#010: Chasing Rainbows

CHASING RAINBOWS

Release date 

February 23, 1930

History

While Chasing Rainbows was released in 1930, it was actually filmed in July and August, 1929, and featured the same lead cast members of Broadway Melody, Bessie Love and Charles King, had a similar theme as Broadway Melody (a love story gone awry in the behind the scenes drama of a musical show), and was filmed only five months after Broadway Melody premiered and one month after its general release. Also appearing are several veteran vaudeville actors-- a young Jack Benny, Marie Dressler, and Polly Moran to name a few.

Following suit with other MGM musicals at the time of including color sequences in a black and white film, Chasing Rainbows has two Technicolor song sequences, one is in the middle of the film, and another is the film's grand finale. The film did not do very well, and both sequences were separated from the rest of the film for a 1931 re-release, which intended to recoup costs. Unfortunately, this separating of the color sequences led to them being destroyed in the 1965 MGM fire. They included four numbers, one of which was a Blackface number with Charles King, and another the infamous number Happy Days are Here Again. The song would take on great meaning during the Great Depression, would become an anthem for Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidential campaign, and would be famously recorded by artists such as Barbra Streisand over the years. While a small version of the number still appears at the beginning of the film, the image for the main version of this number that would soon become an American Songbook standard is now lost.

Review

It surprises me that this film was a box office bomb, because of the films I have reviewed so far for this blog, it was probably one of my favorites. It's interesting to me that while this was filmed seven months prior to release, it was much better made than so many MGM musicals that would follow its production. I wonder if the fact that so much lazy production quality was going into MGM musicals at the end of 1929 had an effect on how this film did, because it is tightly edited, has a good script, great character development, good acting, and while we can only imagine, had some great song and dance numbers. In many ways, this film is much better than its predecessor, Broadway Melody, even if the film transfer was not great, which will be discussed later. 

Chasing Rainbows is about a traveling musical vaudeville show, and the ensemble's adventures throughout the season. The main characters are Terry (King) and Carlie (Love), the two leads of the show who are also close friends and have been working together for many years.  At the beginning of the film, Terry's girlfriend Peggy leaves him and the show for another man and Terry is heartbroken. While he is in a depressive funk, Carlie is able to talk him out of it and motivate him to keep working. When singer Daphne joins the show, he falls hard for her right away. Terry begins ditching Carlie for Daphne, creating tension. Carlie feels ignored, and Terry feels she is not being a supportive friend. They make up, but only shortly, as Carlie soon learns that Daphne is dating Don Cordova, another member of the company, on the side. Carlie doesn't want to break Terry's heart and keeps this from him, which Daphne then uses to her advantage to break the two friends up, all while Carlie has started to acknowledge her feelings for Terry.

As with her performance in They Learned About Women, Bessie Love acts circles around the rest of the cast in this film. After Terry learns that Daphne has been cheating on him with Cordova, he apologizes to her and sings the song "Lucky Me, Lovable You" to Carlie along with an instrumental record that she listens to, not as a love song, but as an apology to a friend. Love's performance in this scene is a great demonstration of her talent. She has the ability to change expressions in a single shot. When he's trying to apologize, she tries being cold to him but can't help herself from warming up to him, all in one take. Later in the scene, Terry asks that they always stick together and she smiles and says they should shake on it, and then changes expressions to completely heartbroken while being hugged, for the camera to see, but then can put a smile back on her face for King's character Terry to see. It's so natural and well done, I wonder if King even knew she was changing facial expressions and allowing the audience into her heartbreak when she wasn't looking at him for a split second. 

Terry is lured back by Daphne and marries her. This scene is vague but implies some pre-code film behavior. Clearly he knows she did him wrong, but when she invites him into her dressing room, the audience doesn't see what is happening and they're soon married; one can only guess that the two of them had sex. When Carlie gets word of this, the way that Bessie Love portrays her in this scene is so ahead of its time. She's able to pull off a performance of crying but pretending to laugh at the news, all the way from leaving his dressing room into the one that she shares with her roommate, Bonnie, played by Marie Dressler. This is a hard rouse to pull off for anybody, pretending or not, but the way that Love does this performance is so captivating that the audience can see what her character is doing. 

The ensemble cast of the film keeps it fresh throughout the drama. Eddie (Jack Benny) is the stage manager of the show and tries to keep everyone in line. His performance is a predecessor to his style of comedy that would revolutionize the stand up comedy world. This can be seen not just in funny lines such as "If you're going to kill yourself, give me two weeks notice" or "How do you look in a bathing suit? We'll get to that later" but also in how the company his character manages reacts to his funny lines, giving us an early version of a laugh track.

