#006: It's a Great Life

IT'S A GREAT LIFE

Release date 

December 6, 1929

History

The Duncan Sisters started their career in 1911 as a famous vaudeville act before hitting it big on Broadway. They were best known for the show Topsy and Eva, a musical comedy based on the characters from Uncle Tom's Cabin. A silent film version was made in 1927, sparking interest in the Duncan Sisters beginning a film career. Their next screen collaboration would be this film, It's a Great Life, loosely based on an MGM sound film released only 10 months prior, The Broadway Melody.

While Variety gave It's a Great Life a lukewarm review, calling it "good lightweight clowning and divertissement," the film unfortunately did not do as well at the box office as The Broadway Melody, and the film put an abrupt end to any other potential films for the Duncan Sisters. They would appear in the unfinished 1930 ensemble film The March of Time among a few other film and TV appearances, but this was the only feature film they would do.

It's a Great Life, similar to The Broadway Melody, has two sections of musical numbers filmed in two-strip Technicolor. According to the AFI catalog, a silent version was also released, but it is hard to imagine what this would look like because the film relies so much on its musical numbers. 

Review

It's a Great Life is clearly an attempt for MGM to generate quick revenue on a musical. It doesn't work that well, with one exception: the comedy in the film is gold, and does not seem as dated as some of the other examples seen so far in The MGM Musical Project. The simple story involves Babe and Casey Hogan, two sisters working in a department store. Babe is in love with Jimmy, a piano player who organizes a musical fashion show for the store. The fashion show goes awry as he, Casey, and Babe are fired for turning it into a comedy, so the three of them start a vaudeville act with Casey and Babe performing together. Casey and Jimmy are always butting heads and jabbing each other, while Babe is caught in the middle. Babe breaks and has a blow-out fight with Casey, marries Jimmy without Casey's knowledge, and the two sisters don't speak. Babe gets ill with a bad flu, and misses her sister's love. Casey comes to her rescue to make her feel better, and the three all make up.

There's not much of a plot there. In fact, the plot is secondary to the vaudeville performances of the Duncan sisters, and I wish that had been more of the case. The comedy in the film is great. For example, the opening scene shows sisters Casey and Babe running to their job, one asking as they leave their apartment building if the other got the pocketbook, which triggers a police officer and nearby citizens to think they're thieves. When the citizens chase them all the way to the store, everyone finally realizes Casey and Babe just late for work. This first sequence reminded me of the opening ballet in Guys and Dolls, as an entire New York neighborhood is turned upside down with the chaos of catching a group of thieves. There is another layer at play, though, when you look at the context of worker treatment in 1929. These two women were running to work in such a craze that it seemed as though they were a couple of thieves. Are the filmmakers having audiences laugh at how ridiculous it is to put that kind of pressure on the workers of America?

When they arrive, there is a staff meeting, where the entire staff is expected to sing the company anthem song, "Smile, Smile Smile". Absurd as this is on its own, it is here that we see just how amazingly funny Rosetta Duncan is as Casey. The comical sister of the two Duncans, she had me rolling as she was making fun of the store song. 

Rosetta Duncan carries her weight in the comedy throughout the film. When the fashion show is a bust because of a mishap with costumes and Jimmy opening the wrong curtain to reveal the wrong act in the program, as well as Babe getting stage fright and bombing during her number, Duncan's character Casey comes out and does a comedy act in a baby voice against her sister Babe's boring number that's losing the audience, and saves the day. The rest of the comedy in the sequence is actually not that funny, but Rosetta Duncan is such an amazing comedy talent that she made me forget just how bad the rest of the scene was.

When the fashion show ends with the same "Smile, Smile, Smile" number and Casey does her mocking of it again, getting her, Babe, and Jimmy fired because the executive of the company is telling his guests how sincere the employees of his company are just before she does this, her mocking the song was so funny that my laughter shook the house. When Jimmy and Casey are bantering back and forth during a rehearsal, the jabs against each other are very funny as well. And at the end of the film, Rosetta Duncan does a number in man-drag as a farmer called "The Hoosier Hop", which she pulls off exquisitely.

There was only one joke that I felt didn't hold up very well. When Casey, Babe, and the rest of the gang are hanging out on a stoop, a neighbor threatens to call the cops. Casey yells back "Why aren't you beating your wife? Ain't she home?" A little tactless, even for 1929, I thought, and unnecessary.

While Rosetta Duncan is an amazing comedian, she is terrible at dramatic acting. And Vivian Duncan is terrible at both. So when Babe snaps at Casey for picking on Jimmy and the film takes a dramatic turn, at that point the film went from a fun experience to agonizingly slow and painful to watch. Babe having a flu that almost kills her and makes her delirious, in a performance by Vivian Duncan which is just plain annoying. This leads to a dream in two-strip Technicolor where she and Casey reunite on stage and sing some numbers together, before Babe wakes up to find Casey consoling her.

As slow as the movie is, the one theme that stuck out was that of sisterly bond. Casey and Babe are inseparable. Working together at the department store, Casey is very protective Babe. When their boss David pulls Casey aside and reprimands her for making fun of the company song, Casey is afraid of not being able to support Babe if she loses this job. When Babe can't perform her number due to stage fright, Casey joining her on stage and singing a duet of a song "I'm Following You" with Babe makes her succeed. At the beginning of the film, Babe won't marry Jimmy unless Casey approves, and because Casey hates Jimmy, she knows this will be almost impossible. At the same token, when David tries to propose to Casey after she's been fired by his boss, Casey won't accept because she can't leave Babe.

