Broadway Melody of 1938
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1937) Dir. Roy Del Ruth
111 min. / B&W / 1.37:1 / DTS-HD MA 2.0 MONO / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $24.98
Available from our partner Movie Zyng
Well, the Warner Archives’ big musical release of the month is one of several Broadway Melody films MGM gave us between 1929 and 1940, their answer perhaps to the Brothers Warner’s popular Gold Diggers series. This is probably the weakest in the series, but we’ll try and play square with it; there certainly are some gem sequences to be found in this coal bin.
George Murphy and Buddy Ebson are a couple of broke ex-hoofers who are getting by horse-sitting a thoroughbred named Stargazer. The horse is currently owned by an addle-brained old man and his snotty young wife, but the horse’s previous owner, a tap-dancer played by Eleanor Powell, sneaks along to keep an eye on the horse and look, nobody watches these things for the plot, especially when the sub-plots are the best part of the movie.
Best Parts of the Movie
Legendary Red-Hot-Mama Sophie Tucker is trying to get her daughter into show business, no surprise since her daughter is played by 15-year-old Judy Garland, and when you’ve got Sophie Tucker and Judy Garland in your movie, any minute wasted on the charmless George Murphy is one minute too many.
George and Buddy had scammed a couple of Italian barbers out of $20, promising them to turn it into $800 on a bet, and the barbers – including the hilarious Billy Gilbert – chase them throughout the film to get their money.
Eleanor Powell’s tap dancing: Nobody in the film can touch her in the Terpsichorean art, and she only embarrasses the rest of the cast.
Worst Parts of the Movie
Robert Taylor is our romantic leading man, so out of place and superfluous (he neither sings nor dances) that he’s off-screen for much of the picture, so much so that when he reappears our response is “Crap, I forgot about him.”
Balcony fave Bob Benchley is completely wasted as Taylor’s agent; he pops in from time to time to make a reference about being an alcoholic, although we did like his quip (Benchley probably ad-libbed it) “Around Times Square your name is a household word. I can’t quite remember what the word is now, but it’s a big one.”
Music, Music, Music
Miss Garland entertains us with Everybody Sing and the song everyone remembers from the film, Dear Mr. Gable (You Made Me Love You), which Judy had performed live for Mr. Gable’s MGM birthday party and which immediately caused everybody to say “We have to put that in a movie!”
There’s a novelty number with Murphy, Ebsen, and Powell called Follow in My Footsteps that is a wow when Eleanor is dancing.
The big finale is called Your Broadway and My Broadway and showcases Miss Tucker and the cast, and it’s a great way to end the film. (Snatches of songs from previous MGM musicals are dotted throughout the film, too.)
The usual superb Warner Archive picture and sound quality and a nice group of short subjects, including two that played with the film in 1937 in its Los Angeles engagement, the Traveltalks Glimpses of Peru and the wonderful back-screen glimpse Romance of Celluloid, plus an historical short, That Mothers May Live and the crazy MGM cartoon Pipe Dreams, which shows what happens to monkeys when they try tobacco. Radio programs, audio outtakes, and the film’s trailer round out the program. Because the film is nearly 2 hours long (which is about 20 min. too much, they should’ve cut out Mr. Taylor and been done with it), you may want to watch the shorts on the next night. Cheating like that is allowed per Balcony rules.
