Tag Archives: Don Ameche

‘Gold Diggers of 1933’: Fast Talk and Hard Times

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Original Poster.

Original Poster.

“Gold Diggers of 1933” is a terrific picture, the best of all the Warner Bros. backstage musicals. The screenplay is so witty and full of charm that the picture would be a pleasure even without the bizarre Busby Berkeley numbers. The cast is composed of the usual stock characters: the overnight sensation (Ruby Keeler), the incognito/slumming boy singer (Dick Powell), the wise-cracking matron (Aline MacMahon), the agitated producer (Ned Sparks), the theatre-hating bluebloods from out of town (Warren William and Guy Kibbee), the chippie with the heart of gold (Joan Blondell), the hoyden without a heart of gold (Ginger Rogers), etc., etc.; the plot is a compendium of The Show Must Go On clichés and conventions — there’s really nothing new about any of it — and yet, the picture is better than merely funny: it is also surprisingly moving. That it is funny is no surprise, but every time I see it, it’s funnier than I had remembered. Great lines keep whizzing by. Here are a few examples, taken at random:

Fay (Ginger Rogers): Aw, gee. I look much better in clothes than any of you. If Barney could see me in clothes . . .
Trixie (Aline MacMahon): . . . He wouldn’t recognize you.

*   *   *

Barney (Ned Sparks — asking about Brad (Dick Powell), a young composer): Yeah, what’s he done?
Polly (Ruby Keeler): Well, he hasn’t had a chance to do anything yet, Mr Hopkins, but he has genius.
Barney: Yeah? Well, the show business could stand a little genius .  .  .

*   *   *

Barney (trying to persuade Brad to be in the show): Now listen: you and Polly would make a swell team — like the Astaires! You’d be a knockout for the mush interest . . . !

*   *   *

Don Gordon (Clarence Nordstrom): Now let me tell you something: I’ve been a juvenile for eighteen years! And you’re gonna tell me how to sing a song?!

*   *   *

Barney: Listen, Brad, whyntcha do this juvenile part yerself? You’ve got it over Gordon like a tent!

*   *   *

Trixie (dancing with Guy Kibbee): You’re as light as a heifer . . . uh, feather.

When Metro tried to do this sort of musical, they always bollocksed it up with sentimentality. Take “Ziegfeld Girl,” for example: Judy Garland, in order to get her career on track, must break away from her excruciating has-been vaudevillian father, Charles Winninger; while Lana Turner, late of Flatbush, is unwilling to settle down with honest truck driver Jimmy Stewart and therefore (in typical Metro fashion) pays for her independence by dropping dead of an unspecified party-girl illness. In the backstage musicals over at Fox, too much emphasis was placed on dud romantic pairings. In “The Gang’s All Here,” the picture comes vividly alive when Alice Faye sings “No Love, No Nothin’,” but it dies a thousand deaths in the love-clinches. Nobody cares whether she ends up with that zero named James Ellison, who is her leading man. Six times she ended up with prissy, ruby-lipped Don Ameche: did anyone, other than Don Ameche, want to see her kissing Don Ameche? I know I don’t . . .

Ned Sparks, Ruby Keeler: 'The theatre could stand a little genius . . . '

Ned Sparks, Ruby Keeler: ‘The show business could stand a little genius . . . ‘

Love is always in the air in Warner Bros. backstage musicals, but nobody pretends it matters. It’s the gags, the snappy patter, the bare skin and the hallucinatory numbers that count. And the acting is always better in the Warners backstagers.

“Gold Diggers of 1933” is bracingly pre-code — it’s full of lewdness and casual criminality, the sort of stuff that widened the eyes of Joe Breen and made him foam at the mouth. Early in the picture, Aline MacMahon steals a bottle of milk from her neighbors and gets away with it. She makes a habit of stealing food from the neighbors. Nobody goes to prison for the theft; nobody feels guilty or even sorry about it. Over at Metro, Judge Hardy would probably have sent MacMahon to the chair for her incorrigible disregard of the law.

