The Broadway Melody (1929)

The Broadway Melody has some historical importance. It was MGM’s first musical and it was the first musical to win a Best Picture Oscar.

With the advent of sound it was obvious that musicals would be a big thing, but the right formula needed to be found. It was no good just filming a Broadway show. A way would need to be found to make musicals cinematic. Paramount were already getting into the musical business and while Ernst Lubitsh’s The Love Parade is a delight it’s more or less an operetta. The Broadway Melody on the other hand invents a new genre - the backstage musical. Big musical numbers but also lots of human drama and romance and intrigue behind the scenes.

This formula would reach perfection with 42nd Street in 1932 but The Broadway Melody is a bold very early attempt.

It signals its intentions from the start, with some stunning aerial shots of Manhattan. This is going to be the magic of Broadway meeting the magic of movies. Or that's what we hope.

Songwriter Eddie Kearns (Charles King) has just got his big break. Big-time Broadway producer Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane) has not only bought one of his songs, he’s going to use it as the centrepiece of his new revue. Eddie now thinks he’s in the big-time, which he is up to a point. His girlfriend Hank Mahoney (Bessie Love) and her kid sister Queenie (Anita Page) have a successful sister act out in the boondocks but now they want to try their luck in the Big Apple. Eddie is sure he can get them a spot in the revue. Unfortunately when Zanfield sees their act he thinks Queenie is terrific but he thinks Hank is no good. There’s going to be some tension between the two sisters.

And there’s a complicated romantic quadrangle involving the Mahoney girls, Eddie and a smooth operator named Jacques Warriner (Kenneth Thomson).

This provides the behind-the-scenes human drama. And the entire focus of the film is this four-way romantic tangle.

The Broadway Melody’s biggest problem is that everybody is going to compare it to 42nd Street and it’s just not in the same league.

It just doesn’t have that Busby Berkeley genius. In the Busby Berkeley musicals the musical production numbers supposedly take place on stage. But they could never be accommodated on any stage and could never be watched by a theatre audience since they can only be appreciated when viewed through the camera’s roving eye, from above and beneath and from various angles. We have left the world of the theatre and entered a world of pure cinema. In The Broadway Melody the production numbers are filmed entirely from in front, as if we’re looking through the proscenium arch. These are filmed stage performances. They’re quite good, but they’re totally non-cinematic.

The Broadway Melody lacks the cynical hardboiled edge of the Warner Brothers musicals, and that sense that the show must succeed otherwise they all lose their jobs and starve. That’s because the 1930s Warner Brothers musicals were very much Depression-era musicals. But this is not true of The Broadway Melody. It was made and released in the boom times before the Stock Market Crash. The Broadway Melody is very much a Jazz Age musical, and it has an underlying buoyant optimism. We’re all going to be successful and we’re all going to be rich.

This is of course a pre-code movie. Jacques Warriner makes it clear that he wants to set Queenie up as a kept woman and that marriage will not be part of the deal. Queenie makes it clear that she’s happy with this idea.

There’s one slightly disturbing moment. A showgirl perched on the prow of a prop ship falls 25 feet to the stage floor. She hits the floor and she doesn’t movie. She is taken out on a stretcher - and she is never mentioned again! The poor girl might be dead for all we know. But the show must go on.

This movie really is way too long. The ingredients are here, but the balance is wrong. There’s too much focus on the romance melodrama and not enough on the backstage struggles involved in putting on a show. The staging of the musical numbers is unimaginative and stodgy. It is worth seeing for its historical importance but it just doesn’t catch fire.

The Warner Archive Blu-Ray looks terrific.