After flooding the market with stillborn Early Talkie musicals, Hollywood abruptly turned off the spigot for a couple of years before rebooting the genre with smoother sound technology and freer cameras in 1933. Or so goes accepted film history. As usual, the actual story far more complicated. Just look at Paramount where Ernst Lubitsch’s gossamer operettas and Rouben Mamoulian’s artistically integrated LOVE ME TONIGHT/’32 had already figured things out. Nonetheless, there’s some truth to the timeline as 1933 saw two major advances: dance director Busby Berkeley moved from stagebound work at Goldwyn to the singular insanity of his Depression Era spectacles at Warners (first up 42ND STREET/’33); and over at R.K.O., Mark Sandrich, in this debut feature, likely didn’t know he was paving the way for Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers to take flight when he put this crew together. The group that, sans Sandrich, made FLYING DOWN TO RIO* (Fred & Ginger in support) later this year; then with Sandrich back as director, Fred & Ginger top-billed in next year’s THE GAY DIVORCEE. CRUISE a first step you might not spot since it has the unenviable task of making a film star out of unphotographable Phil Harris, currently heard but not seen on Jack Benny’s radio show. Sandrich plays along, lifting a traveling song number, shared from character to character a la Mamoulian (alas, Mamoulian had Rodgers & Hart’s ‘Isn’t It Romantic,’ Sandrich gets ‘He’s Not the Marrying Kind.’); grabbing the optical printer for life support with pointlessly elaborate geometric ‘wipes;’ letting top-billed Charles Ruggles ham it up trying to convince his wife those girls in his cabin were only taking a nap. It’s that sort of movie. Still, quite a learning curve for Sandrich as only a year separates this from the perfection of TOP HAT/’35. Or does credit for that one rightly belong to Astaire & Irving Berlin?
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: With so little going on, no wonder the poster is such a busy mess.
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