All singing! All dancing! All bad!: Wedding of the Painted Doll

This was one of those posts that COULD have been among my best, if only. If only technology had allowed it.

For years I've been trying to find a decent-quality YouTube video of an extremely hokey number from Broadway Melody, often called the "first movie musical". Made in 1929, it was one of the first talkies, so nobody even knew how to record a conversation, let alone musical theatre. Everyone was still shouting into microphones hidden behind potted palms.

But that didn't stop producers from trying to cash in on the craze for "all singing! All dancing!" (All the time.) They went ahead, and for some reason pulled together some of the most mediocre performers who ever hit the stage.

My favorite number from this very strange cinematic artifact is called Wedding of the Painted Doll. Strange, because the choreography is a nightmare, and the dance performances awkward and amateurish. Who knows? Maybe only the sound mattered at this point, which was a man singing inane lyrics about - you guessed it - the wedding of the painted doll, in an annoying high tenor voice.

So I finally find a decent video of the picture part of this thing - they seem to appear, then disappear as they're taken down due to copyright restrictions, then pop up again. I couldn't make the kind of gifs I wanted because the THREE different programs I use to make gifs were all catawampus, or just not able to process the video. So I ended up with two sets of gifs from two different YouTube videos. One was extremely yellow, and cropped very badly for some reason, but much clearer in picture. The other one was framed right, but grainy and slow-mo. I had to use something called Facegarage (note the ugly watermark), which explains the rough edges of some of these.

This is interesting because the dancer in the middle "cheats" when she drops to a kneeling position: she puts her hand down to steady herself. Her "split" is awkward in that her knee comes up before it straightens. Very rough, and my nine-year-old granddaughter's dance teacher would surely yell at her for this.

This is meant to be the "parson", and he does some neat balletic things in this, though a bit later on he fluffs a move. Why, I wonder, were there no re-takes in this? Was the budget that low, or - more likely - did this have to be rushed out to meet the rabid public demand for "all-singing, all-dancing" talkies?

Here comes the bride, clomping down the stairs oh-so-daintily. Maybe the sound distracted people from such gracelessness.

The parson, once so nimble, fluffs a handstand. His left arm is wobbly and his right hand shifts, so he abandons the move like an off-balance figure skater and cartwheels off the stage.

And here the dancers are flipped one by one, until two of them are lifted and twirled around so fast it's amazing they can still stand.

And so on! The original video (which I've posted at the top) starts with a cartoon, so don't be daunted. The actual number begins at about the one-minute mark.

When mentioning the title of this number, it kept coming out Wedding of the Pained Doll. No comment on that.

Am I blue? Not any more!

Oh Lor', I've had another one of my famous sojourns into 1929-land. Turner Classics has started showing a lot of (very) early talkies, most of them fairly unwatchable except for the novelty. It's strange that there are silent films right up to 1927, then an abyss in 1928, then a veritable explosion of cheap entertainment in 1929 which drew crowds like flies because, gee whiz, Mabel, these pictures can really TALK!

I suffered through a good chunk of Street Girl, which is not as racy as it sounds and is just a thinly-disguised attempt to showcase the talents of a passably-good dance band. But it's not the musical numbers (and some of the music was written by Oscar Levant) that intrigued me.

Early talkies are hybrids (see the related phenomenon of "goat glanding", below), most with at least some subtitles, and often major glitches in synchronization that give you an odd disjointed feeling. The static nature of these things, with everyone sitting around a table or on a sofa talking into a potted palm where the microphone is hidden, seems to suggest a badly-transcribed stage play. But that's not the weirdest thing: it's that damned infernal noise you keep hearing. It's as if someone is working heavy machinery outside.  It was worse in Street Girl than in any I've seen, with a whirring, vibrating hum alternating with a low rushing noise, and, sometimes, a grinding sound like a garburator.

