There’s no hostess in BROADWAY HOSTESS, a wan programmer that served as a last shot at leading lady status for Wini (Winifred) Shaw as a contest-winner who comes to New York to try her luck as a ‘torch singer.’ Glib publicist Lyle Talbot picks her up as manager, but keeps the relationship strictly platonic as he tries to break into more fashionable society wooing rich, glamorous Genevieve Tobin. Sounds pretty standard. But instead of wounded egos, phony rich types & finding happiness by ‘sticking-to-your-own-kind,’ all the usual tropes are tossed out the window. In this backstager, none of the characters end up with whom you expect, while happy mismatched endings abound (except for one trigger-happy ne’er-do-well trust fund swell). Why even comic relief man Allen Jenkins, a lowlife mugg gone goofy for Spring Byington’s rich Park Avenue ditz, gets what he wants. A fun idea. If only script & execution were up to snuff. Shaw, briefly on B’way in Rodgers & Hart’s SIMPLE SIMON (singing ‘Ten Cents A Dance’), tries hard for that whiskey-tinged Helen Morgan sound, but she flutters & falls off the note, and her acting's too eager to please. Newbie megger Frank McDonald brings nothing special though dance director Bobby Connolly (with loads of B’way credits) amuses with some fancy graphics & twenty girls swimming in a champagne glass. There’s also one really good song, ‘Let It Be Me’ (see poster), charmingly played & sung by Phil Regan as Shaw’s pining piano man. You might well skip everything else other than the nifty trailer which emphasizes all those flip-flopping story tropes.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Claudette Colbert going thru mountains of misery & crises in TORCH SINGER/’33 before reuniting with her lost child & man. (See below)
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