#009: They Learned About Women

THEY LEARNED ABOUT WOMEN

Release date 

January 30, 1930

History

Similar to It's a Great Life, MGM decided to once again highlight two established vaudeville stars in their own film with They Learned About Women. This time, comedy duo Gus Van and Joe Schenk were the featured actors, and the film not only featured a duo, but was directed by one-- Jack Conway, an established silent film director at the time, and Sam Wood, who was also established as a director and would go on to direct such films as Goodbye Mr. Chips, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and sections of Gone with the Wind, among other famous titles. Like other films from this time, it was issued in both silent and sound versions. 

A baseball film, They Learned About Women was the one time that Van and Schenk would work together in a feature film. Schenk would unfortunately pass away months after the film was released. While Van and Schenk were not huge box office stars, the film does feature some names that were already established in other MGM musicals up to this point, illustrating a pattern MGM would have of utilizing established stars in the genre during its reign at the studio. Cliff Edwards (Ukelele Ike), Mary Doran, and Bessie Love return from Broadway Melody, Bennie Rubin, the sidekick from Marianne and It's a Great Life returns and does his own vaudeville routine with Tom Dugan, and we even see Nina Mae McKinney from Hallelujah returning, this time in an on-stage number called "Harlem Madness". According to an Ottawa Citizen article from July 18 1930, this number was originally filmed in Technicolor, however the print featured on the DVD is black and white and no other records I could find show that it was photographed in color, so this may have been a typo. 

While They Learned About Women didn't do very well at the box office and was panned by critics, it was later remade as Take Me Out to the Ball Game with Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Esther Williams, in an adaptation that was much more successful. 

Review

Van plays Jerry and Schenk plays Jeff, two baseball players who are vaudeville performers during the off season. Jack befriends Daisy, a woman who is trying to manipulate him into giving her the finer things in life. He also happens to be engaged to Mary, played by Bessie Love. Mary is also good friends with Jerry. After Jack leaves Mary for Daisy and they wed, Daisy tries to break up the act between Jerry and Jack and finally succeeds. She also convinces Jack to leave the baseball team. Jerry and Jack have a falling out, and Jerry begins a romance with Mary, leading to their engagement. When Jack re-enters the picture, after Daisy leaves him for another man, Jack, Jerry, and Mary become friends again but have to reconcile old feelings between Jack and Mary that are coming back and becoming an obstacle for the whole baseball team.

While this story seems complex, it's really just pulling in elements from several of the MGM musicals that had already been released. Similar to the strong friendship between the Duncan Sisters in It's a Great Life or the two main characters in So This is College, Jerry and Jack hold a strong bond. We see this at the beginning on the train as Jack helps drunk Jerry to bed. He scolds him for being loud but still helps him in his state of intoxication get into his train bed. Jack takes great pride in his keeping Jerry on the straight and narrow. In a funny piece of editing, he brags to Daisy that if it weren't for him, Jerry would be back in the dining car with the girls late at night instead of in bed. The camera abruptly cuts to Jerry in his pajamas with the girls in the dining car, illustrating that Jack has very little control over him. 

Similar to So This is College, Jack and Jerry's relationship may not be as strong as they lead on, for Jack lies to Jerry about why he has to skip dinner with the two of them. It is really because he is cheating on Mary with Daisy but he gives another excuse. When Jerry catches Daisy and Jack together though, he still tries to cover for him, even though Mary also saw them (which Jerry doesn't know). Jerry plays belligerent so Jack will take him home and then lays into him for doing Mary bad. Later in the film, when Daisy accuses Jerry of making a pass at her and Jack punches him, Jerry tries to reason with Jack but Jack won't hear of it. Jerry is more hurt that Jack took Daisy's word over his than the fact that Jack punched him. Again, an illustration of their bond that even a punch in the face wouldn't tear them apart.