I think it was the camera. No, really. I think I read this as a movie-curious child in that big coffee table book we kept in the den (I think it was called "The Movies" or some-such, and yes, it did have a full-page spread of Harold Lloyd hanging off the clock). The noise of the camera was such a problem that they had to stuff the camera and the cameraman in a soundproof booth. Every few shots he'd come lurching out of there dripping wet and ready to pass out. At some point somebody must've said, gee, wouldn't it be better if we just put the CAMERA in the box? Inventing quieter cameras was an even better idea (though nobody had bothered to think about that before). It's a mystery to me why no such noise-dampening method was even attempted in Street Girl, unless it was made on a budget of 49 cents.

The other one I saw, or semi-saw because I can never get through them all, was called On With the Show, and predates even 42nd Street as a hat-check-girl-becomes-a-star vehicle for some nascent starlet. In fact it seems like a sort of prototype for the whole genre. I was nearly halfway through it and getting bogged down in a sort of bizarre fashion show (which didn't seem to fit in with the fox hunt with real horses that preceded it) when I realized I'd seen the whole thing before. I remember because I thought the women all looked like drag queens, and who knows, maybe they were!

But then. 

Seems a shame that she was required to come on with a bale of cotton under her arm, dressed vaguely like Aunt Jemima, but being the fearless artist she was, Ethel Waters overcame every conceivable stereotype the minute she began to sing. All the flailing around without a recognizable theme didn't matter any more: as they say, she owned the stage, or, more accurately, owned the whole show. 

The best singers sing as if they're enjoying the hell out of the song, but the truly great singers somehow bring you on-side so that YOU are enjoying it at least as much as they are. This joy and sunniness and self-possession and the warm earthy quality of her voice almost, well, yes, they DO erase the mediocre acting, bawling sopranos and flailing choreography of a really bad show that probably drew them like flies. Calling Busby Berkeley! We need you! But then, it wouldn't be too many years before he rushed into the void. 

And now, beloved reader, just because you are you, I have a few luscious factoids about this sweaty transition period that might just interest you as much as it interests me. Well then, here it is anyway.

Goat gland (film release)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Goat gland was a term applied c. 1927–1929, during the

period of transition from silent films to sound films. It referred

to an already completed silent film to which one or more talkie

sequences were added in an effort to make the otherwise

redundant film more suitable for release in the radically altered

market conditions.The name was derived by analogy from the

treatment devised by Dr. John R. Brinkley as an alleged cure

for impotence. 

This "goat gland" succeeded mainly in causing previously sympathetic audiences

to abruptly lower their opinions of the characters' personalities

and level of intelligence.

Painted dolls, Harold Lloyd and other miracles

OK, children: who do you think this is? In light of what I posted yesterday, rare photos of Harold Lloyd in his Mack Sennett/pre-Glass-Character days (hell, even before Lonesome Luke!), you might think this is the same guy. Particularly since he's dressed like a minister, and appears to be wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

It ain't.

I don't know who this guy is, but he isn't Harold Lloyd. Not by a long shot. That scares me, because one would think his face and demeanor would be practically trademarked by then.

These few grainy shots, one of them blown up to make it more discernible, are from an atrocious but interesting early talkie, in fact the first "all singing, all dancing" musical, the notorious Broadway Melody.

It wasn't called the BWM of 1938, or 1947, or anything like that, because there had never BEEN a Broadway Melody on film before, and though audiences loved the novelty of sound numbers with chorus girls flailing all over the place, it's a good thing this particular movie never happened again.

The musical numbers, though bizarre, aren't so bad. My favorite: Wedding of the Painted Doll, a quirky little number full of xylophone music and a tenor singing in the high, wavery voice favored in the 1920s. For this musical came out in 1929, just at the turning point of sound films. Whenever  one of these early talkies comes on Turner Classics, I watch it, no matter how atrocious. In fact, the more atrocious it is, the more fascinated I am.