The Visionary

Every backstage musical has a hard-driven, hard-driving, fast-talking wizard who is the brains and imagination behind the hit show that has its premiere at the end of the picture. Sometimes he’s the director, other times he’s the producer; in these stories, the two are interchangeable. In “Gold Diggers of 1933,” he’s a producer/director of genius named Barney Hopkins. We see little of how Barney runs his rehearsals, but we get something rather more interesting and exciting: we see him at the exact moment of inspiration, when he suddenly sees every detail of his next hit show dancing before his eyes. And another interesting thing: he’s played by sourpuss character actor, Ned Sparks. In most other backstage musicals, the creative dynamo is a leading man part (e.g., Warner Baxter, Jimmy Cagney); he usually has some sort of conflicted love affair with his leading lady, and he nearly always has a grasping ex-wife who kicks up a financial rumpus at regular intervals, just to make sure the road to success is plenty bumpy. But Ned Sparks is not burdened with any emotional attachments or romantic entanglements: his Barney Hopkins lives to put on shows and nothing else. Sparks was an extremely popular supporting actor all through the thirties: the cartoonists at Warners made him a semi-regular character in their animated shorts (e.g., “The Coo-Coo Nut Grove“), but Disney’s animators also parodied him in their cartoons. Sparks was so famous for his sour expression, he took out a $10,000 insurance policy with Lloyd’s of London to protect his reputation from being damaged if ever a photographer took a picture of him while he was smiling. At times, he looks almost astonishingly similar to Steve Buscemi; Buscemi’s range as an actor may be broader, but Sparks is much funnier.

Caricature of Ned Sparks from 'The Coo-Coo Nut Grove.'

Caricature of Ned Sparks from ‘The Coo-Coo Nut Grove.’

The scene below comes just after Barney has overheard Brad Roberts (Dick Powell) play a tune in the apartment across the airshaft and orders him to come play for him. Barney is impressed with the young songwriter, and asks to hear another tune. Sparks goes in for broad effects, but he’s got the commitment and intensity to make them work. As Barney Hopkins, he’s a true visionary: the Artist as Hero; in this scene, we see him in the act of creation. Of course his acting style is artificial, theatrical and played to the last row of the second balcony, but his performance gives me goosebumps even while I laugh at it. I think it looks the way creativity feels — if you’re able to accept the artifice, the moment is thrilling.

So Brad goes back to his apartment on the other side of the airshaft and a few minutes later, this is what happens.

“Gee, don’t it getcha?” Well, it sure gets me.

The Foolish Old Moneybags

Guy Kibbee, who appeared in several of Warners’ backstage musicals, is a reliably funny actor, but I think he was never better than he is in this one. He plays a Boston moneybags named Faneuil H. Peabody, who gets taken to the cleaners by the gold digging Trixie (Aline MacMahon). In this clip, he reminisces about the last time he got involved with a chorus girl. That’s the light-loafered Eric Blore who stomps out at the end of the clip. This was one of his first Hollywood pictures. He’s so much younger than I’ve ever seen him before, that I didn’t recognize him at first. But that sibilant, silly ass British accent is unmistakable.


Later in the picture, we see Fuffy entirely under Trixie’s spell. In this scene, he has a low comedy bit with a dog. Kibbee’s such an old pro that he upstages the animal.

The Low Vaudeville Comedy

“Gold Diggers of 1933” also contains a peculiarly American brand of low comedy that was a staple of vaudeville: the dimwit immigrant comics with the silly foreign accents. This short clip makes me laugh out loud no matter how many times I see it. I love dialect comedy; the more outrageous it is, the better I like it — it’s just about the lowest comedy there is — but I love Ned Sparks’ irritable wise cracks even better. My personal hero, the great George S. Kaufman himself, would not have been ashamed to write these gags.

The Pep Talk

At some point in every backstage musical, we get the pep talk. The device was so common that there’s even a joke about it in one of the last of the backstage musicals, “The Band Wagon” (Metro, 1953). The most famous of them all is the one delivered by Warner Baxter to Ruby Keeler in “42nd Street” (Warner Bros., 1932). It is the template for all the others that followed.

