Broadway Babies (1929)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) The first few years of sound cinema were filled with Broadway backstagers, as the newly audible medium reached for the closest equivalent in an attempt to figure out what to do with a soundtrack. A blend of backstage drama, criminal thrills and song-and-dance numbers, Broadway Babies pales in comparison with the better examples of the form that was burgeoning at the time. It’s a bit dull, quite stiff, not yet comfortable in the ways to use sound, and the film had the bad luck of being semi-lost in time: the only surviving copy is a 16 mm copy-of-a-copy—meaning that it looks unusually soft and blurry compared to many other films of the time, even though it wasn’t necessarily as bad when it premiered. Despite technically qualifying as a Pre-Code film, there isn’t much racy material here—there are more shootouts than scantily clad ladies, in keeping with Hollywood tradition. An early effort from famed director Mervyn LeRoy, Broadway Babies is perhaps more interesting as an example of the kinds of things that Hollywood was playing with in its early sound era. Still, there are far better films from the same time—The Broadway Melody and The Hollywood Revue of 1929, both from the same year, have some innate interest rather than being simply examples of the form.