#001: The Broadway Melody

THE BROADWAY MELODY

Release Date

• February 1, 1929 (Grauman's Chinese Theatre)
• February 8, 1929 (NYC)
• June 12, 1929 (US)

History

This was the first all-talking musical ever made. There were musicals that were partial sound films; The Jazz Singer (1927), for example, is a musical but is mostly a silent film besides the singing sequences. In the documentary That's Entertainment (1974), Frank Sinatra credits The Hollywood Revue (1929) as "the first all talking, all singing, all dancing" movie but he had his dates wrong by a few months. Perhaps the producers of That's Entertainment were afraid of questioning Old Blue Eyes in case he decided to have them swimming with the fishes?

Broadway Melody was produced for two forms of projection: Sound on Film, where the sound is read off of the film as it ran through the projector (and eventually became the industry standard for 80 years), and Sound on Disc, which was another standard format at that time where a record ran in sync with the film. Another fully silent version of the film was produced, due to the fact that some theaters could not run sound films yet. I am unfamiliar with how different this version is because it has never been released on home video. Did they cut the songs from the film, I wonder? Were fragments of these numbers shown instead of the full number, considering it would be too hard to show silently? 

One of the highlights of the film when it premiered was this lavish song and dance sequence "Wedding of the Painted Doll" and it was originally shown in 2-Strip Technicolor. Just as silent film had tried testing sequences with sound as a new technology to try out before fully making films in sound, Broadway Melody tried having a sample sequence in color with the rest of the film black and white. Unfortunately, the color footage no longer exists, except for a few fragments. All that remains is a black and white version of the sequence. 

Early sound film was tricky because the producers were learning as they went. It's obvious that some of the numbers are sung live, and at other times, the actors are clearly lip syncing to a prerecorded track, which became more standard as time went on. Shots tend to be more stationary in these early films because moving the microphones around was very hard. So actors tend to move into one spot, deliver their lines a little too loudly and slowly so they can be understood through the microphones, and then they walk away. In fact, shots that don't involve dialogue are much smoother because the filmmakers could rely on silent filmmaking, which at this point was now a perfected art. Replicating the standard world of silent cinema, Broadway Melody has intertitles, introducing the setting of scenes. I wonder, in this journey of watching the MGM musicals chronologically, if this will continue. Stay tuned....

MGM didn't want to make sound films until forced to when the other studios had. And the result? The second film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first sound film to win Best Picture!

Review

The first thing that caught my eye of course was the name Arthur Freed in the title sequence. Freed was, of course, a main producer of the musicals for MGM, but in this case he was just a songwriter. The opening shot also pulled me in-- a skyline shot of New York City in 1929! Listening to an interview with George Feltenstein from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, he informed listeners that this shot was actually lost from the original negative and needed to come from a 16mm element. The film then goes to Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s, where we see a realistic look at what that whole world looked like in its heydey before we focus on the action of the film.

I was expecting this film to be nothing more than a predecessor to the Warner Bros. Busby Berkeley musicals, which were all a one trick pony with the same plot of a small town girl coming to New York to be a Broadway star. The film does start out that way, about a sister act moving to the city, but soon turns into a much richer story. One of the sisters, Hank, has a monologue at the beginning where she is recalling to her sister Queenie about how poor they were, and historically one has to remember what it was like to be poor in 1920s Middle America, especially at the cusp of the Great Depression. I interpreted this as "too poor to eat" broke. They're now living in a hotel looking for work on the Great White Way, which allows the viewers to imagine what urban single life in New York must have been like for so many people in New York at that time. 

