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"Who are we to laugh at popular music?" It opens on a hobo's tapping toe and catalogs the rhythmic morning routines at a ritzy summer resort, it might be Clair or Mamoulian only it's Busby Berkeley in his first time directing an entire movie. (An early bit of bravura has the camera tracking backwards past the employees' legs, then forward past their outstretched arms into a close-up of Grant Mitchell as the hotel director, and finally craning away for a wide view of the lobby.) Tips are encouraged so the moneyed widow (Alice Brady) lets four bellhops share a quarter, her plan is to marry her daughter (Gloria Stuart) to the nincompoop writing a monograph on snuff boxes (Hugh Herbert), "nothing to sneeze at." The clerk (Dick Powell) is a paid companion, the stenographer (Glenda Farrell) forges a marriage proposal, the theatrical producer (Adolphe Menjou) knows how to swindle a would-be aesthete. "I order vintage champagne. What do I get? Vinegar filled with gas!" Love and art are mercenary enterprises in this most cynical of early Warners musicals, the romantic apex is Frank McHugh spinning across a hallway on the wings of randiness. "The Words Are in My Heart" balloons from a tableau of white blossoms and cardboard moonlight into a gargantuan jigsaw of undulating pianos. Berkeley's magnum opus of darkening exhilaration, "The Lullaby of Broadway" is a city symphony sung by the dreamer in the dark—the pleasure seeker (Winifred Shaw) whose nocturnal orgy of stomping feet and askew angles finally engulfs her, leaving the mass requiem to contemplate vacant bedroom and hungry kitten. "Isn't that a peach of a tune? So barbaric." With Joseph Cawthorn, Dorothy Dare, and E.E. Clive. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |