Oh gee! Oh joy! He's Cupid's toy

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.

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

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.