Similar to It's a Great Life, the story in this film is secondary to Van and Schenk as performers, both as singers and as comedians. I didn't mind this as much because the story and script were so weak, and I prefer the songs and vaudeville performances to be intertwined in the story, as opposed to the Busby Berkeley musicals at Warner Bros. around the same time, which had a straight film with 20 minutes of singing and dancing thrown into the last few reels. For example, there is a party scene during They Learned About Women which has several plot points and a decent amount of character development starting to appear, and to keep the scene moving, there are four or five short musical numbers that are interspersed during the action. Van and Schenk are talented singers and blend well together. Schenk is a strong tenor and Van a strong baritone, creating nice harmonics in their voices that can be heard even on a 1930 optical soundtrack. There's another resemblance to It's a Great Life that I picked up on. In that film, Casey and Jimmy are always bickering because Jimmy is threatening the act between Casey and Babe. In this film, Daisy and Jerry are bickering for the same reason when she tags along on their vaudeville tour.

Another mirror to a previous MGM musical I saw was to Marianne. The baseball team is introduced in a scene showing them practicing at the beginning of the season and engaging in a lot of horseplay, similar to the horseplay at the beginning of Marianne where the soldiers are clowning around with each other. The diversity of the characters is also illustrated similarly, not just through Bennie Rubin playing another Jewish man who is embraced by the team (remember, this was still eight years before World War II broke out), but also in that one of the other teammates has a bad stutter and the team is always patient with him and loves him anyway, even if it is in the film for comedic effect.

The biggest drawback to this film is the bad script and bad acting from the male leads. While the film did have a handful of "laugh out loud" moments, the biggest problem is that they were so seldomly done. Van and Schenk may be good singers, but they were both lousy actors, and this could attribute as to why they didn't have a big film career (besides Schenk's death). The loud, slow talking into the microphones that I've spoken about in other films aside, their comedy act is also just not very funny. The jokes fall flat, and lack originality. Bennie Rubin and Tom Dugan have a scene in the film where they try out a vaudeville routine as well that falls pretty flat for the same reason. Van's physical comedy of playing drunk is quite annoying-- he keeps leaning back as he talks and has a speech impediment which may have been his intent to be a drunk slurring. We see this at the beginning and also when he is faking his drunkenness to get Jack away from Daisy.

The character Jack, on the other hand, is too much of a wuss for my taste. I felt like I was watching a film with Butters from South Park. It makes it hard to believe that this man can juggle two women. The two female leads, on the other hand, were fantastic. Bessie Love plays a Plain Jane as Mary, and has a very understated performance. I wondered if this was intentional or if she was just a bad actress who was flat in her performance, but throughout the film there are little moments that prove that she is ahead of her time in her craft, compared to the other performers who are shouting lines, stomping their feet and waving their arms around. For example, when Love (as Mary) catches Jack with Daisy, she has a moment where she recognizes that they are together, and then puts on a good face for Jerry to end their evening, and when her cab drives off, she breaks down in the back of it in a very convincing way. Her reactions during the climactic baseball game at the end of the film are also very subtle and honest in her performance. Most of all, though, during the party scene near the beginning of the film, she is very seductive while playing her ukulele and singing with the baseball team. First of all, it's clear she's actually playing, and secondly, the idea of showing a woman playing anything that resembles a ukulele/guitar in a film seems so foreign for 1930. The only criticism I have of her performance is that, while I do detest the actors yelling into microphones, because there was no re-recording of dialogue at the time, sometimes I couldn't hear her dialogue in the outdoor scenes.

Mary Doran as Daisy was strong as well. The character of a femme fatale who steals Jack from Mary, she starts out very coy and innocent. She even whispers to him that she is a virgin and the girls make fun of her for being too good. Compare this to the end of the film when she has Jack on a short leash, her vocal timber has dropped, and the venom comes out, as she barks orders left and right, storms out of a telephone switchboard room after accusing the operator of patching her to the wrong call and realizing it was a prank by Jerry, and is an overall nightmare. 