It's revealed that when their mother was on her deathbed and Casey was 14, Casey promised to take care of Babe. But how healthy is this relationship? And did we know about codependency in 1929? Or is this supposed to be endearing? Because Casey makes Babe choose between her and Jimmy when Babe admits her love for him, and kicks them out and breaks up the act after they elope. Both Casey, performing solo, and Babe and Jimmy performing as a duo, bomb. Casey and Babe need to be together for their acts to succeed. 

Even when the two of the sisters finally do run into each other after months apart doing their own acts and failing, they reconcile (which is cute) but not without Casey being stubborn about it. Babe keeps extending olive branches and Casey pretends to stay mad. Clearly there is a level of codependence that has never been addressed between the two. The scene would have been a lot better, of course, if Rosetta Duncan hadn't reverted to the dramatic acting motif of slowly yelling her lines into the microphone and ruining it. This reconciliation is short, of course, because Casey goes right into telling Jimmy what he needs to do to take care of Casey, which builds to another fight.

Their sisterly bond is strong-- so strong that Jimmy has to beg Casey to come back and take care of Babe or she will die from her flu. Casey has finally accepted a more direct proposal of marriage from David (who only hinted at it previously), but breaks it off in 20 minutes to go back to Babe and take care of her. She can even hear Babe calling her from the stage! 

A lot of this film does not work. The scenes are slow. The story is ludicrous. The dramatic acting is bad. And the structure is just messy. The only reason Babe is deliriously sick is so that the two-strip Technicolor sequence can come on screen. The sequence is 10 minutes long and is so out of place from the rest of the film. Songs are sung live, as opposed to prerecorded, and this is a big problem because the fidelity is so canned that you can't understand the words to the songs. I don't feel that this was a problem with the restoration, but inherent in the original elements and the audio not being recorded properly. 

Other little details show how sloppy some of the filmmaking was, and that the sections with the plot were really just filler for the vaudeville numbers. For example, when Casey demands to see Jimmy and Babe's marriage certificate, there is a long closeup of the certificate, and it has the year 1921 on it. And yet, there is nothing else in the film indicating that this was a 1921 set film. Everything proves to be 1929, from the style of music, fashion, cars, and technology used during the performances. When David proposes to Casey, there is parallel editing between a far shot and closeups. The far shot is so out of focus and soft that it's barely watchable. But still, the rest of the sequence is okay except for this shot, proving that it has probably always been out of focus and was not reshot even though the take was clearly defective.

While "I'm Following You" is a great number when Babe and Casey first sing it, it is repeated three more times. Once in a rehearsal, then as the rehearsal fades to Babe and Casey on stage again we hear it the third time, and the fourth time is when Jimmy is singing it after Babe and Casey have broken up. It's possible that the filmmakers wanted the audience to recognize that this was Babe and Casey's song, to have it seem nostalgic when Babe hears Jimmy singing it, but at the same time, I felt like it was hammering it into me a little too obviously. Two other numbers that just didn't work were during Babe and Casey's stage performance, one with Casey in a toreador costume courting Babe in a Spanish dancer costume, and another with Casey in man drag courting Bess in Victorian costumes (yes, Rosetta Duncan does man drag twice in this film).

The film's special effects are worth noting, however. When Babe gets stage fright during her solo performance at the fashion show, the camera innovatively does a fast zoom in and out of the audience to illustrate stage fright from Babe's point of view without words, which is commendable. I feel as though the entire budget for the film was saved for Babe's delirium color dream at the end of the film. The second color sequence in the film, it employs many special effects that are pulled off successfully. The end of "The Hoosier Hop" has a double exposure section that works well. And the last number of the film, "On My Way To You", is a fun tap number that is reminiscent of Broadway Melody and Hollywood Revue. An interesting technique of not lighting the dancers and having them dance in a silhouette works fairly well and I applaud the effort even if it wasn't as successful as the filmmakers intended. I thought it was cool to see all of these effects because they set the groundwork for a common theme in MGM musicals of employing special effects during musical numbers as part of the fun.

Home Video

Like other titles thus far on The MGM Musical Project, It's a Great Life, too, was a title not seen on home video until the Warner Archive line released a DVD. It was released in March 2010 and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, this is clearly a new remastering and not an older print, because there isn't the presence of any analog video anomalies. Also, I didn't see any film cue marks, so this must have come from preprint material.

The big issue I had was the difference in quality between the color sections and the black and white sections. They must have come from different sources, because the sound became very grainy and at times inaudible with the first color section (the fashion show) and yet when the film switched back to black and white for the rest of the fashion show, it immediately became easier to hear. The scratchy sound and canned fidelity cleared right up! The image for this first color sequence was pretty bad too. For starters, the image was very orange, not at all remanent of what 2-strip Technicolor really looked like. I wonder if this footage actually did come from a print as opposed to a negative or internegative. The image is also quite warped during this section.

The second color sequence toward the end of the film has much better color and focus, but does have some issues with looking grainy, scratchy, and overexposed during the final number, "On My Way To You", which is a shame because it is the best number in the film. Hopefully a better restoration can come around of these sequences specifically, but the chances of another release of the film are low, and I can't even endorse doing it because the film is not that great to make it worth doing. The black and white content of the film is in very good condition though, and the image and audio hold up very well for a film from 1929.