I loved seeing how close the company of this show was in the film. Marie Dressler as Bonnie performs a comedic vaudeville number on the train at the beginning as they are travelling between towns, and the whole company applauds for her and shows their support. A comic subplot is how she is constantly fighting with wardrobe mistress Polly (Polly Moran). There is a longer scene about twenty minutes into the film where the company does a run through of their vaudeville show with Daphne, which is really an opportunity for the film to throw in some song and dance numbers. This is a great look into the relationships within the company. Bonnie peers interestingly at the chemistry between Terry and Carlie as they rehearse a tap number "Lucky to Have Loveable You" in front of the cast. When Daphne performs "Do You Know What I'm Doing?", Bonnie looks on and makes it clear that she is not a fan of her. This is followed by a funny reprise entitled "Do You Know What You're Doing?" where Bonnie and Polly sing about their animosity for each other. At the end of the film, Bonnie and Polly finally embrace in a sweet moment as they get drunk together. While Marie Dressler is a very funny drunk, the scene is also a little bittersweet because it's revealed that while these two squabble, Bonnie is eternally grateful to Polly for helping her pay for an operation she needed years prior. 

Another touching aspect to the film is how the cast embraces an obviously gay stage hand with the show. He's a panicky nuisance to everyone from the start, is very effeminate, and yet there isn't a single line making fun of him, the cast acting homophobic or stiff toward him, or anything of the sort. In contrast, at the end of the film you see him embraced by the men and women of the company, as if he has a family with them. 

I love when inanimate objects are characters in films, and in Chasing Rainbows the train is a great example of this. The film doesn't open with your typical orchestrations for a film made in that time. Instead, there are titles over shots of a train, a regular setting for the characters of the film. We only hear a train whistle and the train going along the tracks for the whole title sequence. One early sequence is all about the characters boarding the train as it departs for another town, and we have Bonnie performing one of her big numbers in the train compartment shortly after (which I mentioned above). Time passes in the film are shown with the train going from one town to the other. The one that stuck out to me the most was a passing of time later in the film between December and June. A poster showing the Christmas show is seen, followed by shots of the train moving along the tracks, and then we see a shot of a poster advertising a show in June. A great alternative to a boring white text on black title card that would have simply read "Six months later".

All in all, I do recommend this film, even if what's left of it is incomplete. Thankfully, it's on home video, as there are still titles in the MGM musical library that are not available because there are missing segments.

Home Video

I'm glad this was a good enough film where the awful home video presentation of this can be forgiven. Released in May 2010, this was clearly an example of the Warner Archive taking a Turner Classic Movies video master and slapping it on DVD without doing any work. I specifically didn't buy any of these DVDs at the time because that is all they were doing, and charging $29.99 a pop for them. While there was a disclaimer prior to the film noting that the color sequences were missing, and a title card revealed what had happened in the missing sequence where it would have exited, I think it would have been nice to use still images over the audio since all of this exists on Vitaphone discs, instead of just giving a 10 second explanation of what happened in the missing portions of image. After all, the audio does still exist for the numbers, including the song the film is most known for, "Happy Days are Here Again", so this could have been a good addition to the release. If they didn't want to do this, adding the audio as a bonus feature could have also been a nice option.

The image had a lot of printed in splices and the film was heavily scratched in many sections. It looks like a mix of 16mm and 35mm elements were hobbled together to create this master, some fair quality, some not so much. This is fine and I understand a film from 1929 having deterioration issues, but it seems that the work on this release was as bare-bones at it could have gotten. Audio cuts in and out when it is missing, and is scratchy and distorted in several sections of the film. One notable section, during Terry's apology to Carlie in her room, is so bad that it heavily distracts from this intense performance by Bessie Love.

Sections at the reel changes are the worst. It was common at this time to have a longer pause in the audio at reel changes, due to the fact that sound film was new and theaters were still utilizing Vitaphone discs for projection. It would have been better if the folks making this video master had replaced the silent sections with some room noise from another part of the scene instead of allowing the track to be overwhelmed with pops and scratches. 

I wanted to listen to sections that are missing on the DVD due to lost picture elements, and the Vitaphone Project YouTube page added the last two reels to their page. They overlap with the last ten minutes of film that does exist on the DVD and I was surprised at how much better the fidelity was on the Vitaphone Project audio. It then occurred to me that Warner didn't even bother to utilize a new sound master from the Vitaphone discs for this release. If they had, while the picture still may have had its issues, at least the audio would have been more suitable. I hope, one day, that this does get a better release than what is out there-- at least with some digital work on the image scratches, matching the quality of the various picture elements a little better, making the missing sections not look so 90s (an analog video camera pan of production stills with very 90s text over it) and putting the Vitaphone discs back in instead of whatever source was used in this release, hopefully with a little sound cleanup. I doubt this will happen unless the color sequences are found, though.