by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Broadway
Melody of 1940, fourth and last in the Broadway
Melody series at MGM and a better
film than its immediate predecessors, Broadway Melody of 1936 and Broadway Melody of 1938, mainly because of two mega-talents MGM added to
the mix this time around: Fred Astaire and Cole Porter. Astaire was available
because he’d completed his seven-year RKO contract in 1939 with The Story of
Vernon and Irene Castle, the
last in his original series of nine films with Ginger Rogers, and he was now
free-lancing. Porter was available because he already had an ongoing
relationship with MGM that had produced the scores for Born to Dance (1936) and Rosalie (1937), both with Eleanor Powell, who had starred
in the two immediately preceding Broadway Melodies and was in this one along with her dancing partner
from the other two, George Murphy. The script — “original” (quotes definitely
merited) story by Jack MacGowan (a writer on the previous films in the series)
and Dore Schary (an odd name indeed for a film so utterly without social
comment) and screenplay by Leon Gordon and George Oppenheimer — was nothing
special and blatantly copied the mistaken-identity gimmick from the
Astaire-Rogers classic Top Hat five years before. Johnny Brett (Astaire) and King Shaw (Murphy) are
taxi dancers at the “Dimeland” dime-a-dance hall; their duties include
escorting the female members of the couples that get married there — the place
offers a live, for-real wedding ceremony every night — and essentially giving
them away at what passes for an altar at the Dimeland dance floor. They also
get to do a specialty number every night, though they don’t get paid extra for
it; the number we see is a Porter song called “Please Don’t Monkey with
Broadway” which —though I hadn’t thought of it this way before — is really an
anti-gentrification song pleading with the New York City authorities to let
Broadway remain what it is and traditionally has been instead of being
remodeled into something newer, more antiseptic but less appealing. (Maybe I was
wrong about this movie being utterly without social comment.) Johnny learns that a bill collector is coming
to Dimeland to serve a subpoena on King Shaw — so he assumes Shaw’s name and
puts off Bob Casey (Frank Morgan), who he thinks is a process server but is in
reality a Broadway producer wanting to sign up that spectacular dancer as the
lead in a new musical, Swing Song, starring established Broadway attraction Clare Bennett (Powell).
The real King Shaw gets summoned to the producers’ offices,
where Casey’s partner Bert C. Matthews (Ian Hunter, who’d previously played
people around the fringes of Broadway in weepies starring Bette Davis or Kay
Francis at Warner Bros.) sees him, tells him to study Bennett’s show and learn
her number “Between You and Me,” and learn it so he can dance it with her as
his audition piece. King gets the job with Clare’s show and also starts
romancing Clare, while Johnny moons over her from afar — though not that afar since he’s on hand during the rehearsals,
constantly rehearsing King privately and showing him new dance steps for the
numbers. Alas, King lets success go to his head even before he’s been
successful, drinking heavily (especially when it seems like his on-again,
off-again relationship with Clare — we know she’s not really interested in him as a lover, but he doesn’t — is
off again), spending evenings out in nightclubs and working himself into such a
state that on opening night for the show he’s too potted to perform the opening
number (a harlequin-themed production with stentorian baritone Douglas MacPhail
butchering Cole Porter’s lovely song “I Concentrate on You” and Albertina
Rasch’s ballet dancers supporting Eleanor Powell, who here as in other Broadway
Melody episodes shows herself a
good all-around dancer and not just the tap specialist she’s remembered as
being) and Johnny goes on in his stead. (One imdb.com contributor noted the
“goof” that the harlequin costume fits Johnny perfectly even though Fred
Astaire was noticeably shorter and skinnier than George Murphy.) King recovers
to perform the rest of the show, but the next night he’s really too
incapacitated to go on at all, Johnny takes his place, the show is a hit and
Johnny and Clare get together. The End. What I like about Broadway Melody of
1940 is not only the obvious
points of appeal — the great Cole Porter songs (most of which he wrote
specifically for the film but one a five-year-old oldie, “Begin the Beguine” —
first done in a “Carioca”-like style by Carmen D’Antonio, though one Jeri
Hudnutt actually dubbed her vocal, and the Rasch dancing girls; then reprised
in swing style featuring a clarinet and vibraharp, nodding both to the Benny
Goodman Quartet ensemble sound and the hit record of “Begin the Beguine” Artie
Shaw had made in 1938, two years before this film had made, as a dazzling dance
duet between Astaire and Powell) and the incredible dancing done to them — but
some of the novelty acts and, above all, Astaire’s characterization.
Instead of
the dirty, disgusting and vile tricks Astaire and Bing Crosby played on each
other in Holiday Inn and Blue
Skies to win the heart (or get
into the pants) of the leading lady (Marjorie Reynolds and Joan Caulfield,
respectively), Astaire in this one plays a character so humble, so willing to
sacrifice his own ambitions to boost the career of his friend, that if he were
in the Divergent universe he would
definitely be Abnegation. At one point Eleanor Powell’s character even calls
him on it — “You just handed your friend a career on a silver platter,” she
tells him after the harlequin number, “and I’d like to know why.” Frankly I’d
rather watch this noble, self-sacrificing Astaire than the nasty, cutthroat one
of Holiday Inn and Blue Skies — and it’s especially moving in the song “I’ve Got
My Eyes on You,” which Astaire (watched, unbeknownst to him, by Powell), does a
sort of virtual dance with her, playing the song on piano (it is Astaire on piano — he was an excellent musician on
both piano and drums, and whenever a script called on him to play either of
those instruments, he insisted on doing the playing himself) and doing tap
breaks from a seated position at the end of each eight-bar strain. Then, to the
accompaniment of the MGM “magic orchestra” — the unseen musicians who steal in
on the soundtrack to play behind the star, a musical convention brilliantly
lampooned by Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in The Road to Zanzibar — Astaire does a virtual duet with Powell, holding
in his hands the song’s sheet music with her picture on it (recalling the dance
he did with a chorus line of women wearing Ginger Rogers masks at the end of Shall
We Dance) and, for someone often
compared to Buster Keaton, assuming a surprisingly Chaplinesque air of pathos
as he sits down and longingly gazes on Powell’s photo at the end. Add to that a
novelty act by a brilliant juggler, Trixie Firschke — considerably more
appealing than the snoring and sneezing done by Robert Wildhack in the two
immediately previous Broadway Melodies — and acceptable direction by Norman Taurog (the two previous films had
been made by Roy Del Ruth, who was more energetic, but Taurog is good here even
in a film not involving children, his
specialty), and Broadway Melody of 1940 emerges as a quite lovely musical and a fitting end to the series.
(There was supposed to be one more — Broadway Melody of 1943, filmed in Technicolor and starring Eleanor Powell
and Gene Kelly — but it was abandoned, though the numbers filmed for it were
plugged into Thousands Cheer and Broadway Rhythm.)
