Broadway to Hollywood (1933)
(On Cable TV, March 2021) One of the defining aspects of the first decade of Hollywood musicals (which could only start after the invention of sound cinema) is how closely they were synonymous with Broadway. In reaching for readymade inspiration, the musicals reached out and grabbed talent, shows, attitudes and best practices from New York’s stage culture. You can see these fingerprints everywhere in 1930s musicals, from shows being adapted to the big screen, to performers jumping from stage to screen, to avowed subject matter revolving around Broadway—and not merely the ever-popular story of “putting on a show.” Broadway to Hollywood isn’t much of a film, but more interesting when set against this broad 1930s movement. Tracking the story of three generations of theatrical performers as the family trade moves (all together now) from Broadway to Hollywood, it’s a drama more than a musical. Much of the initial narrative has to do with vaudeville losing its lustre and then being truly hammered by early cinema. The last act finds itself in the mansions of Hollywood, with the elderly protagonists having harsh words for what Hollywood has done to their grandsons. Much of the narrative is executed in melodramatic mode—albeit occasionally very satisfying melodrama, as proven by a climactic shove down an armchair—but the most intriguing aspect of the film is in showing, from a very close historical perspective, how American mass entertainment evolved over a lifetime, setting the stage for a cultural landscape far more familiar to us. Broadway to Hollywood has an equally interesting production history — largely shot in 1929 and 1930 in three separate musical streams, shelved when early-early musicals crashed at the box office, reshot and polished off as melodrama in 1933 when a more mature form of musicals once again became hits… the topic becomes the film. There are a few marquee names in here, with most of the contemporary attention going to an incredibly young Mickey Rooney (12!), a puzzling one-scene wonder from Jimmy Durante and a solid turn from Jackie Cooper — although if you want to talk performances, Frank Morgan and Alice Brady are the glue that holds a sometime-disjointed film together as they play the older performers. Broadway to Hollywood is not a completely successful film, but it is fascinating and it does offer a glimpse at a period where the American cultural landscape changed very quickly.
