actors whose styles seem mismatched simply come from different worlds. Once I stop expecting realistic consistency, many fine messes seem to be happening in a sort of contact zone where inhabitants of different realities encounter each other. Comedy loves that sort of thing. It maximizes misunderstandings, misapprehensions, inappropriate expectations, strange motives, and ecstatic copulas, all the things the comic spirit loves.
Some of the great messes are very intentional — Duck Soup and Helzapoppin, to mention some obvious ones. But some aren’t, and you have get used to seeing the film in radically new ways, more as a kind of animation than photo-realism. One of my favorites of this kind of movie is Broadway Melody of 1938. On superficial viewing, it’s just a charm-bracelet with Powell’s and George Murphy’s dance routines, a couple songs by Sophie Tucker, Buddy Ebsen’s comic dances, Judy Garland’s showstopping songs, silly vaudeville gags, a non-sequitur plot around a steeplechase racehorse, and a big Eleanor Powell finale. But seen as a kind of animation, slightly rotoscoped instead of photographed (which the old prints encourage anyway), the film becomes much more enjoyable.
Begin with the two stars: Robert Taylor and Eleanor Powell. I can’t imagine two more wooden, inexpressive actors. Taylor plays a rich, successful Broadway producer and Powell his dancing discovery. The romance between them is supposed to be the main plot-thread but their chemistry is less than zero. It’s as if two androids who were built in different factories were cast in a romantic comedy and were doing their sincere best to imitate human emotions. The Taylor Android seems to be thinking “I think I’m imitating a human lover pretty well here,” while the Powell Android seems to be silently wondering “how long do humans maintain their expressions? can I change it now?” The camera, lighting, and director pull out all the stops to make them appear attractive but Del Ruth uses such fast, bumpy cuts that it’s clear he’s trying to create a dramatic relationship that the actors can’t sell.
But that’s just one register. We see the opposite, too. Sophie Tucker was included in the film mainly as a form of homage to her and the Broadway era that she represents. She does a nice version of her theme song, “Some of These Days.” But she’s more interesting than that. The woman can act! She plays the owner of a theatrical boarding house, who is also Judy Garland’s mother and mentor. It’s worth focusing on her whenever she’s in a scene.
Warner Brothers has blocked all my clips for this very kinetic movie. Stills will have to do.
Then there are scenes that make you wonder whether Bunuel was hired to do some punch up.
And Judy Garland singing one of the most heart-wrenching fangirl songs ever (written by Monaco-McCarthy).
George Murphy is Powell’s dance partner. Murphy was a smooth, elegant dancer, but without the invention, adventurousness, or soul of Astaire. I like much of his work, especially with Shirley Temple, but for some reason he became a kind of accompanist, a dance-version of The Bellamy. In Broadway Melody of 1938 he’s Powell’s partner — and there’s no question who’s leading. The full routine of “If I had a Million” is fine, and I think it benefits from having the more laid back Murphy involved. (I think Powell enjoyed it in a more human way than normal for her. Check out the facial expressions in the final moments.)
Fwiw, I’m not a fan of Powell’s dancing. Lots of people admire it, so I know it’s a matter of taste. For me it lacks soul — she has brilliant technique but her style reminds me drum majorettes and very old-school Rockettes routines. Her plasticized smile and rigid upper body (even when she’s bending) strike me as worryingly artificial. Astaire is said to have complained that, though she was technically even better than he was, she wasn’t a good partner. She dances like a man, he is said to have said. Translated, I think that means that she dances like a star who doesn’t respond to equals. Astaire was blessed with Ginger. Murphy with Shirley. Betty Grable had lots of fun partners. Powell is always somehow by herself with a fixed smile on her face that even botox couldn’t compete with — an android among humans.
