On paper, On the Avenue looks like a great classical Hollywood musical. All the songs are by Irving Berlin. It’s directed by Roy Del Ruth, an unsung master of the genre. It stars Dick Powell, Alice Faye, and Madeleine Carroll. The script is by two good writers, Gene Markey and William Conselman. Lucien Andriot was behind the camera. (A lot of Andriot’s films for Fox are available nowadays only in subpar prints, so his chops are not always evident. They are in On the Avenue, which looks maaarvelous.) And 1937 was a great year for comedy in Hollywood. The film has its enthusiastic fans, but I’m not one of them. There are lots of funny ideas in it, but to me there’s even more forced laughter.
When I first saw it, I thought it was a film version of an Irving Berlin stage musical, and it really does feel like it’s trying to recapture the experience of watching a Broadway show in a movie. To my surprise, it was never staged; it was always intended for film. The result, for me, is a somewhat static and overthought show, much stiffer than one expects from Del Ruth.
The conceit is that “On the Avenue” is a Broadway show within the movie of the same name. It begins with a nice bang — the curtain opens on a big production number of Berlin’s “He Ain’t Got Rhythm,” with Alice Faye in the center of a wide-screen stage that evokes a bit of Busby Berkeley and a bit of the George White Scandals where Faye began her film career. It’s something between a parody and a set of Faye cliches — she uses the same moves and gestures as in her ribald early routines (like “Nasty Man” from George White’s Scandals of 1934), but here she’s buttoned up. The girls’ dorm then glides away to reveal an observatory set for The Ritz Brothers to take over the song. I don’t know much about The Ritz Brothers. I gather they were a popular comedy act. I didn’t expect much from them but this becomes great routine with terrific (and very athletic) goofy dancing, even from the chorines. So far so good. (Btw, “He Ain’t Got Rhythm” was a huge hit in ’37. It was recorded by Billie Holiday with Teddy Wilson’s band, from a session that included both Benny Goodman and Lester Young; by Goodman himself, with Jimmy Rushing; by Red Allen’s band; by the Lunceford band; and by Faye herself. It must have had 24/7 radio airplay. I’ll embed some videos of those versions at the bottom of this post.)
Things get seriously weird in the next scene on stage. The diegetic show’s stars, Gary Blake (Powell) and Mona Merrick (Faye), do a parody routine, “A Quiet Evening with the Richest Girl in the World,” roasting a Vanderbilt-like tycoon, Commodore Caraway (George Barbier), and his glam, hyper-privileged, and terminally affected daughter Mimi (Carroll) — both of whom happen to be in the audience for the big show. The show has been advertised as “the smartest review of the season,” but smart it’s not. We’re eight minutes into the movie and it’s already off the rails. The satire is buffoonish, not in a good way. Why the Caraways are being skewered onstage is never made clear, and the Ritz Brothers’ clowning makes the Marx brothers look like Old Vic thespians. And why exactly are the filthy rich and elegant Caraways attending what’s basically an inflated vaudeville clownfest? For that matter, why is this music hall business happening in Carnegie Hall? But maybe the biggest question is: why did all this nonsequiturized lumpen clowning get an enormous elaborate set and velvety photography?
This is the first sign that On the Avenue will be a gumbo of unrelated styles and plot moves that never becomes digestible. Del Ruth was usually able to combine different styles pretty well. He’s a good practitioner of the ’30s aesthetic that liked to mix slapstick with comedy of manners, the same impulse that spawned screwball at the polite end of the spectrum and blue-streak verbal backstage comedies at the anarcho end. In On the Avenue, the mood slips from cliche to cliche, and each one is treated as if it deserved serious artistic treatment. It’s hard to keep track of them. The story itself hardly even comes together as its own cliche, just a jumble of little ones.
So anyway, Mimi goes backstage to remonstrate with Gary and give him a good slap for the public insult. This of course leads to the (naturally highly probable) mutual attraction of the Olympian socialite deb Mimi and the clown Gary. This of course irritates Mona, who’s sweet on Gary. She’s not a spitfire, but a woman scorned, blah blah. Gary and Mimi of course go cute courting (it’s not really cute, but that’s what we’re supposed to think). Gary agrees to temper the roasting of the Caraways in the next performance, but Mona sabotages the plan by making it even more outrageous. Furious, Mimi exacts revenge for the ostensible betrayal by buying out the show and engineering a mass exodus of the audience during a performance. And in addition, agreeing to marry the requisite stuffy twit hanger on. Mona, realizing that she has no chance with Gary, visits Mimi on the day of her impending wedding to set her straight: the insulting performance was her idea. Mimi realizes she has wronged her clown-man, and she is saved in the nick of time as Gary, in disguise, whisks her away. Runaway bride, get it? The film tries to aerate this leaden plot (made even more leaden by the high gloss production values) by populating it with arbitrary unfunny eccentrics, a la You Can’t Take It With You (which was a Broadway hit the year before). In all, Powell is totally misused, Madeleine Carroll has no comic chops in the film and comes across as eye-candy straight from a London Noel Coward job, and Faye, the only emotionally attractive character, is left out in the cold. There’s not even an undercard romantic juvenile for her. I can’t convey how many movies were cannibalized and sewn together like Frankenstein’s monster with this glitzy snore.
Actually, it’s not quite a snore, since there are several Irving Berlin song-routines — most of which are stand-alones performed in the diegetic show, with no connection to the plot. I’m not fond of any of them, but there are a couple of notable ones. This was the film in which “I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm” was introduced — Powell is good, but its place and design in the film is arbitrary.
The only routine I like is Alice Faye’s rendition of “Let’s Go Slumming on Park Avenue,” another song introduced in the film. I did not know this Berlin tune before, but it turns out to have been covered quite a few times, including by Lunceford. Musically, it’s not much, but the lyrics are sharp, more Cole Porterish than I expect from Irving Berlin.
Let’s go slumming, take me slumming
Let’s go slumming on Park Avenue
Let us hide behind a pair of fancy glasses
And make faces when a member of the classes passes
Let’s go smelling, where they’re dwelling
Sniffing everything the way they do
Let us go to it, they do it
Why can’t we do it too?
Let’s go slumming, nose thumbing on Park Avenue
This routine slides easily into a parodic version by The Ritz Brothers — just another of the arbitrary jumps in mood. It’s not unfunny, and I’m pretty impressed with the athleticism of the clowning. Not much more to say. Everyone involved went on to make many much better comedies, so On the Avenue is not a historic disaster. I just wonder why Zanuck and Fox spent so much money and talent trying to make a knock-off B-idea look like an A.
Here are some versions of “He Ain’t Got Rhythm.” I really like how the Black vocalists complicate the rhythm of the phrasing to underscore that they do have rhythm. (It’s a pretty nonsensical song, so I’m surprised it was covered so often.)
Here’s Billie with Teddy Wilson’s band — with Benny Goodman and Lester Young, in 1937. She’s pretty daring with her phrasing, isn’t she?
And here’s the Goodman band itself, with Jimmy Rushing being an operatic Fats Waller.
Here’s Red Allen — his vocal is pretty amazing, you can hear his trumpet styling in it. Armstrong’s influence is evident, but Allen was pretty original.
And finally, Lunceford’s version. Not sure who’s singing, but probably Sy Oliver.
