(104 mins.) Released 1929-05-28
Director: Alan Crosland
Stars: Arthur Lake, Betty Compson, Joe E. Brown, Sally O'Neil
Larry Ceballos ... dance & stage presentations
originally posted 18 Sep 2017 22:24
We're back to the world of the backstage musical.
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Worth the price of the dvd just for Ethel Waters singing Am I Blue. She appears again to sing Birmingham Bertha, a forgettable tune. She's greeted with a lot of applause whenever she comes on stage. (This is the first of her 11 feature film, and 3 short film, credits.)
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Delightful bonus, the Four Covans dance to 2 numbers in the stage show. The 2 men and 2 women dress exactly alike (in costumes that contrast well with the background), and DANCE exactly alike. VERY refreshing, considering that women had the vote for less than a decade. Technical issue during their first number especially: the dancer on the left is virtually cut off most of the time. I wonder if he fell victim to the editing of the film to transfer the sound from the Vitaphone discs to a re-release sound-on-film print. Also, their tap dancing begs for better framing, since their feet are often omitted. This was an issue Fred Astaire fought for when he started appearing in film. (Ironically, his last musical film, Finnian's Rainbow (1968), directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, has a scene where his dancing feet are cut off.) Sadly, this is their only film credit.
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Joe E. Brown does an amazingly acrobatic comedic dance in the show. (I didn't remember him being a dancer. Sort of a shorter version of Ray Bolger or Buddy Ebsen.)
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Louise Fazenda provides her usual comic mugging, although she is prettier here than I remember.
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Arthur Lake is the whiny juvenile lead. In 1938 he began portraying Dagwood Bumstead in 28 Blondie movies.
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No extras on the dvd. No color sequence in this studio-released print.
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This is Darryl Zanuck's 10th listing (out of 230) as producer in IMDb, although he is officially uncredited.
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Alan Crosland also directed The Jazz Singer (1927) and Don Juan (1926), the first film with synchronized music and sound effects on Vitaphone discs. This is the last of his movies that I own. He died in 1936, at age 41, after making 21 more movies, 63 total.
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Warner Bros, dir. Crosland; 6+
