MOVIE OF THE DAY: "BROADWAY" (1929)

If you want to try an interesting experiment, try watching your favorite musicals, particularly those of the '30s and '40s,without the musical numbers. By and large, you'll find them pretty mediocre without those swell scores and choreography. 

Broadway must be the only musical with the opposite problem. Whenever the gangster subplot is onscreen, it's riveting in its old-fashioned way. 

It was years before I saw anything like
this in my own life, that's for sure.

But once anything having to do with music or its performers takes center stage (screen?), it makes you wish the hoodlums shot the songwriters. And yet it's probably the second-best musical of 1929, coming behind The Cocoanuts with the Marx Brothers.

Released both in silent and sound versions, Broadway takes place in a Times Square nightclub over the course of roughly 24 hours. Singer-dancer Roy Lane is trying to keep his sweetie Billie Moore from falling for bootlegger Steve Crandall. Crandall, having just killed his criminal rival Scar Edwards, wants to scram with Billie before police detective Dan McCorn puts the cuffs on him. Meanwhile, nightclub owner Nick Verdis, who buys Crandall's hooch, just wants to make it through every day alive. Who knew show business was such a dangerous profession?

Forget about this sap, and go with the
gangster.

Had Broadway centered on the crime angle, it would have been a shorter but
dramatically better movie. The big problem involving entertainers Roy Lane and Billie Moore is the characters themselves. As written, Roy is such an obnoxious, self-centered, pig-headed asshole that Billie must be an utter moron, which is pretty much how Merna Kennedy plays her. 

Even worse is the insufferable Glenn Tryon (as Roy Lane), who gives one of the most irritating performances in movie history. No woman today, woke or not, would put up with this dope for a second, either in real life or in the movie. Tryon almost, almost made up for it six years later by co-writing Laurel & Hardy's best feature, Sons of the Desert. God knows how he did it.

Bootlegger Crandall seems to have squeezed the hands
off Det. McCorn.

But you know who's good? I mean really good? Thomas E. Jackson as Det. McCorn. Almost poetically cynical and definitely menacing, Jackson seems to have created the archetypical flatfoot, who can drive a suspect to  madness without making a single threat, yet turn around and give another killer a break, because the victim had it coming. Maybe it helped that he originated the role in the stage version three years earlier.

If my TCM viewing is any indication, Jackson seemed to spend much of the rest of his career playing police detectives, police detectives, and, oh yes, police detectives. Hey, if you're good at something, keep at it!

The costumes aren't that hot, either.

Seeing that Broadway is a musical, I suppose it's necessary to touch upon the score. Frankly, it's not worth touching with a ten-foot conductor's baton. Of the five numbers, only "Hittin' the Ceiling" is interesting, and that's because the melody is, er, way too obviously inspired by (i.e., ripped off from) the far superior "Fascinating Rhythm". (Maybe because the latter was five years old by then, they thought people had forgotten it). Another song, "What Came First, The Chicken or the Egg", is even worse than it sounds, and is likely the low point of 20th century pop music. Which is really something since this was only 28 years into it. (At least the audiences who saw the silent version of Broadway were spared the horror.)

A million dollars, a million candle power -- but who's
counting?

The real draw ofBroadway --   the first million-dollar musical -- is the extraordinary nightclub set. So large that Universal Pictures had to construct an entire soundstage to house it, it also required the construction of a 50-foot crane for the camera to take it all in. Director Paul Fejos swoops, dives, and sweeps through the musical numbers at an often dizzying pace, breaking the long, one-take shots so prevalent of all the early talkies. 

Paul Fejos sets up a shot. I have no idea if he's on the floor or atop the crane, or if anybody can even hear him

 

By the time of Broadway's brief Technicolor finale, you're gripping the arms of your chair in order to keep from falling. Just why the character of Roy Lane wants to leave this palace for a vaudeville dump in Pottsville, Pennsylvania is never properly explained. Broadway isn't the best musical but at times it's the most visually exciting. 

Paul Fejos makes takes a final walkthrough the 
Times Square set to make sure it's worthy of Satan.

It would be unkind to say that you'll leave Broadway humming the sets, but not necessarily unfair. Just the pre-credit sequence, with Satan towering over a miniature Times Square set, is startling. But there's plenty of snappy 1929 slang spit out in every scene, too, with the best line belonging to, of all people, Glenn Tryon. Before going onstage for a big number, he gives advice to the dancers on impressing the audience: "Cut 'em deep and let 'em bleed!" 

Abbott's not going
anywhere.

Well, Broadway cut me deep from time to time, and I look forward to bleeding from it again one day. I'll just turn down the volume during the songs. 

One more thing: George Abbott directed the 1926 stage version of Broadway. In 1994, my wife and I saw the revival of his 1952 hit Damn Yankees starring Jerry Lewis. Abbott was credited as consultant and with script revisions. At the time, he was 105. He cut 'em deep and let 'em bleed for a long, long time.

                                              

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