It's a sort of sociological exercise which tells us where audiences were in 1929: mostly confused. The studios were even more confused, panic-stricken in fact. The minister in this oddball wedding scene is an acrobat who flips and cartwheels onstage as if he's made of rubber. I doubt if Harold Lloyd could do as well. But he's not billed anywhere, and I'll be damned if I'll try to look it up and turn into one of those 93-year-old silent film afficionados who remember exact statistics and scream at you if you misquote them even a little bit, as if it's a mortal sin to forget what Louise Brooks had for breakfast.

So I won't even take a stab at it, though knowing these folks there's probably a whole blog about it: That Minister Guy Who Turned Cartwheels On Stage in Wedding of the Painted Doll from Broadway Melody.

Likely he was pulled out of the chorus of some obscure stage musical, or even taken from a circus. He had his thirty seconds of fame, and that's it.

But doesn't he look a whole lot like Harold Lloyd, and is there a reason for that? Lloyd was just releasing his own first talkie, the abominable Welcome Danger, which I've tried to like but can't. My stomach keeps rejecting it like some food I am violently allergic to. It's an ugly, ugly picture, full of thumps, thuds, bad and mis-dubbed dialogue, and even a mean main character I can't warm up to, as if Harold's personality and charm had to change along with the times. 

But it didn't matter then. Maybe this minister in his frock coat was a stock figure, much like the minister Harold played for Sennett in 1915. Strangely enough, there is a connection: the movie was called Her Painted Hero.

Who knows what else lurks in the dusty, fusty vaults. I am sort of hoping nothing, because I am really getting obsessed here and soon have to leave it alone. My manuscript has gone to the proofreader now, meaning the galleys will soon come back to me and I will have my last chance to correct small glitches. For the past few days, all I can think of is a possible mistake I made in continuity, but I am afraid to look at the manuscript to confirm it. I think if I look at it one more time, I'll simply expire.

POST-SCRIPT. Let's do a little comparison, shall we? One of my famous "separated at birth" things. Might be fun.

  

Harold.

Not Harold.

Harold.

Not Harold.

Just a coincidence?  I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Was there a down side to Harold Lloyd?

A down side? Whaaaaat?

Why, certainly.

We could start with the talkies. Like every other huge star of the silent screen, the advent of the "talking picture" (originally called "talkers", a more logical term) traumatized Lloyd to the point of forcing him  to seriously regroup. Eventually he came to realize he was under immense pressure to let all the old pieces go and start from the ground up.

He found it nearly impossible. My feeling is that he stubbornly held on to aspects of his past filmmaking success, certain in his mind that at some point, things would turn around and the old visual style of comedy would return.

Though sight gags never entirely disappeared and still figure large in a lot of comedy, an actor's signature phrases ("I'm sorry, Ollie", "My little chickadee", "Hey, Abbott!") became essential for moving a comic persona forward. Another dimension had popped out, the other half, so to speak.  You didn't have to have a "great" voice or even a "good" one. You just had to have a memorable voice that expressed the character in no uncertain terms. (Perhaps the acid test was this: could you recognize it on the radio?)

Garbo made it because her dark, velvety voice startled people and dovetailed beautifully with her smoky, exotic looks. Can you imagine W. C. Fields without his whiny and irritating, carnival barker's delivery? And with their endless eccentric bantering, Laurel and Hardy were reborn as huge stars. But these were the few who lucked out. 

At the beginning, almost no one knew how to use the voice to best effect. Early "talkers" were pretty atrocious (I just saw an unintentionally hilarious one called The Vagabond Lover on Turner Classics, in which the hums, buzzes and crackles on the sound track nearly drowned out the dreary, colorless delivery of the lines). It didn't matter much, because the public flocked to them anyway.

It took a few years for things to settle. I always see 1931 as the year that things began to really work. An actor's voice became his calling card, and it didn't have to be conventionally audiogenic. Those actors in the gangster pictures had nasty snarly voices to go with their nasty snarly personalities. Vocal sneers.  But this non-law also applied to leading men. Think of Jimmy Stewart with his high, wavering, stammering delivery which somehow, almost magically conveyed integrity. Now how did he do that?

