Recalling Warners.

The Warner Brothers back catalog has been providing satisfactions pretty much as far as I can remember - and it’s not done yet. A couple of their less well known items have just come my way.

Jean Negulesco proved one of the more approachable Hollywood celebrities. When Alen Eyles and I did an interview, he had just made a film for Zanuck as both their careers were winding down and he noted with some amusement that his producer told him he was a play boy rather than a serious film maker. Negulesco  brandished one of Charles Higham’s books which had been dedicated to him, giving him bragging rights when he showed it to Billy Wilder. 

 

Alen admired the scene in his Humoresque dissolving from brandy swirling in the balloon glass to breaking waves. Negulesco came back “I apologise. That was the most terrible thing I ever did in my life.” I didn’t fare much better, mentioning the nice The Voice That Shook the World short about the arrival of sound and being told that wasn’t one of his. Ever tactful, I said “Your name is on it.” Some time later I ran into him again and he spotted me and said “Hm, you told me 'Your name is on it!'.”

Jean Negulesco

Romanian Negulesco had been an accomplished painter in Europe and gained a spot running second units in Hollywood, Captain Blood and notably the semi abstract retreat from Caporetto in the 1933  Farewell to Arms. Warners put him to directing the shorts used with their features on first runs until he launched with the 1944 Mask of Demetrios where old friend John Huston had drawn to his attention to the studio rights to the story after Huston beat him to The Maltese Falcon. It  came as a surprise to find Negulesco had done an earlier feature, the 1941 Singapore Woman.

That one was doomed from the start. We all warmed to Brenda Marshall being stalwart in Whispering Smith but a do over on the part that Bette Davis got an Oscar for in Dangerous - fair crack of the whip Cobber!

The Steiner fanfare still ringing in our ears, we get mustached David Bruce come from up country to prepare for the arrival of fiancée Virginia Field and partying with associate Jerome Cowan, who comes closest to salvaging something from this wreckage.  In Harry Cording’s seedy waterfront Crows Nest bar, Bruce spots bedraggled Marshall, a regular cause of trouble - flashback to him witnessing her rejected lover shooting himself in the home of her dad Gilbert Emery. Remembering Emory’s assistance (Bruce says) he scoops her up and carries her off to his rubber plantation where she gives ethnic maid Connie Leon a hard time and gets to smash her mirror reflection with a liquor bottle.

Hurrel Portrait of Brenda Marshall

The art department wheel out that tropical foliage they are used to rigging and the verandah set from The Letter. Sorting rubber plants, Bruce tells foreman Abner Biberman “in a few years these will be tires rolling down 5th Avenue.” We get a couple of topical references about the war effort.  However, despite occasional bursts of production value like the long opening tracking of dockside activity, a lively brawl or a dozen extras tin mining, most of the film is Miss Marshall grotesque in awful Damon Giffard outfits and emoting about the jinx that makes her destroy the lives of the men in the support cast.

Featured players are mainly a drab lot with the few good people only making fleeting appearances - Tony Warde, Ian Wolfe and you have to be quick to spot Alexis Smith. Dialogue of the standard of “Gerald’s such a child.” or “You men and your code!”  There are some pieces of badly matched lighting. Negulesco, on his first feature, is trying hard and he’s got the great Ted McCord on camera and an Adoph Deutsch score to prop him up. The comic Crow’s Nest bar brawl accompanied by Eva Puig doing her accelerating rendition of “Dark Eyes” gives hope but the director had a long way to go to the superiority of Johnny Belinda and Humoresque.

Warde, Marshall & Bruce.

The little commented 1929 Broadway Babies gets our attention as an early example of what we will recognise with some enthusiasm as the the studio's city movie, full of Warner’s (First National actually) bustling urban activity.  The opening has a  New York montage backed by “Give my regards to Brodway”,  the iron railed footways back stage fill with chorines in skimpy costumes, the streets are a place of danger. It combines the gangster and musical films that Director Mervyn Le Roy and Warners would shortly make notable. Think Little Caesar or Gold Diggers of 1933.

Show girls Include Marrion Byron, Sally Eilers, Jocelyn Lee & Alice White.

 

Cut to a familiar setting, the theatrical boarding house with three bedrooms to every bath and land lady Aggie Herring distributing towels. This introduces room mates Alice White, Marion Byron and Sally Eilers and dialogue about a Broadway girl getting by without a sugar daddy (very Sally Irene & Mary). They’ve been profiled in the paper as "The Three Musketeers".

Their dresser Bodil Rosing is skeptical about glamor (“The biggest Johns on Broadway used to drink champagne out of my slipper") but chirpy blonde Alice has dance director Charles Delaney’s ring (close up). Meanwhile crooked card players Maurice Black, Louis Natheaux and Lew Harvey have a pigeon lined up in “Detroit Bohunk” Fred Kohler, possibly his best role. Their window overlooks the chorus rehearsal room and they lure on Fred with the prospect of an introduction to Alice. They pitch her about Delaney’s meager prospects “too many fat bankers crazy about you to worry about a thin dime.”

 

The Three Musketeers go off to the Blue Moon night club with the gamblers and Kohler puts
forward the prospect of Alice heading up the late show there. She proves (surprise!) a hit - “The little girl who has danced her way into the hearts of Broadway.” The the nasties close in on Fred who somehow starts winning in the fixed  game and has managed to scoop off Alice. The theatricals (“hoofers and acrobats”) are waiting at the engagement party but the bad hats plan on shooting Fred.

White - Broadway Babies.

Attention does start to wander towards the end, the writing is not exactly Shakespearean stuff and director Mervyn Le Roy and Alice White were not the great talents of the cycle. Still, her bubbly flapper character is super appealing - even if she can’t sing, dance (she manages a few high kicks) or go dramatic. It's agreeable to find that she had such a long career, turning up in Korda's silent The Private Lives of Helen of Troy or in Mildred Pearce. Touches like comedian Tom Dugan’s stutter should have been reigned in and the interchangeable numbers ( "Jig, Jig, Jigaloo", "Wishing and Waiting for Love" included) didn’t make it into popular memory, with the final "Broadway Baby Dolls" performance expendable.

Broadway Babies is particularly interesting to anyone following movie history. To start with, it shows the makers already pushing the still new sound film form to it’s limits. Inset titles persist. There’s one over a dissolve from the stage show to the crooked gamblers but music already plays under dialogue. A Xylophone in a room above becomes an element of the plot. Post synch. is occasionally a bit shaky and the first stage number is obviously shot on long lenses from several angles in the stalls, while the wide angle of the theater shows the process roof and chandelier wobbling above the lower portion of the frame. Running to a cab in the dark street is seriously under-cranked and under exposed. However the pacing is excellent. Editor Frank Ware died young after cutting 42nd St.

The flaws make watching the film more interesting if anything, highlighting the rapid progress Hollywood was making with the virtual monopoly.

Barrie Pattison 2021.