I obviously have a soft spot for the Dick Powell comedies of the Thirties. I have no explanation for it. I didn’t see any of them until I was middle aged. Twenty Million Sweethearts is a generic Dick Powell movie, other than that his female lead is Ginger Rogers, not the animatronic Ruby Keeler — and Joan Blondell is nowhere to be seen. In structure and feeling it’s of a piece with Broadway Gondolier, a film I adore, which was made a year later, and even includes an ensemble number with The Mills Brothers like the later film. Many of the writers worked on both pictures, and though Ray Enright directed the earlier film, there’s little to distinguish his decisions from Lloyd Bacon’s in Broadway Gondolier. The songs are Warren-Dubin tunes, which was standard for these Warner musicals. They fit a formula for sure, but it’s a good one. For me, both films are underrated.
So, the Dick Powell plot: fast-talking borderline con-man agent Rush Blake (Pat O’Brien), desperate to deliver talent to his employers, the sponsors of the Carlotta Soap radio show, hears a young singing waiter Buddy Clayton (Powell) entertaining the diners with a spirited rendition of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” The customers love him, and Blake determines to sell him as a great new radio crooner.
As he arrives at the radio studio for his audition, Buddy hears Peggy Cornell (Ginger Rogers) singing the wonderful Warren-Dubin “Is My Baby Out for No Good.” As usual, Peggy/Ginger’s first impressions of her male lead aren’t good. It’s cool to see Leo Forbstein, the musical-director genius behind the Vitaphone sound, conducting the Vitaphone Orchestra in the flesh. The scene was probably recorded as we see it, not with playback.
When Buddy get his audition, he sings — at Blake’s suggestion — a version of “Flying Trapeze” that stinks up the joint. Notice Forbstein’s reactions as he conducts the orchestra.
The inauspicious beginning is saved when friend Pete (Allen Jenkins), a curmudgeon bitterly doomed to playing host of a children’s radio program, visits Buddy with a new Warren-Dubin tune, “I’ll String Along With You” — a song that eventually became one of Powell’s signatures.
Blake realizes that his protégé really is a crooner, and redoubles his efforts to sell Buddy as a heartthrob. One of the things I find interesting about Twenty Millions Sweethearts is that its songs are performed more than once, in different versions. Some viewers believe that’s a sign of lack of imagination, but to me it’s intriguing and delightful. I don’t know of any other films that do this. The two versions of “Flying Trapeze” make plot sense, but the others are not necessary for the narrative — they’re for the music. Peggy, who has fallen for Buddy (and vice-versa) concocts a plan to have Buddy substitute for her on her radio program. The result is a full orchestral arrangement of “I’ll String Along With You.”
The plan works. Buddy’s crooning has entranced the radio audience. He becomes the star after all.
The logical complication ensues: now that he’s a star he and Peggy want to get married, but the sponsor is apoplectic at the idea that the heartthrob will now be out of romantic circulation, which will inevitably depress soap sales. Blake hatches a plot to delay their marriage, playing Peggy and Buddy against each other and deceiving both. Ginger Rogers may have been the most accomplished comic actress to perform with Powell. I love Joan Blondell (Powell’s love interest in Broadway Gondolier, and his real future wife), but Rogers has a special dynamism — to start, she sings almost as well as he does, so she doesn’t have to play subservient roles. Many folks lament that Powell and Rogers did not make any other films together. I like to think that they would have, if Rogers hadn’t made a sensational impression with Fred Astaire the year before in Flying Down to Rio. The rest is history, as they say.
So, Buddy, incensed about the plot to keep him apart from Peggy, quits the show, and his name is mud with the sponsor. He is semi-miraculously restored to favor through the devious devices of Peggy and Blake, and performs for his sponsors at a nightclub. The song is yet another reprise of “I’ll String Along With You,” now with Ginger as an added voice in a duet. The end.
I’m not sure yet what it is that appeals to me so much about these Dick Powell comedies. As I’ve written before, Powell plays it like Howdy Doody on laughing gas. There’s an irony about it all, but without any bitterness or cynicism. I’m fond of the Warren-Dubin songs, too, which were so pivotal in most of the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas. There’s also a special dimension in Twenty Million Sweethearts and Broadway Gondolier that comes from the musical performances of The Mills Brothers. There are two of them in Sweethearts, but one is special. Powell joins them to sing a hipster reprise of “Out For No Good.”
I’m still trying to verify, but so far in my research this is the first racially integrated musical performance in an American feature-length movie. I had thought that the similar ensemble in Broadway Gondolier was the first, but this little show was screened two years earlier. The Mills Brothers had appeared in the variety movie The Big Broadcast in 1932, but without a white guest. Whether it was the studio’s idea or Powell’s, it shows that the Warner producers were committed to it. That said, let’s not ignore that the performance — just like the one in the later movie — was definitively set off from the rest of the film so that it could be cut from the prints sent to racist southern movie houses, as was the practice of the day.