Sawyer, you listen to me, and you listen hard. Two hundred people, two hundred jobs, two hundred thousand dollars, five weeks of grind and blood and sweat depend upon you. It’s the lives of all these people who’ve worked with you. You’ve got to go on, and you’ve got to give and give and give. They’ve got to like you. Got to. Do you understand? You can’t fall down. You can’t because your future’s in it, my future and everything all of us have is staked on you. All right, now I’m through, but you keep your feet on the ground and your head on those shoulders of yours and go out, and Sawyer, you’re going out a youngster but you’ve got to come back a star!

Here’s Aline MacMahon giving the obligatory pep talk. You will see that she does it with supreme authority, at breakneck pace, yet with great specificity and attention to detail: MacMahon allows nothing to be vague or a generalized emotion. And she does it in a single take.

And yet, for all the low-down comedy and farcical elements, “Gold Diggers of 1933” is really very touching. These chorus girls — the gold diggers — are so resourceful and resilient, so good-natured, so lively and entertaining as they try to make careers for themselves in the bruising hurlyburly of the show business, and in the depths of the Great Depression, that they inspire genuine affection and sympathy. And they make you laugh. Not one of them has an ounce of self-pity — no complaint is ever unaccompanied by a gag — and not one of them would consider giving up on her dream of a successful theatrical career. When Trixie says of Brad, “He has nerve! He’s regular! He b’longs in the show business!” it’s the highest praise she can possibly give. The chorines’ devotion to their profession is evidence of their valor. In this picture, low-down variety artists are heroic figures, not phonies or dopes or egomaniacs — leave that to the swells. These chorus girls suffer set-backs far more often than they enjoy triumphs, but they rise above their disappointments and soldier on . . . and they never stop looking out for one another (even if they do swipe fresh bottles of milk from their neighbors’ window sills). I like the way the picture celebrates talent and commitment to one’s dreams; I’m touched by the way Barney Hopkins recognizes musical talent at once and hires it on the spot: “I’ll cancel my contract with Warren and Dubin: they’re out!” he exclaims after hearing only one and a half songs by Brad, who has not a single professional credit to his name. “I want you to write the music for this show and the lyrics!” (That’s an inside joke, of course: Warren and Dubin wrote the songs for the picture.)

‘Is Everybody Nutty?!’

On the other end of the spectrum from Brad, who heroically risks losing his inheritance by agreeing that The Show Must Go On, there is the arch-fiend, who tries to prevent the show from happening. No backstage musical is complete without the stock character of the skulking show-closer. He comes in many forms: the unpaid creditor, the blackmailing cop, the implacable sheriff, the bitter has-been, the pious busybody, the jilted boyfriend, etc., but whatever form he takes, he always appears just before the opening night curtain goes up. Take a look at this clip which comes right before the finale (“Remember My Forgotten Man”).

This phony “Detective” Jones (Fred Kelsey, who appeared in over 450 pictures and almost never got a credit) is the one true villain in the picture. It’s bad enough that he tries to close the show and throw the kids out of work, but he’s a veteran actor himself. In the theatrical world, an actor who doesn’t abide by the one unbreakable law, The Show Must Go On, is the lowest sort of scoundrel. Yet I find genuine pathos in his predicament: he’s as hard up as all the kids in the show, and this is the only acting work he has been able to find. It’s both funny and heartbreaking when he complains “That’s no way to speak of an artist! Why, I’ve played with Sir Henry Irving, George Arliss and David Warfield!” What an actor! Even when caught in his villainy, he can’t resist listing his credits! But Ned Sparks is having none of it.

Other Notable Movies (for Better or Worse)

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Mildred Pierce

Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott, Joan Crawford -- Toxic Triangle: "How long has this been going on?"

Ann Blyth, Zachary Scott, Joan Crawford — Toxic Triangle: “How long has this been going on?”

“Mildred Pierce” is a superbly balanced blend of Woman’s Picture conventions (single mother struggling to find success, love and happiness in a man’s world), Film Noir elements (e.g., flashbacks, Dutch-tilt angles, dark shadows and silhouettes) and Camp (e.g., Ann Blyth as the Daughter from Hell: the nastiest, cattiest, most quotable little bitch of all time; Eve Arden at her most Ardenesque (i.e., a proto-drag queen), cracking wise and lighting matches off the sole of her shoe). Michael Curtiz somehow makes these three seemingly antagonistic styles work together to create a completely satisfying whole.  It’s quite amazing, when you think about it:  Camp and film noir in the same picture?  Shouldn’t they cancel each other out?  But they don’t — they invigorate each other.  It’s not the greatest picture I ever saw, but it’s one of the most fun.  If I happen across it when it’s on TV, I find it quite impossible to change the channel or leave the room before the end.

