#002: The Hollywood Revue

 THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE

Release Date

June 20, 1929

History

The Hollywood Revue was the second musical MGM produced, and this one took a completely different approach than The Broadway Melody. MGM opted to do away with adding songs to a plot, and instead feature their MGM stars doing variety acts for two hours. The acts vary in form and include songs, dances, tricks, and comedy acts, and are all filmed on a stage to give the illusion that the audience is watching a live performance. As with Broadway Melody, some of the songs are performed live, while others are lip synced to prerecorded tracks. Where Hollywood Revue differs from Broadway Melody though, is that there is no way Hollywood Revue could have had a silent version to play alongside the sound version like its counterpart and so many other sound films of its time. Because it is mainly song and dance, theaters would have been forced to get the proper equipment for a sound release if they wanted to run the film, which shows how dedicated MGM had become to supporting this new technology. 

The film is best known for the song "Singin' in the Rain". The song, previously introduced in the Broadway show The Hollywood Box Revue, is featured here in a lavishly choreographed number, sung by Cliff Edwards, in a performance long forgotten due to the 1952 feature film named after the song. The song was popular for decades before the 1952 film, in part because of its introduction in this film. In the year 1930 alone, the song "Singin' in the Rain" is featured in six MGM movies. I don't want to give away too much of how spectacular the number is, I'll discuss that more in my review of the film. The film features many of MGM's stars, some new, and some who had been with MGM since its silent times and were now highlighting their ability to not only act in a sound film, but also sing and dance in one. Joan Crawford, Laurel and Hardy, and other stars from the silent era, perform. Lionel Barrymore and Norma Shearer appear in a color skit together, which is both of their first color appearances and an early sound appearance for both.

Review

The first time I saw Hollywood Revue I thought it was pretty rotten. I have learned to appreciate it for its historic value and the rudimentary attempts it made. "Soundies" were still a new concept, and for a film to not rely on this technology as its sole gimmick, but to give more to audiences shows the dedication that MGM had to present a quality filmgoing experience. The special effects are definitely worth noting. For example, the opening number uses an effect where the film is dissolving from a positive image to a negative image and back again, creating a cool psychedelic effect that was ahead of its time. There is a fun sequence where Bessie Love is hiding in Jack Benny's pocket and then grows to life size before singing "I Never Knew I Could Do a Thing Like That." 

Busby Berkeley is a name that is associated with the technique of filming a string of dancers from above as they make geometric shapes with the way they line up. He started doing this with Eddie Cantor films, starting in 1930 with Whoopee! However, this technique actually appears in this movie, six months prior, in a very fun and spooky number called "Lon Chaney's Gonna Get You If You Don't Watch Out" (which also features a very racist Mongolian mask, for absolutely no reason) and in one of the color numbers, "Orange Blossom Time".

Another special effect that stuck out to me was during the "Singin' in the Rain" number. This was the best and most memorable number in the film for me. As Cliff Edwards sings and dancers with raincoats come on and join him, they line up, face stage right, and dance while a strobe light flashes on them. It reminded me of a similar shot in the film Gypsy as the film transitions to June and Louise growing up. As with Broadway Melody, this film had a handful of sequences in two-strip Technicolor, which was a nice transition from the black and white. 

Edwards appears in four numbers in this film, and has a fun falsetto voice that he uses in his numbers that made my heart smile. Seeing other familiar faces on stage was great too. Joan Crawford, for example, has a beautiful alto voice as she sings "Got a Feelin' For You", and she lip syncs so well in the first part of the number that I thought it was live. I wonder if she knew that she was supposed to keep lip syncing though, because as her dance section started, she just stopped lip syncing and smiled her way through the rest of the number as she clumsily stomped her way through her tap routine. A very gay looking backup singer lip syncs her part for her as she rejoins them. This was Joan's way of showing the world that not only could she speak as a silent actress, but she could sing and dance too. I feel like this number may have been a great insurance policy for her career.

This playing on diegetic sound occurs in another instance as well. Charles King, who originally sang "You Were Meant For Me" in Broadway Melody jokes with Conrad Nigel about how Hollywood stars don't know how to sing. In response, Conrad Nigel sings the song to Anita Page. Yet, Nigel is not really singing the song....it is actually a recording of King that Nigel lip syncs too. As early as 1929, Hollywood is winking at the audience about how much of a construct movies are behind the camera and bending the rules of what an audience would expect with a sound film. Obviously, dialogue dubbing by other actors had been done before, but doing it in this tongue in cheek way adds a whole other layer! 

Laurel and Hardy's routine stands out as well, because although the team had been doing silent films for almost ten years, they had only done two sound shorts at this point with dialogue (there were some synchronized music and sound effects shorts that had been done in 1928). These two shorts, Unaccustomed As We Are and Berth Marks were only released about a month prior to Hollywood Revue. Both Laurel and Hardy had stage experience prior to entering silent films, and this was an opportunity for them to get back in touch with their traditional performance style, doing a skit with dialogue on a stage. It's interesting to see how different their style is from their typical sound shorts for Hal Roach that where they would do their staple characters. Laurel doesn't talk very much at all, and we don't hear his typical whimpers. Hardy's voice is much deeper with a more mid-Atlantic accent than usual, and he doesn't have his signature mustache. Another thing to note is how different their comedic timing is here vs. in their silent films because they were now performing at the standard 24 fps, which resulted in the routines being done in real time as opposed to sped up.

