The 1938 version of Sally, Irene and Mary is nominally a remake of a famous but hard to get silent musical made in 1925. The original starred Constance Bennett, Joan Crawford, and Sally O’Neil as the title characters. That original is a well made and visually interesting comedy/melodrama, directed by the legendary Edmund Goulding, and it has its affectionate fans (one can see it in seven youtube slices on the Net). A fairly standard showgirls-in-New-York backstage musical, it tells the tale of the three flapper gals at different spots on the spectrum of showgirl virtue and their appropriate fates. The ’38 version is nothing like it.
In the original, the three girls are already in the biz, and we know all about the temptations facing the pre-Code chorine. By the time of the “remake,” the chorus girl had been transformed through umpteen sanitized iterations. In the best versions, the loss of erotic intrigue was compensated for by depicting the chorine diva as an artist at work. (It isn’t entirely gone. Lana Turner’s remake of Broadway Melody, Two Girls on Broadway, is plenty steamy.) In our Sally, Irene and Mary, the eroticism has become broad comedy. And it’s good that way!
The script by Harry Tugend and Jack Yellen, two top-flight comic writers of the ’30s, is very funny and snappy. Our story begins with three aspiring showgirls, the makings of a “sisters” singing group, forced to work as manicurists in a fashionable salon as they wait for their big chance. Out of the blue arrives The Baron Alex Zorka (Gregory Ratoff) for a manicure. I will confess up front that I am a sucker for Ratoff’s comic characters. Ratoff was an interesting director — one of Zanuck’s friends and favorites, actually — but an eccentric and uneven one. His directorial reputation isn’t very high nowadays; maybe that’s unfair. As an actor, though, he’s one of the great supporting comic “foreigners,” the consummate parodic inversion of Stroheim’s elegant cosmopolitan Prussian. As the “Slavonian” Count, he strides in, makes his imperious demands, and proceeds to examine the row of female manicurists like an officer reviewing a line of cadets. What he’s looking for, though, is “a beautiful creature.” I love this scene, and Ratoff basically steals the show throughout the film — which is saying something, since he will be playing across from Fred Allen and Gypsy Rose Lee.
Hearing that his beautiful creature Sally (Alice Faye) has ambitions to sing on stage, The Baron has the bar orchestra brought in to accompany Sally as she sings a fine Gordon-Revel tune, “Got My Mind on Music.” I’ll confess that I find Alice Faye an enigma — a very nice one, but I don’t quite understand what made her one the giant stars of the time. I can’t think of a comparable singer-actress. For the Tin Pan Alley and Follies worlds she inhabits in the movies, she seems way too refined — her gestures and expressions so understated, I’m having trouble seeing how she could have projected like a Red Hot Mama on the big stage. But she did, and audiences loved her.
Before getting on with our story, I have to include a clip from Faye’s debut in the 1934 George White’s Scandals, singing “Oh, you nasty man!” in a Busby Berkeley style Follies extravaganza. (It’s impossible to find a good print of the film.) Extra spice: a younger Ratoff is in it, too.
Back to our story. No sooner has The Count gushed over Sally, rushing to make her the star of Slavonia, than the girls’ agent Gabby (Fred Allen) arrives on the scene to claim his clients. Yet another wonderful scene with two great comedians.
Like so many of his manager ilk in backstage comedies, Gabby wants to produce a show but he’s low on funding. His canaries take jobs as cigarette girls in a nightclub where heart-throb Tommy Randall (Tony Martin) sings what he claims is his last song before he quits the biz.
It’s love at first sight between Tommy and Sally, but Sally has an ensconced rival: glamorous and rich Joyce Taylor (Gypsy Rose Lee, but billed as Louise Hovick, her pre-burlesque name). This is another scene I love, despite Tony Martin’s song in the background. The dialogue is as snappy New York as it gets (and vintage Fred Allen — co-scriptwriter Harry Tugend was one of Allen’s longtime radio writers).
GABBY: She was in my chorus when she married her first millionaire.
