(92 min) Released 1937-03-12
Director: Mitchell Leisen
Stars: Carole Lombard, Fred MacMurray, Charles Butterworth, Dorothy Lamour, Anthony Quinn
Genres: Comedy | Drama | Musical | Romance
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029626/
Public domain print; very fuzzy.
Really not a musical, but a drama involving people who make music professionally, with plenty of performances shown.
A good comedy/drama as befitting both stars.
Lombard (b. 1908), despite her early death at age 33, has 61 film credits; 19 of them released before '29 (the year of bulk transition to talkies), starting in '21. This film was released between My Man Godfrey ('36) and Nothing Sacred ('37), so she's in her prime here. She was between husbands: divorced W.Powell in '33, married C.Gable in '39. This is her 3rd of 4 films in this quest, although she has more music/musicals in her CV.
MacMurray (also b. 1908) was actually a musician, earning a living with his saxophone in earlier days. (He doesn't do well fingering the trumpet here.) Despite my youthful impression that he was just a somewhat befuddled dad (My Three Sons ran 1960-72), he's actually a 6'3" hunk in his salad days, as really shown off in No Time for Love ('43) with Claudette Colbert (a frequent costar) and same director Leisen, where he plays a sandhog, a worker digging out tunnels under water. (Colbert's a reporter.) This is his 14th film of 85 (throwing away the 3 bit parts in '29) since '35. The last was in '78; died in '91. He made only 9 music/musicals; we'll probably see him 6 more times in this quest.Nice to see Butterworth take on some serious scenes; he's usually just the wealthy incompetent; here he's one of the musicians.
Fourth film for Dorothy Lamour; 2nd with a character name. The first Road to ... picture is Singapore ('40), and she does 11 films before that. (Yes, she's in all 7 with Hope & Crosby.) She'll be in a lot of films on this quest.
Anthony Quinn (b. 1915) looks that young, very handsome and virile, and a lot like son Francesco. We only see him in the bar fight early in the film. His lines are in Spanish (we're in Panama), and you can feel the heat when he's onscreen. This is his 6th of 139 credits, and we'll look for him again shortly in Waikiki Wedding,
If someone rescues this film from public domain hell, I'd like a restored copy. It's screwball, it's intimate, it's tragic, it's jazzy, it's good. One of those proving that lapsed copyright can happen to good films, even those produced by a major studio.
Paramount, dir. Leisen; 7
