When asked, "Which movie won the first Academy Award for Best Picture?" a fair number of people will know it's 1927's "Wings." Ask those people, "What was the first musical to win an Academy Award for Best Picture?", and many of their faces wrinkle in puzzlement. And those who'd guess "The Jazz Singer" would be wrong. However, if you're a fan of slap-slap-slap-ball change, you'll know the 1930 winner is the memorable "The Broadway Melody."

This MGM backstage musical, written by Edmund Goulding, Norman Houston, and James Gleason and directed by Harry Beaumont, was promoted as the first all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing movie. Movie sound was still in its infancy, and there were many technical obstacles to overcome to achieve some semblance of artistry. "The Broadway Melody" was the leader of the pack in the musical genre, only to be bested by Busby Berkeley's visual inventiveness in musicals throughout the next decade.

Originally conceived as a biopic of the Duncan Sisters (two vaudeville queens of "Topsy and Eva" fame), "The Broadway Melody" kept the sister act concept but evolved its story into love and sacrifice within the contexts of show biz and gangsters. The real star of this movie is its fabulous Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown score with such gems as "You Were Meant for Me", "Wedding of the Painted Doll", and the title song "Broadway Melody" (which you hear three times in the first half hour of the nearly two-hour movie). Following its success, there were three more "Broadway Melody" films released in subsequent years (1936, 1938, and 1940), each one a winner and improving on this original.

After touring the vaudeville circuit, hardscrabble sister act The Mahoney Sisters come to the Big Apple to "make it on Broadway" and, for one sister, to marry her fella. Hank (in a dynamite performance by Bessie Love, who had a long Hollywood career) and her sister Queenie (woodenly played by Anita Page, popular silent film star, who had received several marriage proposals from Benito Mussolini) meet up with Hank's fiance, Eddie Kearns, played by snappy vaudevillian Charles King. He's a performer himself and provides the means of getting them onto the Broadway stage, but the story centers on their love triangle and the sacrifices each sister makes (one smart, the other bone-headed) for this lug, who gets the best of both sisters.

Throughout the film, Hank physically clings to Queenie so much that you wonder if there's more to their relationship than birth sisters. Also, it's not explained why Hank's dialect doesn't match Queenie's strident Brooklyn accent, which sounds much like Lina Lamont's accent in "Singing in the Rain." Much is made of Queenie's beauty in the movie, but it's evident that Hank is equally lovely. Looks aside, Bessie Love, as Hank, is a hungry spitfire, who can act, sing, and dance rings around her co-star Anita Page. Of course, Page was only nineteen to Love's thirty-one, which could account for some skill gap, and, to Page's credit, she does do a wonderful job acting very drunk in one scene with Love (practice makes perfect, they say). However, her presence pales to the effervescent Love, especially in the scene where Hank learns the truth about Eddie's feelings for Queenie. It's the most moving scene of the film and a darn good one, so it was no surprise when Love received a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for BM.

But this film wasn't produced to showcase anyone's acting talents. It was made to entertain, and it certainly delivers with energetic music, zippy dialogue, funny characters, yelling and cat fights, and legs, legs, legs. And there are plenty of thick ones attached to bevies of chorines in Zanfield's (shades of Ziegfeld) Revue. There's even a chorine in a mouse cap tapping in toe shoes, normally worn only by ballerinas. Recurring comic relief is found in Zanfield's sycophants (who only say, "Yes, sir," in chorus to him), a stuttering Uncle Jed (with the phoniest stutter imaginable), and "Unconscious," the drunken sophisticate in bad boy Jock Warriner's gang.

Some of the sets are simply Art Deco fabulous, and many of the costumes are designed outrageously, especially the sisters' "The Boyfriend" outfits, adorned with at least twenty pounds of ostrich feathers (or some bird's feathers). And it's always fun to hear the slang of that time in the dialogue, such as, "Oh, you're just a crepe hanger," "I can use the blonde, but that little cluck is out," and "You can't go out with that bird!" These were the days when folks would go out to eat a "bowl of chop suey" or a "bowl of chili," and say things like, "It's better to star in Peoria than to starve on Broadway."

Political correctness hadn't been invented, and early cinema had many non-PC moments, with BM being no exception. At a party, one fella claims to another, who brought with him a super-sized radio, "I got Scotland on mine last night." "How'd you know you got Scotland?" "Cause they were singing 'The Best Things in Life are Free'." In another scene, back at Zanfield's theatre, chorines complain to the costume designer that their hats are too wide for the door. He responds with, "Well, I design the hats, not the doors to the theatre," to which the costume lady retorts, "I know. If you had, they'd all be lavender." And I could be wrong, but I could have sworn I heard Uncle Jed say, "Ah, why don't you have a little drink, Hankie? It might f*ck you up."

I was going to give BM a rating of 3 but had to give it a 4. The deciding factor was my weakness for the utterly surreal number "Wedding of the Painted Doll," which, by the way, was the first film footage that was filmed to a playback of pre-recorded music. Although it's a terrific song, the choreography was clearly not designed for the cinema. Sloppy (probably exhausted) dancers stumble and flit across the stage seemingly randomly, jostling each other, their fleshy limbs flapping in the breeze. One male dancer nearly drops a female dancer on her head--twice, and a string of bizarrely costumed chorines perform their routine with the precision of drunken yahoos at a Rudy Vallee concert. Though the endless stream of dancers appear rather Felliniesque (I could swear there's a young man wearing heavy makeup and dressed as a ballerina), the set looks Art Deco ravishing. And it is a divine song.

Sure, BM is grainy black and white and has that old-time audio sizzle in the soundtrack that makes you hungry for bacon. But it broke ground as the first high-caliber movie musical, and it has a lot of charm over and above its retro appeal. Or, as stated in the last line of dialogue, "Why it's cream in the can, baby."

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age