There were some interesting cinematic choices that I enjoyed with the film, for example when Jerry and Mary go dancing. Their whole conversation is filmed from the legs down and only pans up at the very end to show that it was in fact Love and Van who were doing their own dancing in the scene. Also, in contrast to So This is College, the baseball game at the end of the film is very clearly featuring the actors of the film doing their own playing, specifically Schenk who is the pitcher, responsible for striking out the other team, and then scoring the final run of the game. Also, while random characters were listening to the game on the radio in So This is College, we have that same element here, with a snobby kid listening to the game and cheering along (an odd choice because this was a character that had never been introduced before and exists for a total of two random short scenes).

Unfortunately, there are also some rather odd editing choices which stand out more than the positive in this film. There is about 15 minutes toward the end of the film that is practically unwatchable because of the bad editing. A whole saga of Jack coming back to the team after Daisy has left him, learning that Mary and Jerry are engaged, and coming to terms with it as he is blowing the World Series for his team due to his heartache is filled with several short two minute scenes that fade to black and fade back in. The editors (James McKay and Tom Held) were definitely having a hard time managing the story and making a finished product. Unfortunately, this was the last piece Held would work on, and McKay took a 19 year break before returning to Hollywood (minus working briefly on Tarzan Escapes as director before being fired). The film employs title cards as well as newspaper headlines to introduce scenes or explain what has happened off-screen in between them, but I felt like a small piece of dialogue could have replaced these easily and kept the action going. I suppose that because this was a film with sound and silent versions accommodations needed to be made. Additionally, there was some implementation of hand cranked shots, but this was only obvious at the end of the film during the climactic final baseball game scene.

The musical numbers in the film are the biggest highlight. Beyond the minimalist jazz numbers that Van and Schenk perform in the film, where it's clear the music is being performed on camera, there are two other numbers that are bigger and utilize off-screen orchestrations. One is a number called "Ten Sweet Mamas", which features the baseball team in the locker room, showering naked-- obviously naked. It's clear the actors are wearing nothing, as the camera reveals everything except for private parts on them. In fact, one of the players definitely was showing a little butt crack! The only embarrassing part about this number was that Van was singing in a minstrel type of style, all while he and the other characters are being tended to by Black men. It is a complex situation-- on the one hand the number was progressive, even for today's standards, and would definitely be banned in a few years due to the Hayes Code. On the other hand, it was also so dated and offensive of the racial depictions of its time.

The "Harlem Madness" number, which comes later in the film, is the big show number of the film. Van and Schenk do a rendition first, and then an all-Black cast, including a cameo by Nina Mae McKinney come in with lavish costumes, outstanding choreography, and a lush orchestral score, and perform the number in such a way that anything else in the film isn't even worth noting. The camera work is noteworthy too. Thus far, if there has been a big stage number in an MGM musical, the camera work is pretty stagnant and mostly done in a far shot as to mirror the stage experience. Here, though, the number was shot from above, in closeups, and in an interesting change, from behind audience members' heads! I do hope that if people are wondering whether or not to watch this film, the "Ten Sweet Mamas" and "Harlem Madness" numbers are enough of a reason, because they are definite show-stoppers.

Home Video

They Learned About Women is another Warner Archive release from 2009. While this film did have a laserdisc release in 1990 as part of the Dawn of Sound box set, it's unclear if this DVD uses the same video mastering or a new one. Clearly, original elements were not used, and this came from a print. There are printed in splices, cue marks (which fall in the middle of the frame instead of the top), and there is an overall softness and flickering quality to the print. The quality of the cue marks hint that this was a 35mm print and not a 16mm print but it's hard to know if this could have come from a 16mm print without cue marks that had the 35mm cue marks printed in. While this isn't a bad video presentation, it's not spectacular either. The big issue is that the source print has been cropped on the edges. This is clear from text from the newspaper clippings used as make-shift title cards missing text on the sides of the image, and people's heads being cut off from time to time (most annoyingly during the "Harlem Madness" number). The audio is thankfully of wonderful quality, and without subtitles I could follow the dialogue with no issue, the exception being when Bessie Love was speaking some of her lines, but this was probably more due to her performance than the video transfer. While I don't think the whole film needs to be remastered again as it isn't very good, I do hope that some work is at least put into the two show stopping numbers I illustrated above into making them look and sound better for future generations.