As Queenie succeeds more than her sister on the stage, and Hank comes to terms with it, there is a shift in Queenie. She makes rich friends, she has a rich beau named Jacques. Hank's beau, Eddie, ends up falling hard for Queenie, now dating Jacques, and ditches Hank. And Queenie, getting a taste for the finer things in life, has a hard time adjusting. The trauma of being poor in her past has to be reconciled with the fancy urban life she is now tasting. Life in the fast lane gets the best of Queenie and we see her spinning out before she gets nearly raped by Jacques and is rescued by Eddie. Isn't it interesting that a 1929 film shows someone breaking into show business and is fighting off rape from the man who promises to advance her career, and 95 years later, this is still a struggle that is heard of far too often? Of course the difference is in 1929, Queenie is victim blamed for not being a good little girl and being a wife to Modest Man Eddie, instead of wanting the finer things in life. She settles for marriage to Eddie, which is the happy ending of the film.

This gross dated moral aside, there actually is a lot of shocking pre-Code Cinema behavior that would not have been allowed within a few years due to the Hollywood Code. The near rape scene was pretty shocking for its time. Also, the film showing the main protagonist drinking regularly with her friends at speakeasies during Prohibition must have turned heads. There is a very obviously gay costume designer who works at the theater, who in one scene is lamenting about how his large hats are being poorly treated by the chorus girls. I had previously seen this clip in the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1995) about the history of LGBT characters in cinema. 

Additionally, the characters are wearing scandalous bikini costumes, and while in one scene it's obvious that Hank has a skin colored stocking on underneath the costume, other costumes look as though the characters are almost bare! Very shocking for the time. Consider too that one of the sequences with these scandalous costumes was in color and how much this would have blown people away. We also see characters do things that would have seemed very suggestive of the time, such as sharing a cigarette. At the very end of the film, when the sisters part ways, Hank kisses Queenie on the lips! Even if they were sisters, this is an act that would have been absolutely condemned by the powers that be in a few years.

The humor of the film holds up in some places. There is a character who is in a Roman soldier costume and is nagging the crew for his spotlight, dissatisfied with how he is lit on stage. After incessant demands, the crew throws the entire spotlight on the stage and almost crushes him. This made me guffaw. I'm always happy when joke from a film almost 100 years old can make me laugh. This was an exception though. One character, Hank and Queenie's uncle, has a stutter. His stutter becomes a source of humor through the film and a running joke. A better academic could pass this off as trying to be 'inclusive of people with disabilities by showing them in film' but to me it was just plain mean and stupid. A different time, I guess, and I can appreciate that we should still watch films with problematic elements like this to observe what was considered humorous at the time.

The lavish quality of this production, from the costumes, to the sets, to the fact that at Queenie's birthday party, her birthday cake had a sailboat on it, really blew me away. MGM went all in on this production and I am really hoping that all of the films in this project are just as lavish and excessive in their detail. With the amount of closet homosexuals working on these films, I know I won't be disappointed.

Acting in early sound film was very difficult, as I mentioned earlier. Because of the technology of early sound film, I was worried that the performances would be lacking. Some scenes were a little over the top, especially toward the beginning of the film when Hank and Queenie are supposed to be more innocent and child like before stardom has hardened them. In their first scene, there is a noticeable point where they are very slowly yelling their lines into the microphone. As the film goes on though, both performances mature. Anita Page, who plays Queenie, has a meltdown scene toward the end of the film, and it is very powerful. You can hear her straining her voice as she yells and screams, and it is not at all 'lady-like'. I was really blown away, and was shocked that she didn't get a nomination for this performance but that Bessie Love, who played wholesome Hank, got the nomination instead.

Musicals on Broadway had just learned how to integrate musical numbers into the plot with shows like Showboat (1927). The team behind Broadway Melody set a precedent of how easy this would be for filmmakers, but it's execution wasn't perfect. The title song "Broadway Melody" is sung three times and is the only number for the first 20 minutes or so, which left me confused as to whether the filmmakers did know what they were doing. Eddie sings it in Tin Pan Alley, for Queenie and Hank, and then does it on stage in a rehearsal in a much more lavish number. When the third version appeared, I thought "Ahhh, now we have the beginning of the real MGM musical number." This number would also start the long tradition in the MGM musicals, throughout the studios many decades of producing them, for an MGM musical to feature a number on stage that was way too lavish to be performed on a real stage, forcing the viewer to suspend disbelief.