Marion Davis does a tap number in an androgenous bellhop costume surrounded by men in British Guard costumes. For a woman who had such a legendary life, this seemed fitting. Her dancing reminds me of Eleanor Powell, who would be an MGM star in a few years. It was hard to take my eyes off of her. Then, of course, the director thought it would be necessary to throw in another special effect and decided to speed up the camera. This led to a huge first act finale.

I feel this film holds up well because of the musical numbers. There is a great chorus of dancers who will appear in many numbers to do a second chorus or reprise of numbers after the lead performer does the first chorus and a verse. While it becomes a little too routine after a while, this was how numbers tended to be performed on stage at the time, and it does allow viewers to concentrate on the choreography now that the singer has made them familiar with the song. The dancers will sometimes hang out on risers and applaud and laugh behind the emcee while he does a short comedic skit in between numbers. 

The Adagio Dance is incredibly sensual for 1929, with dancers in many acrobatic positions, and the dancers simulating an orgy. This would not have been acceptable after the Hollywood Code was enforced, so I relished in it, knowing that a few more films into this project I will not be able to see anything like this. It would have been better if there hadn't been so many corny jokes from the emcee thrown in to interrupt the dance and explain the action, but I also can appreciate that 1929 audiences would not have been able to just focus on the dance at the time without this.

All this aside, there are elements of this film that are also very painfully bad to watch. For example, the comedic dialogue is not very easy to relate to. It's very slowly delivered, and also very corny in nature. Even the Buster Keaton sequence was a failure. A great deal of it has to do with the technological limitations of sound recording for film in 1929; the actors are still yelling their lines very slowly to compensate.

Also, the flow if the film isn't always that great. Many times, the film will splice two shots together with the actors in the same place in order to give the illusion that it is one long take. Unfortunately, the edits are done a too crudely to make this seem seamless, but the attempt is noted. Sometimes, instead of these interludes, three toddler children will come on stage carrying a sign introducing the next act. I don't quite know why this was done for some acts and not others. 

The weakest part of the film is toward the end of the film. Charles King, Gus Edwards, and Cliff Edwards come out and do a number called "Charlie, Gus and Ike" where they sing a chorus, go into a comedic routine, and then transition back to their chorus. This is followed by a similar number with Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, and Bessie Love entitled "Marie, Polly, and Bess". The sequence is unwatchable and had me wanting to reach for the remote because it also seemed to go on for way too long for something that was not funny and boring within the first 30 seconds.

The film redeems itself for the final two acts, though as "Orange Blossom Time" ballet is great to see in color, and the "Singin' in the Rain" color finale is nicely done, where all the MGM stars that were featured in the film come out and lip sync to the final track, some enthusiastically, some not as much. Buster Keaton just stands there stoically, without even trying to lip sync along, which made me guffaw. 

Overall, I'd recommend seeing this film, but caution people that it should be seen if one is interested in watching it from a historic perspective, not as a simple mode of entertainment. Watching the musical numbers separate from the rest of the film would be more recommended.

Home Video

It pains me to say that this was probably one of the worst video transfers I've seen from an official studio release...ever. A little history on this, Hollywood Revue was part of the first cannon of Warner Archive DVD releases, and at that time, the team behind this project was taking old video masters and slapping them on DVD without doing any work. This was very clearly from a 16mm dupe print, and everything that could be revealed in the quality of a 16mm dupe print was in this transfer. The opening titles were crudely cropped. Parts of the image, including Joan Crawford's head during her number, show this cropping issue too. There were printed in splices throughout the film, and cue marks were scribbled onto the print at random intervals other than the standard 10 or 20 minute intervals. The image flickered and went drastically out of focus a number of times, probably due to warping. The soundtrack was just as rough. At times, I couldn't hear what the actors were saying, and there were times where a good number, like Bessie Love's big number, was ruined because of the rough audio track. As men flipped her around in the air, I was trying to not have a vein pop out of my head because the audio was so rough to listen to. 

The bigger issue, though, is that this was not even a digital scan of the print, it was an analog transfer done years before. This was obvious from the sharpness and contrast. They were fair, but definitely not of DVD quality. When the Warner Archive DVD line came out, titles were $20. This was an expensive price for a DVD which had no extras and was manufactured on demand. Beyond the risk taken of the disc being printed improperly (which ended up being a problem that happened with a number of their discs and resulted in many titles being unplayable in the future), it seems like Warner Brothers took a big risk in releasing titles for this price with this quality of image. I am happy for them that their operations made it through this storm, but there was major side eye watching this, wondering how they had the gall to release something that looked like a public domain VHS from 1985.

I especially felt this way during the color sequences. Two-strip Technicolor doesn't look great, but it definitely looks better than it did on this badly printed 16mm source. It was grainy, the color was breathing heavily, and it was not at all representative of the filmmaker's intentions. I know that not all films from this time exist, and a 16mm print is better than nothing, but one would hope that an effort would be made, for historical purposes, to do a new scan of the materials for posterity, if other elements do not in fact exist. The "Singin' in the Rain" number was featured in That's Entertainment and there are internet rumors that the film was restored in the 1970s from an 82 minute version to its original length. So....where are those restored elements today and why were they not pulled out for this version?