But Harold, now. Harold somehow didn't get it. After so many years of mastery, of innovative film-making, he didn't see the train coming.  When all this mayhem was going on, he was making a silent feature called Welcome Danger - an awful one, as it turned out, which is puzzling because he had never done anything like that before. It was 1929, everything was changing, and like Chaplin and Keaton, Lloyd was stubbornly hanging on to what had worked for him before.

A critic named Welford Beaton, whose very name suggests doddering and fustiness, had some decided opinions on what was happening at the time: "The silent drama has become a great art and I hope the advent of sound is not going to arrest its development." Sidney Kent of Paramount (and who knows who the fxxx Sidney Kent of Paramount was, but hey, it's a great quote) wrote, "Personally, I believe the time will never come when the outstanding silent pictures will be out of the market. We are trying to work out the best possible combination of sound and silent."

This reminds me of nothing more than Martin Short's insanely hilarious character Irving Cohen, a doddering old Hollywood relic: "So I walked into Jolson's office, at that time, and I said to him, Asa, this talking picture business will never get off the ground!"

As for that "best possible combination,"  such an unlikely hybrid was bound to fail, as Harold found out with his ill-conceived Welcome Danger. Legend has it he watched a movie short full of "punk gags" like whistles blowing, fire engine sirens, etc. - anything involving sound - and the audience was laughing uproariously. Shocked out of his denial about talking pictures, he suddenly decided to graft a sound track on to his partially-completed movie, with awkward, badly-dubbed results.

I have seen Welcome Danger one-and-a-half times, forcing myself to stay with it after bailing the first time. I was watching it in a hotel room with my husband a few years ago. "Look! There's a Harold Lloyd movie!" (He thought we were in for a couple of hours of enthusiastic squeaking and ahhhh-ing.) The first time Harold opened his mouth, I said, "Oh nooooooooooo." Midway, I sadly turned it off. "He didn't have a good voice," Bill said. But it was much more than that. 

I still don't really know what Welcome Danger is about. It goes on far too long, though the original cut was an astonishing two hours and forty-five minutes. Why was Harold making so many mistakes, even before this disastrous failed transplant? Only one picture ago, with Speedy, he was at the very top of his game. Now this. To me, it's an indication that Lloyd was profoundly spooked and had already lost his way. 

Harold's character in this mess, a man with the hideous name of Bledsoe, is some kind of botanist trying to break up a Chinese opium ring while pursuing a girl dressed like a boy. But when he opens his mouth to speak, he sounds like Jiminy Cricket on helium. That fussy, strident quality is an immediate turnoff. Whatever emotional appeal he had in his silents - and in most of them, his character was vulnerable enough to have it - evaporated, and sadly never really returned.

I don't like Richard Schickel's book about Harold, don't like his lack of respect and assumptions about Harold's personal life, but I have to agree with him that in his sound pictures, his voice was "inescapably colorless and flat - prissy would be the best way to describe it." The voice isn't just pitched too high (though at moments of stress it shoots up into the stratosphere until he sounds like a hysterical girl) - it has a lightness and lack of resonance that doesn't record well.  And for some reason, the delivery is unnatural, awkwardly hokey. Of course a comedian can sound weird as all get-out and still make it, but whatever he's doing, it doesn't work. All this from a man who began his career as a stage actor,  believing it was his destiny.

Ironically, when you look at interviews with the ageing Lloyd (and like a lot of good-looking men, his looks wore well as he evolved into a twinkly old charmer), his voice has dropped considerably, relaxed and mellowed into something you could easily listen to for two hours. It still isn't particularly deep or resonant, but it has a great raconteur quality, and an expressiveness that never came across in his post-silent films. The odd Nebraskan inflection pops through to charming effect: "While we were working on that picture, I think it was Girl Shy, the fire hose flew up and struck me on the foah-hayyd."

There were so many more after Welcome Danger (which, ironically, had better box office than any of his other movies due to his fans' curiosity about his voice), and I have tried to like them, believe me, I've tried. And the problem isn't just his voice. Though individual scenes work, something just isn't right. Hal Roach, his friend and longtime director, put it this way: "His character couldn't age."

