Flirtation Walk (1934)

(On Cable TV, January 2020) At one time, Americans loved their military officers as much as they loved their musical stars, and so Flirtation Walk is a naked attempt to combine both, as it focuses on a soldier who falls for a general’s daughter in Hawaii, and meets her again years later while they’re both at West Point. It’s also, in movie musical history, a film known for first attempting to get away from Broadway-inspired backstage musicals to a more naturalistic setting in which song and dance numbers could be integrated. Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler make for a good romantic pair—helped along by an antagonistic relationship that gradually defrosts and a comic tone that has the heroine pursuing the male lead on his own territory. The idea of getting the musical away from Broadway isn’t fully realized yet—or should we say that it comes with a rescue buoy given how much is made of the male character’s work on a West Point musical theatre play. (You can get the musical away from Broadway, but you can’t get Broadway away from the musical…) It’s not that good of a musical from a song and dance perspective, but it does work relatively well as a romantic comedy, with some very funny sequences midway through as the heroin barges in on the play that he’s writing—and he responds in kind. Blend in the romance, song, military, stars and amiable tone and you get something in Flirtation Walk that was apparently good enough to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy award back in 1934—a year in which the winner was the funnier but non-musical romantic comedy It Happened One Night.