I’m crazy fond of Hooray for Love. It has a limited — very limited — legendary status because of a spectacular number performed by Bill Robinson, Fats Waller, Jeni LeGon, and an ensemble of some of the best Black Broadway performers of the time. It’s truly a phenomenal piece. (I’ll embed a video of it below.) It’s also significant that, like the racially integrated showstopper finales of some musicals, it’s too formally integrated to be segregated for southern movie showings. The audience had to tolerate Blacks and whites performing together if they wanted to see the show at all. It’s 1935. I’m not sure, but that seems to me to be the year when a few studios began to bring Black performers forward. That was the year Robinson first danced with Shirley Temple in The Little Colonel, the first racially integrated dance routine in American film history. (Though that sequence was excised for southern showings). It’s also the year when Dick Powell first sings with The Mills Brothers, in Twenty Million Sweethearts, possibly the first racially mixed song performance on American screens. What’s more, there are no blackface performances in Hooray for Love, by either white or Black actors.
But there’s more to Hooray for Love than that. It’s basically a backstage musical. Young collegian Douglas Tyler (a Princeton man, no doubt — played by Gene Raymond) wants to become a bona fide Broadway producer after organizing shows in college. He falls for a beautiful nightclub singer, Patricia Thatcher (Ann Sothern). At first she wants nothing to do with him. He is fortuitously accosted by Patricia’s father, a ramshackle Dickensian faux gentleman-dreamer-planner forever in debt who wants to be called “The Commodore” (Thurston Hall). Tyler is persuaded to invest in a show he is partnering in (without any real cash, as it happens), entitled “Hooray for Love.” Tyler literally bets his house on the show and joins the other partners — partly from his own aspirations, and partly because Patricia is the lead in the show. (There is actually no male white lead in the diegetic show.) The other partners turn out to be crooks and run off with Tyler’s money. Patricia naturally eventually accepts and reciprocates Tyler’s feelings. After some fine zigs and zags, The Commodore (whose aura you can sense in “Colonel” Harrington of The Lady Eve) persuades a rich elderly widow, “The Duchess” Schultz (Georgia Caine), to marry him and to provide the missing fiscal backing for the show. The show is performed, and is a great success. The end.
It’s actually not a bad plot. It’s fully part of the backstage, Busby Berkeley genre. It’s important to keep in mind that Gold Diggers of 1933 was released just a couple of years earlier, and they were still making backstage musicals into the 40s. But there are no gold diggers in Hooray for Love. And the music is, to my ears, quite wonderful. The songs are all Jimmy McHugh-Dorothy Fields products — one of the most engaging teams to write for the movies. The whole enterprise seems like it was working on a shoe-string budget, but it blasts out of it biggly. I’ve had a crush on Ann Sothern most of my life. It began with her television show in the 50s, in my prepubescent years, but everything I’ve seen of her heyday, the 30s and 40s, has just deepened it. I don’t much care for Gene Raymond, but I forgive him because of his role in this film. I’m not sure what the studio, RKO, expected from it; it’s hard to compare any musical in 1935 to Berkeley, since he was basically getting a carte blanche for his films then. The budget constraints on Hooray for Love probably helped it. I have no idea why this film is not admired more.
Take this scene. Tyler has, somewhat involuntarily, taken a job in “the business,” giving tours of the radio performance space where Patricia is the marquee act. (Fwiw, I love this song, “I’m in love all over again,” which shows the genius of Dorothy Fields: “Tell me what did you do?/You’re better than you/I’m in love all over again.”)
There’s another lovely song later marking the moment when Patricia accepts her love for Tyler, “You’re an Angel” (Tyler has sung it to her earlier.)
You can tell that not much money was spent on sets and imagination (Walter Lang was not the most auterish of directors), but the film has extraordinary heart. Whatever one might think of Sothern or Raymond, the supporting cast is stellar. Here’s the scene when the Commodore attempts to reconcile with The Duchess. (He had earlier left her in the lurch after running to Tyler with a check from her to cover the show’s expenses.) The actors here — Thurston Hall, Georgia Caine, and Etienne Giradot — are all experienced comic stage performers, the last two were to become part of the Preston Sturges stable.
The show, of course, goes on. So now it’s time to see the Robinson-Waller-LeGoin showstopper, “Livin’ in a Great Big Way.”
It’s not the finale, though. Here’s that.
Gotta love it.