No matter how good he looked, and he did look good even with the slightly higher hairline, you can't slip The Boy into a middle-aged body and work it like a puppet. A scene in Movie Crazy really does drive me crazy as he parodies the melodrama of the talkies: his voice soars up and up, growing more strident by the sentence. Feet First is even worse: he does an aerial stunt (and that's another water hazard of the new era: repeating gags, which most comedians had to resort to), yelling in that shrill near-falsetto for about 15 minutes as he scrambles agonizingly up the side of a tall building. The surreal, thrilling climb that worked so well in 1923 is just awful with grunts, yells and traffic sounds added, and some theatres did their audiences a favor during the sequence by turning the sound track off. 

Is there any good news here? Unlike most people, I did sort of like The Cat's Paw, in which he played a missionary (of all things!), but again the high light voice evoked a kind of virginity that had been kept in a glass case. Everything I've ever read about Lloyd indicates exactly the opposite: women loved him from the start, and he was not about to turn them away. Harold lived large, and never wanted just a little of anything.

j
The classic musical  Singin' in the Rain (often called one of the best movies ever made, which is strange because I hate everything about it) dealt with the revolution in sound film, as did the more recent The Artist. (Ditto. I did not like any of the characters, from that ditsy little girl Blinkie or whatever-her-name-was to the strange Douglas Fairbanks-looking guy or that wretched dog lifted from The Thin Man, or perhaps Frasier.) As everyone predicted, all the actors from that much-touted movie disappeared without a trace, which is probably good for my mental health.

The Jazz Singer  supposedly began the revolution in 1927, even though it wasn't even a talkie - my ass it was a talkie, it had titles all the way through it, and only had sound during Jolson's blackface songs about tootsie rolls or whatever. What most people don't realize is that sound could have been introduced several years earlier - the technology had been basically worked out - but the industry dug in and resisted, and viewed from today's perspective, it's easy to see why. 

Harold kept at it, ending his movie career in 1947 with an ill-advised comedy called, variously, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock and Mad Wednesday. Even the wildly-popular director  Preston Sturges (with a nudge from producer Howard Hughes) couldn't save this one. Harold was 54, still playing boys that hadn't quite grown up. I find it excruciating to watch this so-called extension of his legendary The Freshman: he plays a man stuck in his dead-end job, stuck in his lonely life. He hasn't grown up at all. There is a scene where he is obviously deeply depressed, and I just didn't want to see it: his Glass Character never stayed down for long, but this fellow had been down all his life.

How could a man lose such great acting chops after all this time? Maybe he just didn't know how to apply them in an unfamiliar medium.  Though Harold went charging forward into a million other activities that he kept up for a lifetime, including a tremendous amount of philanthropy, the loss of his celestial career was sad for him, sad for movie posterity, sad for us all.

Post-blog:  There's one movie I've never seen, a mid-'30s Lloyd talkie called Professor Beware. All the evidence I've found that it ever existed are some stills, and all I know about it is that Lloyd didn't like it. He may have done something to the negative - Harold was even closer with his movies than he was with his money - or else it's just hiding in an old tin can in a basement somewhere. There was a rumor it was shown on Turner Classics, but only once. I WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE. Not that it will necessarily be better than the others. It's the fact that it's not available. Is someone, perhaps the mysterious, unknowable Rich Correll, keeping this thing banked for a rainy day? 

Painted Doll: the magic of the early talkies

The Wedding Of The Painted Doll

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the Painted Doll
It's a jolly day
The news is spreading
All around the hall

Red Riding Hood & Buster Brown
The Jumping Jack Jumped into town
From far and near they're coming here
Church bells ringing, bringing

All the little dollies from the follies
With the painted cheeks
Little Mama doll has fussed around
For weeks and weeks

Shoo the blues
No time to lose
Rice and shoes
Will spread the news
That it's a holiday
Today's the Wedding of the little Painted Doll

Here come the bridesmaids
Look at them in their places
Look at the fancy laces
Look at them as they smile
All sorrow away

