WARNING: SPOILERS

After I became aware of that great triumvirate of 1933 Warner Bros. backstage musicals (“42nd Street,” “Gold Diggers of 1933,” “Footlight Parade”), each with lavish, risqué choreography by Busby Berkeley, and each featuring a a Dick Powell-Ruby Keeler romance backstory with a different male lead (Warner Baxter, Warren William, James Cagney), I wondered whatever became of them. Yes, the Production Code killed the more risqué aspects of them. But before Joe Breen brought the curtain down, did Warners fit in one final version ?

They did! This one. And it’s awful.

It’s also hard to find. And I imagine it’s hard to find not because it’s awful but because of the big closing number: Al Jolson doing “one of his characteristic numbers, for which he is famous,” per bandleader Dick Powell.

Yes: blackface.

It’s brutal to watch but a good lesson for anyone wondering if we’ve made any racial progress in this country. Or for kids in this era of racially blind casting who might not know just how easy it was to make money off racist tropes, and how the majority of the country was totally fine with it.

Wheeeeeps
So (beyond the racism) why is “Wonder Bar” awful? Why is it different than the triumvirate above?

Those movies are all about struggle. How to put on a show. How to survive. That’s a Great Depression theme, so we identify. Hell, it's a universal theme. It's 100 years later and I still identify. This movie is about rich people falling in love in Paris with the wrong person and who gives a shit. Both Al and Tommy love Inez, but Inez loves Harry, as does Madame Renaud, even though Harry only loves himself. None of them are worth a dime. They all deserve each other, but we don’t deserve them.

Should I start from the beginning?

Acclaimed dance partners Inez and Harry (Dolores Del Rio and Ricardo Cortez) wake up in the same apartment, but he’s leaving her. “You knew it was coming,” he says. “See you tonight at the bar.“

Meanwhile, Madame Renault (Kay Francis) is cheating on her husband with Harry. Meanwhile, Tommy (Dick Powell), sings a love song to the photo of Inez on his piano. Meanwhile, Al Wonder (Al Jolson) awakens with a kiss from Inez … but she dissolves into a fantasy. But he decides, that night, to ask her to marry him!

All these machinations collide that evening at the Wonder Bar.

That’s where we also get comic relief Americans: two couples from Schenectady, New York. The husbands, inebriated, and played by Guy Kibbee and Hugh Hubert, are tired of their wives and prone to the flirtations of Mitzi and Claire (Fifi D’Orsay and Merna Kennedy). Their wives (Louise Fazenda and Ruth Donnelly) keep them in check with stern admonishments and dry wit. Fazenda is great, while Donnelly underused. Then the women become prone to their own continental enticements. We get no resolution on this. We don’t see anyone follow through and/or come to their senses.

Between musical numbers, Al Wonder gladhands with his clientele, but the bits come off as old-fashioned ”bits“ rather than real life. Example:

Man: Where ya been for the last three weeks, Al?
Al: Oh, I’ve been to a nudist colony.
Man: A nudist colony?
Al: Yeah, but I’ll never go again.
Man: Why not?
Al: You get tired of looking at the same faces all the time!

Since Al’s work is never done, he also tries to buck up Capt. Hugo Von Ferring (Robert Barrat), who recently lost all of his wealth—as Warner Baxter did in “42nd Street”—except Baxter kept fighting. Von Ferring just plans to kill himself. Al keeps trying to talk him out of it ... until the moment when he basically gives him a push.

And it’s all because of that third musical number.

In the first musical number, Jolson/Wonder welcomes us with “Vive La France.” Then we get the much-ballyhooed Harry and Inez dance routine … which quickly dissolves into a Busby Berkeley fantasy involving masked blondes and their masked beaus. Finally, the third number, a “Gaucho Dance,” with Harry duded up like Valentino, and equipped with a whip. Al’s intro: “In this dance, monsieur Harry whips her with a whip. He whips her, and he wheeps her, and he wheeeps her. But she loves eeet!” Is that a pun I don’t get? Or just more racism?

Cortez (née Jacob Krantz) played the screen’s first Sam Spade, and he was often posited as a post-Valentino Latin lover, but he’s less Valentino than Zeppo: handsome enough, but c’mon, gals. Yet each of the beauties here is crazy for him, begging him to stay, blackmailing him to go to America with him. Before the Gaucho Dance, Inez says she’d turn him over to the cops if she couldn’t go, which leads Harry, in the number, to coming awfully close with that whip. Sensing this, at its close, rather than fake-stab him, she stabs him for real—and the only one who sees it is, of course, Al Wonder. Backstage, Al assures Inez that Harry will be fine. As if on cue, Harry dies.

Worried for Inez, Al remembers his good friend Von Ferring talking about driving his car over a cliff on the way home. So they put Harry in the backseat. In other words, Al decides he shouldn’t stop Von Ferring from killing himself but rather use his suicide to cover up the murder Inez committed.

And this is the movie’s hero.

After the closing number, Al, seeming to realize he’s too old for Inez, pushes her toward Tommy, the Wonder Bar carpet is rolled back up, and that’s that. Think of the crimes swept under that carpet. The greatest of them is the closing number.

The Gaucho Dance: Del Rio and Zeppo.

Goin’ to hell on a mule
Tommy announces the closing number, ”Goin' to Heaven on a Mule,“ the camera pans over, and suddenly we’re no longer on a pristine Parisian stage. There’s dirt and wood chips and a log cabin, and Jolson in blackface talking to a little white girl (also in blackface) about why he loves his mule, Zeke, and why he’d rather ride Zeke than a horse. Then he starts singing:

Ever since I was a little pickaninny
I rode an old Missouri mule
And that’s the only way I’m ever going to travel
I’m a superstitious fool

And when the good Lord tells me
That I’ve sung my closing song
My soul will be on that mule
A’jogging right along

Eventually that comes to pass, and he rides his mule across the rainbow bridge and into an Art Deco heaven. Is it far-sighted that everyone there is black? Or at least blackface? We see St. Peter, Gabriel, the inevitable Warner Bros. gay tailor. Old Black Joe and Uncle Tom are there, too, as is Emperor Jones. Al licks his lips over Pork Chop Orchard, digs into some fried chicken, and takes The Milky Way streetcar to Lennox Ave. and the Big Dipper Cabaret, where, on stage, a giant watermelon is sliced open to reveal a tap dancer. Each second you think, “It can’t get worse,” and then it does. 

Anyway, that’s what killed the Warner Bros. musical: this big number. Everyone was shocked by the racism so Warners stopped making them.

Kidding. “Wonder Bar” was one of Warners biggest hits of 1934. Grossing $2 million worldwide, it was considered a good comeback for Jolson, who all but made Warner Bros. with “The Jazz Singer” but had fallen out of favor with the likes of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum.” In its review, The Kansas City Star felt he was too old for the “Vive la France” number, but that final number, “Goin’ to Heaven on a Mule,” they wrote, “is particularly well done.”

People need to see this stuff. Just this closing number, really. See what everyone was fine with—Warners, the Production Code, The Kansas City Star. See what was deemed, to 1934 eyes, ”particularly well one."