Why, It’s Vaudeville in the Can, Baby

The first sole Best Picture winner (after “Sunrise” and “Wings” (both 1927) split the top prizes of the inaugural Academy Awards), “The Broadway Melody” is a good reminder that the Oscars have always rewarded some very bad films. Indeed, I’ve seen four of the Best Picture nominees for that second awards show, and they all suck. The only good nominee, presumably as it’s a silent film directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, is now lost. Moreover, it’s not as though the 1928-1929 theatrical season was an atypically bad one; it’s just that they tended not to nominate the good films, which at that time mostly still meant that they were silent films. Because these early talkies are terrible. Don’t give them credit, either, for innovation when such so-called pioneering efforts consisted of abandoning a mature art form (the silent film) for what’s essentially canned theatre—in this case, vaudeville, or what hoity-toity New York high society would call a “revue.” Plus, there’s better early talkies and musicals than this (e.g. Lubitsch’s “The Love Parade” (1929)). Of course, MGM’s next musical and inexplicably (well, MGM head Louis B. Mayer basically owned the union-busting Academy, so actually quite explicable) another of that year’s Best Picture nominees, “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” was a straight-up vaudeville show embarrassing the studio’s top stars.

“The Broadway Melody” is credited as the first all-talkie musical, but so what? Invention in and of itself doesn’t convey quality. “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) wasn’t only Hollywood’s first epic; its narrative was about revolution (granted, a racist one), and it was a revolution in film technique, improving cinematically upon the Italian super-theatrical productions, such as “Cabiria” (1914), that preceded it. “The Jazz Singer” (1927) wasn’t just some first talkie; it was a silent-sound hybrid about the conflict between tradition and modernity, monocultural orthodoxy and multicultural showbiz. And one could go on—”Citizen Kane” (1941) both narratively and visually about telling a story from multiple perspectives, a “deep focus,” to the “Avatar” blockbusters (2009 and 2022, thus far), spectacles that are about posthuman avatars and nurturing and protecting CGI environments, etc. So, is there anything special, form meeting function, about “The Broadway Melody” being an early full-fledged filmed musical to never shut up? The short answer is: no.

It’s creaky, with vestigial title cards between scenes and with no musical accompaniment for when characters aren’t performing their musical numbers, because without the ability of sound mixing early talkies forwent the silent film tradition of full, non-diegetic scores. Lacking even Paramount’s boom mic, the dialogue is over-enunciated inane filler. The musical numbers are dull, including the titular one that’s played four times, and irrelevant to the backstage drama, which itself is a laughable love-triangle melodrama, silly self-sacrifices and the woman’s goal to become a housewife included, that’s extremely poorly acted, including by Best Actress nominee Bessie Love. Scene dissection is exceedingly limited, with the blocking mostly consisting of the actors moving for the camera instead of the other way around. This happens frequently, beginning with the opening scene, but the most outlandish example may be the dance at the birthday party where the couple shuffle their feet in place under the microphone and only for the static nature of this composition to be highlighted by the camera moving to follow them dancing to another microphone in between the chatter. I was also afraid (or rather hoping) lead actor Charles King was going to headbutt someone the way he ran in for those close-ups with two figures talking to each other with their faces only a couple inches apart and which especially standout with the reliance otherwise here on long-shot framings and rudimentary editing (according to the cinemetrics website, the average shot length is about 13 seconds, which is slow but doesn’t even sound as bad as it feels actually watching it). Reportedly, King was so bad at memorizing his lines they resorted to cue cards (his character’s repeated inability to complete a sentence (“Because,” “because.” “Here’s your pants, sir.”) comes across as a joke on this), but I don’t know what everyone else’s excuse was. Even Anita Page, who like Love can’t sing or dance; go watch her instead in the silent “Our Dancing Daughters” (1928).

”That’s not a motion picture. It’s not a movie at all; it’s a stage presentation.”

- Producer Irving Thalberg responding to rushes for “The Broadway Melody.”

Either nobody listened to Thalberg’s demands for more camera angles, which is unlikely, or this must’ve been an even worse picture before retakes and is still awful due to both the limited capabilities of synchronized-sound technology at the time and the limited capabilities of the filmmakers involved in the production. There’s a reason MGM was the last holdout of the majors to adopt sound. I’ve tried at least three times now to find something worthwhile here, but no, and those film buffs who keep protesting otherwise should stop. To be fair, though, the New York setting is of some interest, and the opening cityscape sky montage demonstrates how lousy the rest of the picture looks by comparison. Like the sisters here from “out West,” Hollywood was now looking to Broadway for talkie talent. Also, one of the sisters (Love) wants to do all the jibber-jabbering, whereas the other (Page) tries to keep her good acts unsaid. She even, albeit ridiculously, gets her big break by merely standing silently during one musical number. But, then, both sisters and everyone else won’t pipe down in the end, so whatever reflexive promise might’ve been there is lost aside from the backstage genre already pioneered by “The Jazz Singer” in film and the same year on stage by “Show Boat.” Again, though, the music has little to nothing to do with the backstage drama, so that’s a lost cause, too. Additionally, an originally-Technicolor musical sequence now only exists, like the rest of the film, in black and white (because sound-on-film also negated the silent film practice of tinting and toning).

The most interesting parts tend to be glossed over. There’s a gay stereotype as a costume designer, who argues with a lesbian at one point. Page’s Queenie is forcibly stripped by a stage manager for a costume change between scenes. "Zanfield" obviously sounds like Florenz Ziegfeld, the real Broadway’s king of vaudeville… I mean, “revues,” or “follies.” He’s comically followed around by yes-men and financed by skirt-chasing drunkards. The name of the picture’s cad, a “Jacques Warriner,” sounds like Jack Warner, head of Warner Bros. studios, where the sound-on-disc system Vitaphone was pioneered. The “skipping record” stutterer of an uncle-manager here seems to be a joke on such sound-on-disc systems, and the stutterer would be a trope in talkies for years to come.

As for the Jack Warner parody here being the sexual aggressor, and not that I know that much about or care to defend Warner, but this is a narrative about starlets sleeping with their songwriter, as played by Love, who was involved with lyricist Arthur Freed at the time, and Page, who ended up marrying composer Nacio Herb Brown. Also, Freed allegedly exposed his genitals to a 12-years-old Shirley Temple, and Mayer is said to have sabotaged Page’s career because she wouldn’t perform sexual favors for him. Seems there were plenty of “Jacques Warriners” to go around, in other words.

Speaking of awkward transitions and to continue to be fair here, there are a few good uses of the primitive sound technology. The opening montage of intentionally awkward cutting between various musical noises at Gleason’s Music Publishing Co. is a perfect set-up for the rest of the show, letting us know what we’re in for. There are two scenes with non-diegetic orchestra music for when Eddie sings to one or both of the sisters in their hotel room. The sound effects of Queenie entering and leaving in a car outside as the camera focuses on a close-up of Hank in her dressing room is surprisingly good, and it’s too bad the rest of the picture is so relatively poor. I only rate this one as high as I do because there are a few things to pull it up from the gutter where most of it resides. If there’s any distinction “The Broadway Melody” deserves, it’s that of the first bad so-called Best Picture and a contender for the worst of all time to ever be so honored.