Star Power: Estelle Brody

Brody & George Gershwin.

I was looking through Kino’s Cavalcade of Comedy DVD, a collection of (largely awful) early sound shorts which Paramount made probably at Astoria Studios in New York utilising Broadway and radio talent and I got to A Broadway Romeo from 1931, a fifteen minute item with minimal direction by Morton Blumenstock who specialised in these.

The film is unremarkable beyond giving a glimpse of Jack Benny’s shift into movies. However playing opposite him is Estelle Brody. She had been a major star of English films, notably the lead in Maurice Elvey’s 1927 Hindle Wakes, probably the best silent made in Britain - we’ll never know because the British film establishment regards British film, particularly British silent drama as a chore to be ignored as long as possible.

Brody - Hindle Wakes

 New York born Brody was first cast by director Thomas Bentley (the 1931 Hobson’s Choice and 1937’s Silver Blaze) in his 1926 White Heat and selected by Elvey for his 1927 Mademoiselle from Armentiers with it’s surprisingly vivid scenes of trench warfare, where Brody accompanies romantic lead John Stuart into the lines, not unlike Eleanor Boardman in Henry King's She Goes to War two years later. This was a major hit on it’s own turf and Brody and Elvey continued their association with the follow- up Mademoiselle Parley Vouz along with The Glad Eye, The Flight Commander (all lost) and Hindle Wakes.

Not a really pretty girl, Brody was lively and winning, carrying the lead part of spunky
Lancashire mill girl Fanny Hawthorne impeccably in Hindle Wakes. When Victor Saville
made Kitty in 1929, British film recording was still lacking and he took the unit to
Brody’s native New York where she found herself faking a British accent recording for
the part. Till then she’d passed herself off as Canadian to avoid the ill will toward
Americans in British films.

A Broadway Romeo

Two years later she tried to launch herself in American movies with A Broadway Romeo where she makes little impression. She did a couple of bit parts in American movies before settling in to unmemorable small roles in British film and TV in the fifties. No one seems to have remembered her there. The neglect of Maurice Elvey, then reduced to dim B movies, had spread to Estelle Brody. That’s kind of a shame.

 

Barrie Pattison 2018