Alice Faye (in “The Gang’s All Here”)

Alice Faye: Round the block, but not through the mill.

Alice Faye: Round the block, but not through the mill.

I confess to having a fondness for “The Gang’s All Here,” which many people I respect abominate.  It’s a terrible picture — terrible.  And it’s ugly.  And there’s a lot of music in it that I don’t like.  But I love the ingenious staging of the opening number (even though I’ve never liked the song “Brazil” and don’t like Carmen Miranda), and I like the bizarro stuff that pops up every 15 minutes or so.  In fact, it was one of my younger brothers who first called the picture to my attention — specifically, the last number, called “The Polka Dot Polka.”  It is damned strange — almost nightmarish, in a way that Busby Berkeley’s black and white pictures weren’t.  (By the way, “The Gang’s All Here” is the first color picture — and the last big-budget picture — that Berkeley ever was allowed to direct.  One can see why.)  I like the picture because of its awfulness.  I wouldn’t dream of trying to talk anyone into sharing my enjoyment of a picture that is inferior in so many ways.  Oh, but there is one song smack in the middle of it — Chapter 15 on the DVD — that, for my money, is one of the two or three best songs that Alice Faye ever sang.  It’s “No Love, No Nothin’ ” and she sings it beautifully.  (I think the only other song of hers I like more is “You’ll Never Know,” which she sang so exquisitely that it seems foolish for anyone else to bother singing it.  She owns that song the way Garland owned “Over the Rainbow” and Streisand owns “People.”)

I love Alice Faye’s deep, caressing voice and her perfect intonation — she’s always in the exact middle of the note (no wobble, no scooping); she phrases beautifully and serves the lyrics as faithfully as she serves the melodic line; there’s never any straining or phony sentimentality.  She was born and raised in Hell’s Kitchen — she didn’t have a noticeable New York accent, but her demeanor makes it clear that she was nobody’s patsy.  And I’m a sucker for the contralto voice!  Faye’s complete absence of the movie star’s need to be worshiped by her adoring fans makes her unique:  she always gives me the impression that the song she’s singing is more important than anything else, including her fans’ approval.  She wasn’t a show-off; she never overwhelmed a tune with ostentatious virtuosity; she trusted the melody and the lyrics to do the work for her, her choices about what to emphasize and what to underplay always made perfect sense and suited the songs perfectly.  (Gershwin and Berlin always said Fred Astaire was their favorite intepreter of their work, since he never “improved” their songs with his own unwelcome liberties:  he sang the songs exactly as written, and you could understand every word.  I see their point, but Astaire’s voice was thin and unappealing — unmusical.  Alice Faye did what Astaire did, but also produced a beautiful, luscious sound while she did it.)  As a screen presence, she conveyed friendliness and decency without seeming insipid or naive.  She was never the girl next door; she was the girl from the tenement down the street and she knew the score.  Yet, remarkably, for all her streetwise savvy, she wasn’t hard or jaded — just smart and in the know.  She’d been round the block, but not through the mill.  In my book, that’s a killer combination, and it’s at the heart of what makes her such a great singer:  no tricks, no fussiness, no self-aggrandizement, only beautiful diction, warmth, intelligence and emotional candor.  Whenever I hear Alice Faye sing, I think of how homesick her honey voice must have made the GIs overseas.  I haven’t seen many of her pictures, and the ones I’ve seen have been terrible.  But no matter how bad the pictures are, I always like her.  She was a good actress, and by all accounts, she was a very shrewd broad — she was one of the highest paid women in Hollywood (on many of those Jack Benny programs, you hear jokes at Phil Harris’s expense about how much more money his wife earns), and when Betty Grable came along (whom Faye liked), she knew her days were numbered and got out before her star faded.  She once said, “Six pictures I made with Don Ameche and, in every one of them, my voice was deeper than the plot.”  (SIX with Ameche!  No wonder I haven’t seen more of her pictures!)

