Film musical taken from JB Priestley's novel about three musicians joining together to save a failing concert party, the Dinky Doos.
(113 mins.) Released 1933-02-28
Director: Victor Saville
Stars: Jessie Matthews, Edmund Gwenn, John Gielgud, Mary Glynne
Comedy | Musical | Romance
Watched online, poor quality video and especially audio:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5eyv5q
(If you watch it again, don't choose this one.)
(If you watch it again, don't choose this one.)
Keeping in mind that we're back to 1933, and this is BRITISH, the ratio of dance+singing to plot is bad, but MGM hadn't figured that out yet either. The problem is that with JM, you have someone who can sing AND dance well. MGM needed Eleanor Powell to star in 1935 before they put together a terrific ratio, and her singing was dubbed. Even Warner Bros made you wait until the end of the show to get 20-30 minutes straight of song&dance. RKO did better in '34 with The Gay Divorcee, but they had Astaire involved. (What was the formula on Broadway? Show Boat was 1926. Were stage musicals still mostly revues in '33?)
So this one is a lot of talking, some with heavy accents (and bad print audio), and a lot of bad/mediocre performances because that's where we were: "concert parties". It seems like that was poor man's music hall/vaudeville. And the conclusion of the piece (SPOILER) is that JM's girl gets elevated to The Big Time, but the rest of the troupe replaces her and continues on the concert party circuit. (I guess Styne and Sondheim deserve a lot more credit for Gypsy than I've ever given them for writing such good songs that seem appropriate to vaudeville and burlesque, but still give great pleasure.)
John Gielgud is virtually unrecognizable because he's so young and thin.
The dress on the poster above is actually much prettier in the film (even with the bad print). The film is black and white, so I thought of the dress as white, and it's just as sheer as the poster. They lit her from the back so you could see her legs as she danced. They had rehearsal clothes with very short shorts, so the dress didn't show as much as we'd already seen.
Gaumont British Picture Corporation, dir. Saville; 5-
So this one is a lot of talking, some with heavy accents (and bad print audio), and a lot of bad/mediocre performances because that's where we were: "concert parties". It seems like that was poor man's music hall/vaudeville. And the conclusion of the piece (SPOILER) is that JM's girl gets elevated to The Big Time, but the rest of the troupe replaces her and continues on the concert party circuit. (I guess Styne and Sondheim deserve a lot more credit for Gypsy than I've ever given them for writing such good songs that seem appropriate to vaudeville and burlesque, but still give great pleasure.)
John Gielgud is virtually unrecognizable because he's so young and thin.
The dress on the poster above is actually much prettier in the film (even with the bad print). The film is black and white, so I thought of the dress as white, and it's just as sheer as the poster. They lit her from the back so you could see her legs as she danced. They had rehearsal clothes with very short shorts, so the dress didn't show as much as we'd already seen.
Gaumont British Picture Corporation, dir. Saville; 5-