SALLY: She ought to pay you a commission of her alimony.
GABBY: She’s been married to six millionaires since then. She gets a new model every year.
SALLY: I wonder what she does with her old ones.
GABBY: When that baby gets through with them, they go back to the finance company.
SALLY: Look at those rocks!
GABBY: Her right arm looks like the coast of Maine. See you later.
SALLY: Where’re you going?
GABBY: I’m headed for the rocks.
William Seiter, the film’s director, probably made more comedies in the period than any other director. His output is uneven, but he made some great ones — this one is close. He learned his craft directing silent comedies, and was responsible for a number of Laurel and Hardy features. There are lots of funny visual details in the film that evoke the silents. Take, for instance, the ads on the stairs leading up to Gabby’s office. Revealing company!
Gabby persuades Joyce to back the show (improbably titled “Soup to Nuts”) so that she can be Tommy’s patroness. But seeing the sparks between Tommy and Sally throws Joyce into a rage and she backs out. Gabby is back on the street — literally. He’s set up shop on the sidewalk, where he hobnobs with the proud street sweeper Jefferson Twitchell (Jimmy Durante). I’m not a fan of Durante and he adds nothing to the film for me — but he was a big comedy star at the time for some reason. He plays a nice role in this little carnival street-scene as Gabby mediates the middle between street-sweeper and baron. The latter has re-appeared in his chauffered Hispano-Suiza (or whatever that gorgeous automobile is). Gabby fears he’s come to finish the duel, but he quickly learns that The Baron has come to seek out Sally, for whom he is pining. Gabby has a new backer, if Sally will marry The Baron. But Sally’s a no go. She wouldn’t “marry that Russian wolfhound for all the money in the world!”
The girls are down on their luck again, back in their old walk-up. Fate intervenes. Mary (Marjorie Weaver), who has been the least distinctive of the trio, miraculously inherits a steamboat from an uncle she’s never known. The ship turns out to be a rusted-out scow too beaten down to sail, but Tommy and Gabby have the inspired idea to turn it into a pierside showboat nightclub. One problem: still no money. Tommy decides that destiny is against them, and suggests a breakup with Sally. Which is a fine excuse for Faye’s main number, the Spina-Bullock tune, “This is Where I Came In,” one of her first great solo set-pieces.
Meanwhile, back at The Baron’s. Another great scene with Ratoff — it begins with him courting Irene (Joan Davis), the broadest comic of the broads, but ends with Sally. Making the greatest of sacrifices, Sally agrees to to become The Baroness if he’ll fund the show.
So the show goes on on the showboat — but Tommy can’t know about Sally’s great sacrifice. Among the numbers is a very strange staging of “Who Stole the Jam?”, another Spina-Bullock tune that was apparently very popular, and was covered by Ella Fitzgerald and featured in a bizarre arrangement in the Marx Brothers’ final film. I think this was originally intended to be a hokum song. I can imagine a Mae West or Sophie Tucker version — but here it’s sterilized so badly that I don’t like watching it. But I do like listening to it.
The show’s finale is a mock-wedding of Sally and Tommy — but a real preacher is secretly substituted so that the wedding is real and… you get it. Standard. What’s not standard is that Twitchell fires up the furnace of the steamboat (“The General Fremont”) to a pitch so that it breaks away from its moorings and heads off down the river on its own, tossing the passengers to, fro, and overboard. All’s well that ends well, though, replete with a double wedding.
Sally, Irene and Mary also includes one of the more interesting acts ever to appear in one of these show-simulating musicals, Raymond Scott’s “Minuet in Jazz.” Scott would soon become one of Fox’s stable composers, and his “Quintette” was involved in the soundtracks of several of the jazz comedies Fox made in the late 30s and early 40s. He was also one of the main sources for the Warner Brothers’ cartoon sound tracks. The “Minuet” has no narrative function, it’s more like a music video. But it has a somewhat legendary status even for folks who have no idea what film it was in.