I often wonder what her career would have been like had she been signed at Metro instead of Fox.  She radiated too much intelligence and self-respect to be a sex bomb, but at Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck made sure that she was a sexually desirable presence.  At Metro, her sex appeal would have been ignored — certainly not enhanced — but she probably would have been in better pictures.  Metro’s studio head, Louis B. Mayer, was the only mogul (perhaps the only man in America) who never understood that sex sells.  All the studios were expected to obey the crazy rules of the Production Code set down by the Hays Office, and all of them complied — more or less.  But that didn’t stop Harry Cohn over at Columbia from making Rita Hayworth as sexually vibrant as the law would allow.  Warner Bros. tended to focus on gangster pictures and “important” Bette Davis woman’s pictures, but Ann Sheridan (the Oomph Girl) was under contract at Warner’s, and she, too, was an out-and-out sex bomb.  Paramount had Marlene Dietrich, who was all about sex — and not even “normal” sex; she was the personification of Old World sexual decadence.  And Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox saw to it that his female stars were sexy — Fox produced more sex kittens than any other studio (Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell, etc.).  So Alice Faye, who was beautiful but not kittenish, was costumed and photographed to look as alluring as possible (though not, alas, in “The Gang’s All Here,” in which she’s costumed in one hideous ensemble after another:  in “No Love, No Nothin’,” she’s dressed like a milkmaid from a Ruritanian operetta).

Mayer was the only studio head who slavishly complied with the Production Code; he made it his business to see that no hint of sexual innuendo or naughtiness polluted the pictures from his studio.  (And that’s why so many Metro pictures look so dopey nowadays:  they’re exasperatingly asexual.)  Common wisdom says that Mayer knew if he didn’t willingly comply with the Code, the government would interfere in his affairs.  This theory has never made sense to me — all the other studios complied, but, knowing that sex sells, found ways to subvert the rules even as they obeyed them.  I sincerely doubt Mayer feared government intervention — he had closer connections with Washington power brokers than anyone else in Hollywood.  No, I think he was simply afraid of sex.  That’s why he didn’t trade in sexbombs.

Mayer’s female stars tended to be matrons and grande dames.  The only real bombshell at Metro in the 30s was Harlow — but her most of career as a bombshell was in the pre-Code years.  Garbo was certainly alluring and mysterious, but sexy?  Maybe in the silents, but after the talkies came in, even when she played Camille, she was more glamorous than sexual — and the whole business of how Camille earned enough dough to keep herself in stockings and fans was completely left out of the script.  For most of the 40’s, Metro had but one resident sexbomb:  Lana Turner, who wasn’t nearly as sexy as the studio press agents wanted audiences to believe.  Her reputation for sex appeal and her nickname “the Sweater Girl” (which she hated) came from a small part she played in a Warner Bros. picture, “They Won’t Forget” — before she signed with Metro.  At Metro, she was often cast against Clark Gable, and since he was the reigning male sex symbol, she became a sex goddess by default, even though by the early 40s, she was already beginning to put on weight and age badly.  (She was a party girl:  she went out every night, drank and smoked too much and never got enough sleep.)  Her career has always bewildered me:  she was the most incompetent major star in Hollywood.  She couldn’t act, she couldn’t dance, she couldn’t sing.  A triple threat.  Hell, she couldn’t even cross a room gracefully.  If Turner had been at Fox, Zanuck would have put her on a diet, made her exercise more and wear a tighter girdle.  So what sort of actresses did Mayer employ?  Katharine Hepburn (sexless and in her mid 30s), Greer Garson (sexless and effete), Myrna Loy (who began as a siren in the silents, but quickly became Wm. Powell’s favorite wife, whereupon sex went out of her career), Norma Shearer (Irving Thalberg’s lumpen, cross-eyed wife), Joan Crawford (who started as a flapper, but soon was typecast as truculent working girls), and a host of elderly British character actresses.  In the late 40s/early 50s, Mayer promoted Ann Miller as a sex symbol (mainly because he was infatuated with her and tried unsuccessfully to have an affair with her), but I don’t think anyone ever bought Miller as anything but a hoofer with alarmingly fast feet.  The only genuine sex bomb to work at Metro in the 40s was Ava Gardner, and she was wasted there.  She was undeniably sexy, but every time I see her in a Metro picture, I think of how Zanuck at Fox would have presented her.  He surely would have given her bigger parts and made her show more skin.  Elizabeth Taylor eventually became a sexbomb, but not until Mayer had been fired.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Post-war blues for a bunch of schnooks:
Banker, soda-jerk, & the one with hooks.
Harold Russell, Dana Andrews, Fredric March: Down in the dumps in a B-24.