A detail that I couldn't believe I had always missed, seeing this number in the documentary That's Entertainment is not only was the music and singing pre-recorded for this number, but also the tap sounds were done in ADR! How difficult must this have been for a 1929 film, to have done this special effect to a tap dancing solo. Speaking of That's Entertainment, Frank Sinatra makes a joke in the film that Charles King is doing the number with a group of overweight chorus girls. No, Frank. Those legs are all solid muscle. More muscle than you'll ever have and they could probably fling your skinny ass body across the theater using only their legs. Girls are allowed to have muscles. Do better, you drunk overrated douche.

"You Were Meant For Me" the first number in an MGM musical where a character breaks into song, and it's hard to tell if it is allegorical or reality. Was Eddie just having a conversation with Queenie, confessing his love to her, and this moment was reinvented as being in song form for the audience? Or was it meant to be a real song that Queenie actually heard? A little mystery that is cleared up later in the film when Queenie hears the song when she's dancing with Jacques and it makes her uncomfortable. Apparently, Eddie just sang it to her and an imaginary orchestra just bloomed out of nowhere.

There are two other fun big numbers in the show, the "Wedding of the Painted Doll" sequence, discussed previously, and the "Boy Friend" number, which the sisters perform as their rehearsed act (although their singing isn't their high point and one wonders how the characters got on Broadway with voices like these). There's also a very fun number that made me snap my fingers and smile entitled "Truthful Parson Brown", performed by a group on their guitars in a speakeasy.

This is a great historic document. A film that should not be missed for musical fans because it shows us where our genre was born. There are a lot of terrible early sound musicals, and I was blessed to learn that the first one was captivating, and for the most part holds up well!

Home Video

Broadway Melody was first fully released on VHS in 1989, followed by a 1992 Laserdisc release as part of the Dawn of Sound box set. IMDB users state that these versions had a different opening than what's on the DVD and Blu-Ray releases. The film made its home video release a little earlier than this, if you consider that in 1980, That's Entertainment made its home video debut and featured clips from this and other MGM musicals. I won't talk too much about That's Entertainment going forward with this project, but wanted to bring it up here for the first film of this project, because it was how many people saw clips from these films on home video unless they had taped them off TV, until MGM/UA started rolling them out slowly from prints in their library onto VHS and laserdisc (MGM/CBS did a select few as well).

In 2005, the film made its DVD premiere with a large number of special features, and that was the version I rented from my local library for this viewing. The special features were so worth renting the DVD for! There were a number of Metro Movietone Revues, which featured performances of vaudeville stars of the day, as well as a humorous parody of Broadway Melody featuring dog actors, called Dogway Melody. 

George Feltenstein, when promoting the 2023 Blu-Ray on the podcast The Extras, indicated that this film has been a challenge to watch prior to the Blu-Ray because of the quality of the restorations done in 2005 and earlier. The original negative was in bad shape. Many elements needed to be culled to make a usable product. But watching the 2005 DVD, I found that it wasn't as bad as he let on. The image was quite appealing with a few exceptions. For example, in the scene where Jacques woos Queenie with flowers, the scene was very heavy on scratches. While watching the "Wedding of the Painted Doll" number, there is an extra grainy and out of focus quality compared to the rest of the film, and I wonder if this is because it was a couple of generations out from the color negative. 

In one dramatic scene when Hank is praying, the soundtrack sounded like a car driving over rocks, but overall, I found that for a 2005 restoration of a 1929 film, this was a very good quality restoration. If there was any complaint, it was more of an artistic choice made by the restoration crew. In between scenes, when there are intertitles or fades to black, the sound would go to dead digital silence, which was jarring considering there would have always been a little hiss heard in a theater even on the best quality prints. It just sounded so.....digital.

For the new Blu-Ray release, Feltenstein indicated that a mint quality set of vitaphone discs was used, and that the image is of higher quality than the previous releases. It also has all of the special features of the original DVD release, so I'd recommend checking this one out if you've never seen the film before. Clips online are quite stunning in sight and sound.