Movie Review: Broadway Babies (1929)

The most intriguing character isn�t the star, Alice White�s Dee Foster, nor any of her chorus-girl friends, nor her dance-director boyfriend, nor any of the mobsters vying for her attention; for me, it�s Scotty (Tom Dugan), the best friend of the dance-director boyfriend. Why him? Because he�s got a stuh-stuh-stuh � He�s got a stuh-stuh-stuh � He has trouble saying words.

And he keeps doing that: trying to say something, getting caught on a word, pivoting to another:

Bad? It�s gru-gru-gre � It�s: you said it alright.

Which is totally a Porky Pig move�six years before Porky Pig was created. (Sidenote: It took me decades to realize that Porky is trying to say �The End,� at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, but he can�t, which is why he pivots to �That�s all folks!�) I�m sure the trope of a stuttering pivot didn�t begin with Scotty. I could see it as a vaudeville staple. But I like the fact that Porky had antecedents.

The rest of the movie is less intriguing.

Bad girls
How awful are Dee�s pals Florine and Navarre (Marion Byron and Sally Eilers)? They spend the movie pushing their friend away from the guy she loves, and into the arms of a criminal she doesn�t, and to what end? Are they just assholes? The criminal�s got dough and the skinny director doesn�t, but isn�t he at least in the same racket as them? Doesn�t he have connections? Didn�t he get all of them a great writeup in Variety?

A Broadway gal who can take care of herself without help from the sugar boys�she�s a musketeer. A musketeer is a chorus girl who can get along without a cash-and-kiss popup. The three musketeers referred to are Dee Foster, Florine Chandler and Navarre King.

This is what the girls are reading one morning at the rooming house. And Billy (Charles Delaney) was the guy who planted the story! For them. And how is he repaid? �There are too many fat bankrolls flirting with you to go crying over that thin dime!� Florine tells Dee, with a dismissive wave, a few days later. (Great line, btw.)�

These three are part of a show on Broadway for which Billy is choreographer and/or director, and Dee is lead chorus. You know Alice White�s story, right? Charlie Chaplin thought his secretary had pizzazz and suggested she try the acting biz. By the tail-end of the silents she was a star�Warners� answer to Clara Bowe. Controversies with various men interrupted her career in the early �30s, she came back as a good supporting comedienne (see: �Picture Snatcher�), and then aged out and disappeared. She died in 1983.

This was her first talkie and it was a hit, but she�s not exactly Ginger Rogers. She has three big numbers, and the catchiest is the most problematic to modern sensibilities: �Jig Jig Jigaloo,� which begins �Down in Bananaland�� The chorus girls carry Zulu warrior/Art Deco shields.

Dee�s playing ingenue here, and I think she�s better with a little snap and crackle. She�s already wide-eyed, so no need to underline it. Her innocence is just a set-up for the men:

Brand: Mr. Gessant is in the importing business from Detroit.
Dee: Really? Importing? Oh, you mean perfume and things like that in bottles?
Stephanos: Yeah. In bottles.

Perc Gessant (Fred Kohler) turns out to be a nice, meaty bootlegger from Detroit who gets roped into card games, where NYC gangsters Brand and Stephanos (Maurice Black and Louis Natheaux) try to fleece him with a scheme involving an upstairs xylophone player. That old gag. To this end, they try to get him to stay in the city longer by shoving Dee in his face.

At the same time, Florine and Navarre are badmouthing Billy. At the same time, Blossom Royal (Jocelyn Lee) can�t keep her hands off Billy. That�s how Dee winds up with Gessant. Hell, she�s going to marry the lug. But this is when Gessant fleeces Brand and Stephanos with the same xylophone bit, and they don�t take kindly to it. On the way to the wedding ceremony�to take place, for some reason, in Dee�s old rooming house�Dee finally breaks it off with him. �I can�t go through with it,� she says. �I thought I could forget Billy, but I can�t.� He doesn�t believe her, but then he�s shot by the other gangsters�a helluva shot, an impossible shot. And at the wedding site, to which Billy has run like an ur-Ben Braddock, a wounded Gessant graciously bows out.

Billy: That�s a pretty big break for me. But that�s pretty tough on you. And I don�t feel so good about that. On the level I don�t, Mr. Gessant.
Gessant: That�s great of ya, kid. But it�s all in the game.

It�s all in the game. Another interesting antecedent. Everything new is old again.

Then Gessant gives his poker winnings to Billy so he can star Dee in a Broadway musical, where we get a closing number that ain�t exactly Ginger Rogers.

Grain of salt
Mervyn LeRoy directed Alice White quite a bit. In his autobiography, �Take One,� LeRoy says it�s because, while she couldn�t act, he could get something out of her:

Poor Alice. You had to tell her everything you wanted her to do, and then go out and practically do it for her. There was a dance scene in the picture, and I wound up waving a handkerchief at her when I wanted her to move one arm or the other. She couldn�t remember her movements without that off-camera semaphore system, but she tried hard.

Take all this with a grain of salt. On the same page, LeRoy claims he directed James Cagney in Hot Stuff in 1929 when Cagney wouldn�t land in Hollywood for another year; and he says he discovered and named Loretta Young for a 1931 picture called �Too Young to Marry,� when, by then, she�d already starred in dozens of film as Loretta Young.�

�Broadway Babies� is one of the many early musicals, almost all of them backstage musicals, that appeared with the advent of sound. They went out of fashion quickly but then roared back with a vengeance with Warners� 1933 Busby Berkeley triumvirate: �42nd Street,� �Gold Diggers of 1933,� and �Footlight Parade.� Apparently the key was an earnest and bland frontpiece romance (Powell-Keeler), a lot of backstage backbiting, and chorus girls flashing skin.

Speaking of: This is from the beginning of the movie. I imagine jaws dropping along with the stock market.