EveryBestPicture.com revisits this Oscar Best Picture winner
This is much more what I expected of an aged Hollywood “Best Picture”. My hopes were high after ‘Wings’, and perhaps my inability to appreciate schmaltzy musicals is to blame, but this is definitely one for the ‘you had to be there’ pile. There was, however, much to say for The Broadway Melody at the time. It brought the magic of Broadway to a cinema near you, belters that most would previously only ever had heard over the wireless, disembodied, were now accompanied by the faces that sang them. It did suffer from more than its share of crowd-pleasing gimmicks- there were more than enough semi-clad ladies in fancy silk underwear changing backstage, or in a bathroom, or offstage, or in the hotel room, or bathing nude… come to think of it I am not sure there were any scenes that did not feature or were not bookended by scenes of chorus girls getting changed. The stand-out moment would have been the Technicolor sequence which will have wowed audiences of the 1930’s. Although it wasn’t the first to have colour. Nor sound. Nor even both. Much like Avatar, where once the 3D element is removed it becomes distinctly average, this film would have done well to be warmly received without the colour sequence. Worse still for the legacy of this picture, no colour print survives, so you will have to drift through it in black and white. The script was paper thin- simply serving to showcase the colour, sound, songs and chorus girls. There were some try-hard ‘zinger’ one-liners and yet another love triangle in this story of two sisters arriving in broadway trying to make it big. Although it does depart from the classic 3 act format (1. struggle to make it big 2. Have a modicum of success but a major setback 3. Fame and fortune abound) this may be down to the fact that the makers were too busy trying to feature all the crowd-pulling features to let the plot get in the way. With the director doing a professional by the numbers job (although much lauded by critics at the time, so maybe the lens of time I see this through does poor Harry Beaumont a disservice), scripts in their early days of evolution (this was only the first ‘talkie’ to win an Oscar- as only the 2nd Oscar this is perhaps a cheap statistic!) and camera work generally limited to “Can we get their legs AND faces in every shot?” this is one you might avoid, save to get the gist of early musicals. It was a total victory at the box office. Many critics celebrated its sure-fire recipe to make money before general release, strong performances from the leads, technical gimmicks and a decent score cemented financial success and were even enough to win it the Oscar. The first all-colour talking movie had only come out the year before, but The Broadway Melody came with all the added magic and titillation of Broadway. “Great performances & plenty of sex!” squealed one sweaty-palmed critic for Variety. He was to be rewarded with 3 sequels over the next 10 years, whether he liked them or not. To the modern eye this ain’t no hit, it has aged badly and stands as a testament to how a film can generate money and win awards by pushing all the right buttons on the cash register. |
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AuthorPablo Griffiths is a man with a passion for many things. He has recently taken an interest in writing about film, and himself in the third person. |