Here comes the bride now
Look at the little cutie
Look at the little beauty
Look at the little doll
It's her wedding day

Here's the preacher and all look
As he takes his little book
He is sure he knows his stuff
'Cause he's done it oft'n enough

Here comes the bride groom
Ready for the service
Just a little nervous
Now the preacher says,
"You're married to stay"

It's a holiday today
The Wedding of the little Painted Doll


Arthur Freed (W) & Nacio Herb Brown (M)
from the 1929 movie, "Broadway Melody"

I finally found a YouTube clip of one of my favorite Hollywood production numbers. It's one of my favorites because it's just about the first Hollywood production number ever, from the 1929 curiosity Broadway Melody. Then of course you know what happened. It was taken down due to one of those silly rules, such as the law against theft.

So I put up the closest thing I could find, which is grainy still pictures, but the music is good.

The days of early sound must have been heady and terrifying: everything was dumped upside-down. Theatres had to scramble to convert all their equipment, careers were shattered, others sprang up full-blown like Athena from the head of Zeus. (Sorry, I used that metaphor a few posts ago, but it was too good not to repeat. This Oscar Levant stuff is getting to me.) It wasn't so much actors with "good voices" who were able to make the switch, but actors who were able to adapt their style to something more fluid, more subtle, with no more fluttering eyelashes or jabbing, full-body gestures.

Try something here, if you will: look at some silent films, both dramas and comedies (and turn off the wretched music that usually goes with them: when I say silent, I mean silent). Then watch some black-and-white movies from ten years later, with the sound off. Observe carefully. It's a whole 'nother ball game, like comparing stage acting to screen acting. The old large gestures won't play. Often, one murmur will do.

This doesn't mean sound films are "better", but they do seem to be from another planet. Much as I'm intrigued by them, I find silent pictures hard to follow. I'm one of those auditory types, and seeing lips moving with title cards strains my imagination.  Except for Harold Lloyd comedies, the pace of silent film seems much slower, and I was raised as a vid-kid on television that, by comparison, moved at light speed.

So, with the release of that awful non-talkie The Jazz Singer (featuring Al Jolson, the most repulsive performer who ever lived), everything changed. Garbo walked in and mowed everyone down with a voice that was heavily accented, "foreign", and far too deep and gruff to match her ethereal beauty. Something about it worked, it snagged people, grabbed them viscerally. Comedians such as W. C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy, who already had a loyal following in silent pictures, exploded overnight into international stars: and need I tell you why?

So anyway, this Broadway Melody, which I have watched on Turner Classics (bailing halfway through the first time because the non-musical part of it is just so awful) is a fine example of the partial transformation that audiences gobbled up at the time. It's a sort of cliche of early talkies that everyone had to cluster around a microphone hidden behind a potted palm, but it actually is true that these movies had a peculiarly static quality. Nobody knew how to deal with a microphone, which to the actors (mimes, by our standards) must have seemed like a voice-sucking monster. That explains why they had to include frenetic production numbers like this one, to keep rigor mortis from setting in.

This is the strangest one ever, with girls being spun around like compasses, a preacher with Harold Lloyd glasses and rubber legs who appears to fall down the stairs, cartwheels and splits galore, girls with a pompom attached to one ankle (??), and precious lyrics sung by one of those young men with a falsetto voice. I also note a bit of '20s choreography I've seen before: the girls stand on one foot, the other leg extended, hold on to the extended ankle, and hop up and down.


The whole thing is so beautiful to look at: not "black and white", but silver and shine. The music has that charming, optimistic "oom-cha, oom-cha" quality that was so popular before the Depression brought it all crashing down. Soon would come a leap in sophistication:  better songs, real plots instead of stilted novelty-driven dialogue ("Take. . . him. . . for. . . a. . . ride"), Fred and Ginger. If you look at pictures from 1929, then pictures from 1931, you will be astounded at the transformation.

In the interim was a mad scramble, studded with quirky little sparklers like this one.