Harold Russell, Dana Andrews, Fredric March: Down in the dumps in a B-24.

I’m not crazy about “Best Years of Our Lives,” for a couple of good reasons and plenty of bad ones.  For starters, I can’t get past the name of that fictional town:  Boone City.  I like Teresa Wright and Myrna Loy; late in the picture, there’s a devastating performance by a character actor named Roman Bohnen.  As for the rest, it’s three hours of “We will now pause for the liberal message” with a special emphasis on the amazing variety of things that can be done with prosthetic hooks.  I know it’s meant to raise public awareness, but honest to Pete, it borders on the pornographic when William Wyler spends five minutes showing us how Harold Russell uses his crooked pincers to light a match.  I remember thinking, “Well, at least we don’t have to see him play ‘Chopsticks’ . . . Oh, wait!  We DO have to see him play ‘Chopsticks’ . . . !”  It is the only time I’ve disliked a scene that featured the redoubtable Hoagy Carmichael.  The picture was produced by Sam Goldwyn, who made several high quality pictures, but never a good looking one.  The interiors in nearly every picture he produced are of almost unimaginable hideousness.  “Dodsworth” (1936) had a number of attractive deco sets (Richard Day won the Oscar that year for his work), but that seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

From the very first frame of the credits, the Hugo Friedhofer score alone is enough to tell you you’re in for it.  Then the credits tell you the screenplay is by onetime Algonquin wit Robert E. Sherwood, who had been the US propaganda minister all through the war and had come to take himself  v e r y  seriously indeed.  He’s like a nagging, neglected wife in bathrobe and curlers waiting for you to tiptoe in at three in the morning.  Big Ideas are his rolling pin.  And then there’s that first scene, in which the camera lingers over Harold Russell’s hooks as he writes his name and lights his cigarette.  Willy Wyler is gonna force us to gaze upon those hooks long and hard before he’s done with us.  That shows how honest and serious he is.  Every time Harold Russell shows up, it’s like a bad vaudeville act played in reverse:  the hooks start the act, instead of stop it.  Robert Warshow, the great critic of popular culture in the 1940s and 50s, titled his review of the picture “The Anatomy of Falsehood,” which should give you some idea of his opinion of this self-congratulatory piece of shit, but there’s no mean-spiritedness in what he wrote; I don’t know how he did it.

Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael: 'Chopsticks' & steel hooks

Harold Russell, Hoagy Carmichael: ‘Chopsticks’ and steel hooks

Harold Russell is the only man to win two Oscars for a single performance.  Nobody expected him, a non-actor, to win the Best Supporting Actor award, so they gave him a special Oscar for being a good role model.  Then he made a monkey of bookmakers everywhere by winning the competitive award, too.  Clifton Webb, who was nominated that year for “The Razor’s Edge,” uncharacteristically, took the loss in his stride — not so his aged mother, a termagant known as Mabelle, with whom he lived until the day she died.  She delivered a harangue to a crowd of reporters, in which she denounced the Academy for snubbing her son AGAIN:  this time, he had the Oscar in the bag, “. . . and at the last moment, along comes the man with the HOOKS!”

(Two anecdotes about Webb and his mother.  He went into deep mourning when she finally kicked off at 91.  More than a year after she died, Webb called Noël Coward long distance and blubbered so much that Coward finally snapped, “Clifton!  If you don’t stop weeping, I shall reverse the charges!”  Another, somewhat crueller anecdote about Mrs Webb goes like this:  Bogart invited Webb to a party, and said, “But I’m warning you:  bring your fucking mother, and she cleans up her own vomit.”)