Friday, December 22, 2017

Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round (Edward Small Productions, Reliance Pictures, United Artists, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I settled in for a night of movie-watching, including one of my quirky favorites, the 1934 Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round. This was one of Hollywood’s more appealing genre mashups of the period, a gangster movie/musical set on an ocean liner, produced by Edward Small for Reliance Pictures, released by United Artists, and so technically an “indie” but with a much bigger budget than usual for a non-studio production. I first saw this in 1975 as part of a tribute the local San Francisco UHF station Channel 44 (whose logo is immortalized in the film The Candidate — it’s the one at which Robert Redford blows a media interview by laughing uncontrollably at a malfunctioning boom mike) was mounting to Jack Benny, who had just died. They showed five films of his in succession over the week, including The Meanest Man in the World (a 20th Century-Fox “B” whose central premise — an attorney with a high sense of ethics suddenly gets photographed in a pose that looks like he’s literally taking candy from a baby, and his legal career zooms up as potential clients think he’s an unscrupulous S.O.B. — and star deserved a better movie; ah, if only Preston Sturges had directed it!), Charley’s Aunt, Ernst Lubitsch’s anti-Nazi masterpiece To Be or Not to Be and The Horn Blows at Midnight, the fascinating 1945 Warners farce that bombed so totally at the box office it killed Benny’s film career and he made jokes about it on his show for years afterwards. (In one episode of the Benny TV program he shows up at the studio gate to make a new film, and tells the gateman, “Remember me? I once made a picture here called The Horn Blows at Midnight.” “Remember it?” says the gateman — “I directed it!”) 

On Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round Benny is billed third, after stars Gene Raymond and Nancy Carroll. He’s called “Chad Denby” (I joked that the writers — Leon Gordon, Joseph Moncure March and Harry W. Conn — must have worked their imaginations big-time to come up with that name) and he’s the radio host on board the S.S. Progress, an ocean liner traveling from New York to Paris that puts on a nightly entertainment featuring the Boswell Sisters (who perform two songs, “Rock and Roll” — almost certainly the first use of that phrase in a movie to denote music — and “If I Had a Million Dollars”), Mitzi Green (who performs a strange song called “Oh Leo, Oh Love,” first in her own voice and then in a bizarre and surprisingly exact imitation of George Arliss) and a couple of invented characters, Sally Marsh (Nancy Carroll) and her brother Ned (Carlyle Marsh, Jr.). It seems that before the boat sailed Sally briefly dated gangster Lex Luthor — oops, I mean Lee Lothar (Sidney Blackmer) — and while they were going out her brother Ned started going to Lothar’s gambling casinos and lost a lot of money. Lothar used this to blackmail Ned into working for him and steering other potential victims his way, and Sally naturally wants to get her brother out of Lothar’s clutches. She also wants to break up with Lothar but he insists that she remain with him or else he’ll exact his revenge on her brother by keeping him in what amounts to debt peonage forever. Sally goes on the boat in disguise and appears in Denby’s program so her name won’t be listed on the passenger manifest, but Lothar finds out she’s going on the Progress and buys a ticket for the boat himself. 

Gene Raymond is Jimmy Brett, gentleman thief, who’s after a valuable jeweled bracelet belonging to Anya Rosson (Shirley Grey), a married woman whom Lothar is also seeing — and who of course is having jealous hissy-fits over Lothar’s continued attempts to get Sally even though Sally isn’t interested in him. Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round actually begins with Lothar’s murder on board the Progress in mid-cruise and then flashes back “Forty-Eight Hours Before — Back in New York.” We’re introduced to this dizzying cast of characters, which also includes Joe Saunders (William “Stage” Boyd), who escaped from prison and is believed to be on the Progress with a gun and a grudge against Lothar; Anya’s husband Herbert (Ralph Morgan, brother of the Wizard of Oz and a frequent killer in these whodunits), who stows away on the Progress by hiding in a lifeboat; and Inspector “Mac” McKinney (Robert Elliott), who’s on the Progress for a vacation but ends up embroiled in the murder and also the presence of Jimmy Brett, who along with his sidekick “Shorty” (Sid Silvers in a very Allen Jenkins-ish performance) is scoping out the passengers looking for potential pigeons and gets into a crooked poker game — one of those deals in which the con men will let the “mark” win the first few hands and then take him for everything he’s got — which he outwits by having “Shorty” come into the cabin where it’s taking place just at the point when they’re going to start rigging the game against Brett to tell him that his mother, presumably also on the Progress, has just been taken desperately ill. Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round has its flaws — notably that after the close of the big number, “It Was Sweet of You,” which we see at the opening just before Lothar is shown getting shot, there isn’t any more music until midway through the film, when first singer Jean Sargent and then the Boswell Sisters perform “Rock and Roll” with Jimmie (misspelled “Jimmy” on his credit) Grier and His Orchestra — the Boswells sing from a preposterous prop boat being pulled along an equally blatantly faked sea. 

Still, it’s an appealing movie and a nice little bit of genre-mashing even though Benny gets surprisingly few funny lines (his best line is when Sally, whom he has a decidedly unrequited crush on, sees an old publicity photo of her on his mantel and asks why he’s kept it — and Benny says, “I had to. The frame cost five bucks” — so at least one part of Benny’s fabled radio and TV character, his incredible cheapness, shows up in this film!) and Mitzi Green’s parody of George Arliss is screamingly funny if you’ve seen an Arliss film but just confusing if you haven’t. It’s also noteworthy for the big production number on “It Was Sweet of You,” credited to dance directors Larry Ceballos and Sammy Lee but so blatantly derivative of Busby Berkeley’s mega-numbers at Warner Bros. it seems as if Ceballos, who’d actually sued Warners after he was taken off the job of dance director for Footlight Parade and replaced by Berkeley, wanted to show he could do that sort of number just as well as the Master! In the end, if you cared, Ralph Morgan’s character turns out to be the killer — William K. Everson once joked that audiences that only cared whodunit and not why or how could leave the theatre early if Morgan’s name appeared on the cast list, “confident that the Hollywood typecasting system would not let them down” — he reveals himself when he shoots his wife as she’s being interrogated by McKinney, getting himself arrested and then confessing he killed Lothar too. But the perfunctoriness with which the mystery is solved is a minor blemish on a quite stylish movie, well directed by Benjamin Stoloff (who’s especially skilled at finding plenty of locations to relieve what might otherwise have become boring, given that almost the whole movie takes place on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic) and acted by a skilled cast of players who ably complement each other.