The Broadway Melody (1929)
The first--and possibly only--Best Picture winner to reference my hometown of Reading, PA.
Why, it's cream in the can, baby!
The Broadway Melody (1929) - watched 7/13/24
Director: Harry Beaumont
Writers: Norman Houston, James Gleason
Starring: Charles King, Anita Page, Bessie Love, Kenneth Thomson
Available to watch on most platforms to rent or buy
First Time Watch? Yes
Folks, we’ve now found ourselves at the end of the 2nd Academy Awards! Honestly, this is a huge achievement for me, a frequent abandoner of projects.
But Janelle! I hear you say. There were five Best Picture nominees, and this is only the fourth film!
Well, first of all, I admire you for keeping track. Accountability is important! Second, there's a good reason for this, and that reason is that the fifth film nominated for Best Picture, Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot, is a lost film. Currently, only about 2500 feet of film (of a total 10,172 feet) have been found, and these excerpts are currently preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which can’t be accessed by the general public. It’s the one Best Picture nominee considered to be lost; a couple other entries are nearly complete, with only small segments lost, but with the amount of film missing from The Patriot it’s not possible to watch enough of it to really matter.
UCLA did post a silent trailer for The Patriot to their YouTube page, which is the closest I’ll likely get in my lifetime to watching this film. Based on the trailer… it honestly looks like it kinda slaps. If the editing and action of the film is half as engaging as the trailer makes it out to be, it seems like we’re missing out on a pretty exciting historical drama.
The Patriot is loosely based on Czar Paul I of Russia, who seems like a truly crazy dude, and the events leading up to his assassination. It was tied with In Old Arizona for the most nominations this year, at five nods—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Art Direction, and it won for Best Writing. It would have been nice to have seen more than a scant three minutes of footage, if only to break up the monotony of gangster flicks and bland romances that I’ve been inundated with so far in this venture. Czar Paul seems like he would’ve spiced things up, for crying out loud! Alas, we’re sadly stuck with a bunch of duds1 from 1928 and 1929, the last of which being our winner, The Broadway Melody.
Baby, they were plenty smart when they made you beautiful.
Hank and Queenie Mahoney (Bessie Love & Anita Page, respectively) are a vaudeville sister act who have been touring the midwest, and have now settled in New York City with aspirations of making it to Broadway. Hank, conveniently, is engaged to Eddie Kearns (Charles King), an established performer who will soon be starring in a new revue to hit Broadway. He meets the gals in their new apartment—apparently he hasn’t seen Queenie since she was much younger, and seeing her all grown up makes him all horny. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen a character become enamored with another so quickly and so strongly before—and it was super unsettling!2
Eddie manages to swing an audition for the producer of the Broadway revue, Zanfield (Eddie Kane). A chorus girl, jealous of the Mahoney sisters, sabotages their audition by putting a bag inside the piano. Hank, the more hot-headed of the sisters, starts a very funny fight with the chorus girl, and Zanfield passes on putting the act in his show. He says that he might be able to add Queenie to the show, on account of her good looks, and Queenie eventually convinces him to allow her sister into the show as well, by agreeing to be paid only one wage for the two of them. During a dress rehearsal, Zanfield eventually cuts their act. Say, these dames are really getting jerked around!
When a performer is injured during the rehearsal, Queenie steps in to take her place. She catches the eye of Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thomson), a suave, wealthy womanizer. Both Hank and Eddie become enraged at Queenie for indulging Jock’s advances, and they make their disapproval clear over and over and over again during their courtship. In reality, Queenie is only dating Jock to try to distract from her growing feelings for Eddie. Queenie and Eddie eventually confess their love for each other, but Queenie is ultimately too loyal to her sister to break things off with Jock.
Hank’s no fool, though. After witnessing a very specifically heated argument between Queenie and Eddie, she realizes that they are in love, and she urges Eddie to go after her. Huh. Okay. To motivate him to go after Queenie, Hank tells Eddie that she was only interested in him to advance her own career. Eddie then leaves to go find Queenie and, in the most compelling scene of the whole movie, Hank becomes emotional, oscillating between sobs and laughter, and calls up her uncle to accept a job with a touring show.
