(78 mins.) Released 1933-12-22
Director: Raoul Walsh
Stars: Marion Davies, Bing Crosby, Fifi D'Orsay, Stuart Erwin.
Albertina Rasch ... dance director
musical, romance
originally posted 15 Oct 2017 20:40
Wow. Wish I'd been keeping a ratings log with reasons. I rated this on 4 Oct 2014 with 3 other movies (none musicals); they each got 6, but this was 8. Today I give it a tepid 6.
We get 13 songs (5 done by a novelty radio trio), and 3 of the non-novelties are familiar: the title song, Beautiful Girl, and Temptation. Two more give us Marion Davies dancing, which is ok, but not more. One has a brief chorus of scarecrows with faces covered; this is MGM, and 6 years before The Wizard of Oz (1939), but weird anyway.
Marion's performance is subdued. When a character is yelling at her, she's speaking in a low calm tone, but when she gets slapped, she hits back right away. Is this a director problem, or did she have an acting coach (or boyfriend Hearst?) sabotaging her?
Among Raoul Walsh's 76 talkies, 8 are musicals, but none are rated as high as this (7.9 now); next highest is 7.0; lowest is 4.8. And his CV is mostly macho works, directing Bogie, Cagney, Flynn, Mitchum. My favorite of his films is High Sierra (1941), 8.
For the plot, we get radio singer Bing going to Hollywood to make a movie (which should be a musical, yes?) and Marion abandoning her boring life, tagging along with Bing because she fell in love with him from his radio performance. But instead of seeing professional musical numbers, they are mostly dreams or crew entertaining each other during off time. We do get a montage of the movie, so we see some costumes, and a bit of a Cinderella plot, but Marion plays the Prince. (Huh?)
I must have been influenced by the other IMDb voters. I'm pulling it down to a 6, and giving a plus for the pretty voice and face of Bing. But it was tough to watch his character drowning his sorrows in booze for a short while, given his real-life troubles with drink.
MGM, dir. Walsh, 6+
