I had to check that title twice when I first saw this movie listed as the Best Picture winner for 1928-29. Broadway Melody of 1929? Were they sure about that year? Because I knew -- knew -- that I had not only previously seen, but even owned on DVD, a film called Broadway Melody of 1940. It couldn’t be they’d gotten it all mixed up, could it?

But, no, Oscars.com knows their business, it seems, and it turns out that the 1940 edition of the melody with which I was familiar -- starring Fred Astaire and songs by the magnificent Cole Porter -- was not the original one of these. That honor goes to this bizarrely low budget and silent film-esque early attempt by MGM at what they would later come to do best: a musical.

Seen now, more than eighty years later and in a post-Gene Kelly, Disney, Grease and Moulin Rouge world, boy, is this effort awkward and peculiar. Title cards are employed liberally as an expositional device. The editing is terrible, the acting is worse, the singing voices almost universally abhorrent, and there are long periods of silence in which some character or other is creepily gurning at the camera, usually for no discernable reason. The song choices are tangentially related at best, and really not very good, with two notable exceptions: George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “You Were Meant for Me” -- no, not the one by Jewel!

But looked at from an historical perspective, at a time when the release of Hollywood’s first “talkie”, The Jazz Singer, (starring Al Jolson and a whole lot of racism) was only two years in the past, when musical theater still reigned, if only just, and when musical films were very, very few, this becomes an interesting, if not exactly satisfactory, experience.

Indeed, the 20’s saw an end to the Golden Age of vaudeville, and this movie effectively sounds the genre’s death knell even as it ostensibly celebrates it. (Of course, movies from Yankee Doodle Dandy to Easter Parade to Funny Girl would later go on to shine their rose-colored glasses on the era, but the difference between those and Broadway Melody is obvious. It’s like the difference between Jane Austen and modern Regency romance novelists. They all write of the same halcyon period, in approximately the same manner, but only one of them was actually living in it at the time.) With the advent of the movie musical, theater attendances dwindled even more rapidly than they had when merely offered silent pictures; here, we are given a loving look inside the itinerant, yet apparently noble lifestyle that this film and its ilk very soon obliterated.

If there were a single likeable person on display here, one might feel guilty about the inevitable schadenfreude.

Eddie opens the show with a reedy rendition of "his" hit song, "Broadway Melody."

One of the biggest problems of The Broadway Melody is its truly appalling choice in stars. We have a triangle of leads here, a songwriter named Eddie (Charles King) and a small-time double act called The Mahoney Sisters. Eddie has just hit it big with a new -- bad -- number, and he asks his fiancée Hank (Bessie Love) and her sister Queenie (Anita Page) to come to New York and perform it in the new Francis Zanfield show. (And if you don’t get from that the name of Florenz Ziegfeld and his Follies, then you just don’t know a thing about early 19th-c New York theater. Philistine!)

Hank is sprightly and forthright, possessed of boundless energy and ambition; we’re told she’s plain, but I simply can’t agree. Her sister is a vacuous, sweet-faced beauty of the Mary Pickford variety, all big eyes and dimpled elbows and bow-shaped mouth. “Baby,” Hank says at one point, “they were plenty smart when they made you beautiful.” Yeah, Queenie’s our Britney from Glee, and we immediately see that she spells trouble for our happy couple. Eddie just can’t get over how well she’s has grown up (and, presumably, filled out) in the time since last he saw her. He tries hard to fight his illicit attraction, but, of course, it does no good; she valiantly tries to do the same, but again, to no avail. Oblivious to all of these undercurrents, Hank only wants to prove herself and her sister worthy of Mr. Zanfield’s show, and there is a whole lot of talk about how much they deserve this big break and what a hit they’re going to be. “Oh, honey, with your looks and my ability,” says Hank, significantly. And you’re thinking, wow, Hank must be really something on stage!

"Don't worry about being stupid and not much good at anything, Queenie. At least you have your looks..."

But when the sisters finally do get to perform, we learn that she has a certain infectious enthusiasm but no evident gifts, and Queenie has even less to recommend her (at least Brit can move!). It’s kind of like at the end of Save the Last Dance, when Julia Stiles finally overcomes her fears and her mother’s untimely demise and makes it to the Julliard audition… we’ve spent the whole movie hoping she gets in, but after seeing her perform, we realize that she doesn’t really deserve to. What the hell Mr. Zanfield is thinking letting them into his show is a mystery, regardless of the nominal reasoning behind it (something to do with Queenie being 1920’s hot, I guess), and things just kind of go downhill from there. There’s more of the love triangle nonsense, and then Queenie’s forcible courting by wealthy -- and slimy -- playboy Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thomson), and much later we spend a good three minutes staring at Hank’s silent histrionics after she’s been dumped hard in favor of her more-favored little sis.

Peppered throughout, we get a variety of variety show-type performances. There are the chorus line girls whose modicum of rhythm is barely compensated for by their comely, scandalously naked, legs. There is the group of guys who are kind of like the proto-Be Sharps, except they play guitars and seem to be harmonizing the Blues. There’s even a girl tap dancing on pointe shoes, much of which remarkable feat we are privileged to witness from the ankle up. (Dude. Worst directing decision ever.) We see temperamental performers and catty co-stars and mustachioed men by the score. There are falsetto voices and oddly arrayed scenery and choreography that evokes nothing so much as the Double Dream Hands guy, but without his panache and conviction.

It’s… pretty bad.

Dogs dancing to "Singin' in the Rain", which was not even in this movie. (But did appear, for the first time, in another, similar Oscar nominee: The Hollywood Revue of 1929. Genius!

You know what’s awesome about this movie, though? The DVD Extras! The copy that I obtained offered up hours of fun, from The Movie Tone Review (which was pretty much the MTV of its day, except featuring artists of dubious, positively Hank-like “ability”) to the crowning jewel of the collection, The Dogway Melody.

Yes, long before those “No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture” disclaimers were made mandatory, we have a bevy of bejeweled and bewildered pups speedily enacting many of the (believe it or not) Oscar-winning scenes we just witnessed. There are dogs dressed as chorus girls, as stagehands, as gentlemen in dinner suits, all hopping about on their hind legs and applying makeup, hammering things and sipping champagne. Of course, the ASPCA would in no way approve, but to anyone who ever thought a monkey on a tricycle was cute (come on, it is!) then it is simply hilarious, and way more entertaining than the movie it’s satirizing. I mean, in one scene there is a dog in a turban riding a pony.

Here’s an excerpt, that sadly does not include that part, but will still give you the idea:


Aside from the aforementioned 1940 edition of The Broadway Melody, I have discovered there were also of 1936 and of 1938 versions made, the first starring Jack Benny and Robert Taylor, the latter of whom is also in the second, which also features a pre-Oz Judy Garland and Algonquin wit and secret love of Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley. (At least, so that Vicious Circle movie would have us believe). Both, along with the 1940 edition, also star tap dancing sensation Eleanor Powell, who apparently just could not get herself enough of that tuneful thoroughfare -- they were, in fact, her most successful films.

But is there a Dogway Melody of 1936, 38 or 40? No. So, y’know what? I’m gonna say that all three are inherently inferior to the original, Powell’s famously fabulous legs notwithstanding. ’Cause a dog in a turban riding a pony. If that doesn’t make its progenitor Oscar-worthy, then I don’t know what does. (Yeah, I really don’t. As I think we’ve already established.)

  -- Rachel Hyland