I find Two Girls on Broadway interesting for two reasons. First, it’s one of the three dance comedies Lana Turner made as a 19-20 year old in the 1939-40 span. The other is that it’s a remake of the foundational Hollywood film musical, The Broadway Melody (1929), and it attacks the problems of that film in an interesting way.
I’ve written about my interest in the dance comedies that MGM made with Lana Turner at the beginning of her career (Dancing Co-Ed, These Glamour Girls, and Two Girls on Broadway), all directed by S. Sylvan Simon. Each one is a different kind of comedy with a different kind of ensemble — tests, I imagine, for the best combination for Lana Turner’s gifts. In Dancing Co-Ed, her ensemble included some brilliant verbal clowns. She thrived in that one. In These Glamour Girls, she was plopped into an ensemble of elegant comedy-of-manners types and the prospective leading man (and insufferable snob) Lew Ayres. The experiment in Two Girls on Broadway was to ground her with two proven comic stars: Joan Blondell and George Murphy.
The plot is taken directly from Broadway Melody. A sister act from the Midwest, the Mahoney Sisters (Molly, played by Joan Blondell, and Pat, played by Lana), is invited to come to Manhattan by their old friend Eddie (George Murphy) to perform on Broadway. Eddie and Molly were sweethearts and partners in the wayback. The pretty sister, Pat, is targeted for seduction by a rich playboy, Chat Chatsworth (Kent Taylor). Pat is saved when she and Eddie discover their unacknowledged love for each other. Molly decides she must return to the boonies to free Pat and Eddie to enjoy their love and their eventual success on the Great White Way.
I’ve noted some of the serious sticking points I have with the original story in Broadway Melody. The pretty sister is given the treasures of fame and love not because of her talents, but because of her gorgeous looks. It’s that simple. So it’s intriguing how a much more gender-dynamic comic environment in 1940 addresses the basically airhead sexist problem of the relationships of the three main leads in the original story. It doesn’t all hinge on Lana Turner.
The film opens not with a flashy, jazzy panorama of Manhattan followed by Eddie’s charismatic performance of a big tune as in the original, but with a sweet, ironic visual joke: we see the expected iconic “Broadway” street sign, only to have the camera pan out to show it’s not Manhattan’s Broadway, but Rome’s, and not that Rome, but Rome, Nebraska, ultimately closing in on the sisters’ dancing school located above the Meat Market. It’s funny. And it’s sweet. And knowing.
Then a glimpse of Molly and Pat’s Midwestern life far from NYC. They’re teaching small town kids dances from Harlem, trying to inspire them to be the next Astaires and Eleanor Powells. Not gonna happen. I like this scene because Blondell rarely danced on screen (and almost never sang — her memorable performances are all “talk-singing”). So the focus begins on the cute sisters and their innocent aspirations; we see them before we see Manhattan. It’s a clear signal that we should expect “Midwestern values” to prevail over the Big City’s. That could go either way.
Then we see Eddie performing. I love this scene. He’s the most feckless of the often feckless Murphy characters, implacably cheerful, contracted to perform with his trained canaries on the radio show, “Oddities of the Air,” brought to you by Chatworth’s Lineoleum, another in the long line of radio shows with ridiculous sponsors in Hollywood comedies. (Preston Sturges’s Christmas in July, the consummate parody of these shows, appeared in the same year as Two Girls on Broadway.) Eddie’s animal act is a lovely parody of the predicament of real “canaries” in Broadway shows — expected to sing on demand. But Eddie’s are refuseniks. So he’s forced to perform himself, including a nifty dance that of course only the studio audience can see because he’s on the radio. The song is, to my ear, one of the finer Nacio Herb Brown-Arthur Freed-Roger Edens tunes, “Let’s Dance,” which is reprised elegantly later in the film.
This is one of my favorite Murphy dance routines. The Astaire feel is obvious — and it’s reinforced later in the film in a higher class duet with Lana –, but it’s confidently distinct too. Murphy is imitating the Astaire feel, but his persona is also the innocent “dese, dem, dose” salt of the earth hoofer that Astaire would never play. The routine is meant to be both corny and elegant, which was precisely in Murphy’s wheelhouse. He’s dancing with his imagined canaries in this routine. The next time he dances to this tune, it will be with Lana Turner. We’re on the cusp of 1930s respect for Manhattan glitz and 1940s Hollywood versions of down-homishness. Fortunately, Broadway is still in control.
As in Broadway Melody, the “beauty” of the Mahoney sisters is selected out of the pair to be the star. But in Two Girls on Broadway it’s not only because Pat is the beauty, but because she’s also the better dancer. That changes everything. It gives Turner’s character depth — she’s a real talent –, it motivates Eddie’s transfer of affections from Molly to Pat, and it provides a reason for Molly’s wisdom to sacrifice her love for Eddie for the sake of Pat. Unlike in the original film, Pat actually does deserve to be a star.
Pat auditions with Eddie in a dance that captures the style that Turner appears to be identified with at this point in her career, the perky, light hoofing of her previous film, Dancing Co-Ed. To me, this was an inspired pairing. Unlike Astaire, Murphy was an excellent “accompanist,” never pushing for virtuosity and always nudging his partners into the spotlight. Bobby Connolly, a superb choreographer, is credited with some of the dance routines; but watching this scene I can’t help but think that Murphy taught Lana some things. Their carriage is similar enough to indicate some coaching on that point.
The plot follows the original closely enough: the playboy tempts Pat, Eddie realizes his love for her, and Molly takes on the standard melodramatic female sacrifice. But it has been made abundantly clear that Pat is special in terms of star-power compared to Molly. (Molly has had to make do as a cigarette girl in the club where Pat dances.) The clincher, the pièce de resistance, is a theatrical show dance to “Let’s Dance” that aspires to reach the status of the Astaire-Rogers “Night and Day” or “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” at least in terms of scene. The studio appears to want Lana to be a Ginger, with a sense of pleasure that lacked Ginger’s worldly irony. But Murphy would never be Astaire, so basically this is Lana’s show. The mise en scène is a hybrid of the Astaire-Rogers ballroom exhibitions and the Busby Berkeley abstract artifices.
The time for this stuff had passed, but this is as good an epitaph as any. Turner could easily have been a dancing Venus if she had been born earlier. (Lana never danced with Astaire, which is a head scratcher.) The taste for upper-class elegance in ballroom dancing was fading. As far as I know, Turner never had another extended dance routine on film.