At a party, Jock manages to sequester himself with Queenie in a room away from the crowd. He attempts to assault her, telling her she owes him for all of the gifts he’s given her (yikes!!!). Eddie bursts into the room and attempts to fight Jock, but he’s knocked down right away. Queenie runs to Eddie’s side, finally revealing her true loyalty to him.
Cue a very abrupt time jump! Eddie and Queenie are returning to the sisters’ apartment after their damn honeymoon, and everybody seems reasonably happy, if a little uncomfortable, though I can’t imagine why!! Queenie announces that she’s done with show business, essentially hinting that she’s settling down to be a proper housewife in Long Island. Hank leaves to go on tour with her new partner, who happens to be the chorus girl who tried to sabotage her early on. She vows that when the tour is over, they will return to Broadway.
Calories? What are they?
My immediate initial thought during the first scene of this movie sum up my overall thoughts pretty well: What the hell is wrong with these people?
The very first scene shows a bunch of different vaudeville and chorus and musical acts performing all willy-nilly in the office of a music publishing company. It’s honestly an insane, chaotic scene that made me shake my head and think “I guess theater people have just always been like this.” Charles King then introduces us to the titular song, which we will hear way too many other times throughout the film. The way this movie starts out… does not bode well for the rest of it.
We then meet Hank and Queenie, who are delightful. I could have watched Bessie Love and Anita Page riff and play off each other for the rest of my life, truly. I adored these sisters and I wanted better for them than what this movie offered. Honestly, take away the creepy men and this wouldn’t have been a half bad movie. Bessie Love truly carries the whole thing—her range in this role is stunning to watch, and I would even go so far as to say her performance is responsible for this movie getting the Best Picture win, despite her losing in the Best Actress category (damn you, Mary Pickford). It’s a shame, really, because you can tell Bessie Love put in the work for that Oscar nomination. I have no idea how she reacted to this upset, but I am outraged on her behalf, almost a full century later. Bessie Love, you were the star of 1929 and I’m so sorry you didn’t get your proper dues for it.
Bessie Love’s dynamic performance aside, this movie didn’t have much going for it. Lots of creepy guys behaving poorly. A character with a stutter is played for laughs. The music was… fine. The dancing was… fine. Two highlights include a chorus girl who toe taps during a segment, and a very funny pastor character dancing during the “Wedding of the Painted Doll” number.
The ending also left me feeling deeply, deeply unsatisfied. Queenie quits showbiz to become a housewife to a middle-aged creep and Hank gives up her Broadway dream almost immediately, settling for a touring show. I mean, do what you gotta do to keep the bills paid, Hank, but I hated to see this strong, talented character resign herself to accepting less than she deserved.
Did the Academy get this one right? I mean… jeez, we didn’t exactly have a great pool of films to choose from in 1929, it seems. We had a formulaic crime noir, a racist western, a vaudeville revue, a historical drama lost to time, and… this. I want to believe that The Patriot at least offered something more compelling, more unique, just… more. But considering I can’t fairly judge The Patriot against these other films, I guess The Broadway Melody would technically be considered my Best Picture for the 2nd Academy Awards. Sheesh, how bleak.
I do give the film an extra half-star boost for mentioning my hometown of Reading, PA. Look, it actually doesn’t take much to impress me, okay!
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Quick Facts:
Nominated for 3 Academy Awards:
Best Picture (Won)
Best Director (Harry Beaumont)
Best Actress (Bessie Love)
MGM’s first musical, and first talking picture
Originally contained a Technicolor sequence which is now lost
My Rating: ⭐️⭐ ½
Next Up: The Big House (1930)
Too bad they weren’t freaking Milk Duds!!!! My favorite movie snack!!! haha, just kidding. I do love Milk Duds though. Girl, I don’t know, I’m tired.
Especially when you consider that Anita Page was only 19 in this movie and Charles King was in his early 40s! Yuck!!!