Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

WELCOME! Use the search engines on this site (or your own off-site engine of choice) to gain easy access to the complete MAKSQUIBS Archive; more than 5500 posts and counting. (New posts added every day or so.)

You can check on all our titles by typing the Title, Director, Actor or 'Keyword' you're looking for in the Search Engine of your choice (include the phrase MAKSQUIBS) or just use the BLOGSPOT.com Search Box at the top left corner of the page.

Feel free to place comments directly on any of the film posts and to test your film knowledge with the CONTESTS scattered here & there. (Hey! No Googling allowed. They're pretty easy.)

Send E-mails to MAKSQUIBS@yahoo.com . (Let us know if the TRANSLATE WIDGET works!) Or use the Profile Page or Comments link for contact.

Thanks for stopping by.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

BROADWAY RHYTHM (1944)

Composer Jerome Kern’s last B’way show, VERY WARM FOR MAY, must have been jinxed. A final collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II after SHOW BOAT; SWEET ADELINE; MUSIC IN THE AIR (all filmed more or less intact), this retitled film kept nothing but one song (‘All the Things You Are’) and a bit of its out-of-town theater setting. But then, the stage show was treated just as shabbily by absent-producer Max Gordon, off in Hollywood embalming his hit play, ABE LINCOLN IN ILLINOIS, then, upon his belated return, insisting on a new book no one liked . . . not even him! A blah three-month run & Kern never wrote for B’way again.* The largely original film version (downgraded from top producer Arthur Freed to L. B. Mayer son-in-law Jack Cummings) tries an Old School/New School angle with young producer George Murphy (sporting a disfiguring mustache) staging an up-to-date show for B’way while ‘Pops’ (Charles Winninger) opts for old-fashioned hoke out-of-town. Naturally, they join forces for a smash ending that makes little sense as drama or logistics. So it’s a good thing Roy Del Ruth’s film has a slew of Dance Directors staging nifty specialty acts. Worth a look to see young Lena Horne tear into Gershwin’s ‘Somebody Loves Me’; piano dazzler Hazel Scott swinging Chopin; a pair of good tap solos; slightly bizarre impressionist Dean Murphy go from Joe E. Brown to FDR & Eleanor; even leading lady Ginny Simms who offers little but diminuendos on long-held high notes. And that missing plot continuity? So extreme, it feels downright refreshing.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Kern did sign on for ANNIE GET YOUR GUN with lyricist/librettist Dorothy Fields and Ethel Merman as star, but died before he got started. (Producers Rodgers & Hammerstein induced Irving Berlin to take over, which he did, generously altering his percentage in Dorothy Fields' favor since Berlin wrote his own lyrics. A very classy move.)

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: Hollywood rule-of-thumb says any storyline, no matter how tangential or idiotic, is better than no storyline, even if you’re just hiding a revue. See plotless ZIEGFELD FOLLIES/’45, fabulous and frustrating, for confirmation.

No comments: