Cast: Marceline Day, John David Horsley, Noah Beery, Henry B Walthall, Carmelita Geraghty, Mischa Auer, Francisco Alonso, Anya Gramina
64 min
A pilot and his dog crash-land on an island run by a psycho who owns a motel–and most of the locals. With Marceline Day and John David Horsley.
Plot
While aviator Lieutenant James Robbins signs his autograph on the leg of an attractive, admiring French girl at a crowded airfield as he prepares to fly from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Flash, his German shepherd, grabs a parachute and sneaks into the plane.
Thirty hours later, Jim survives a fierce lightning storm, but afterward his engine catches fire. Flash parachutes to Tabu Island, just south of Hawaii, and Jim crashes in the ocean. The dog finds Jim unconscious hanging onto a broken wing and pushes him to shore.
After Flash finds Sally James, daughter of a missionary, swimming nude in a lake, she and her father take Jim and Flash to the trading post and bar run by drunken Otto Von Krantz, who exploits the natives and, with his blonde barmaid Molly, encourages them to drink and spend the money that he pays them for the pearls they find. Jim and Flash wait for the weekly boat to come, and three days later, while Sally and Jim hold hands and watch the natives dance, Von Krantz rapes chief Manu’s daughter Rari.
When Manu orders Von Krantz to leave the island, Von Krantz shoots him. The natives hold a ritual to bring Manu back to life and keep the white people captive in Von Krantz’s bar, but Flash sneaks out with a torch and lights a pyre to signal search planes. Manu rises and Reverend James goes to speak with him, but Von Krantz shoots Manu and a native knifes the reverend.
After Jim knocks out Von Krantz and escapes from the bar with Sally, Flash bites Von Krantz to death as Molly watches. After Jim and Sally bury her father, Flash attacks a native about to spear them from above and falls with the native over a cliff. A plane lands in the water, and as natives approach, Jim, Sally and a limping Flash escape to the plane.
Cast: Bessie Love, Conway Tearle, John Holland, Natalie Moorhead, Emma Dunn, June Clyde, Edmund Breese, David Rollins, Lina Basquette, Virginia Lee Corbin, Otis Harlan
65 min
Plot
Helen Hutson, the secretary and mistress of New York businessman Van Dyne, is initially upset when her childhood sweetheart, Paul Cooper, comes to her office to visit. However, she agrees to have dinner with him after he says he is leaving town that night and, feigning a headache, breaks a date with Van.
They go dancing, and Paul, whom Helen once told not to come back into her life until he made good, proposes by the end of the evening. Helen avoids giving an answer, and at the train
They go dancing, and Paul, whom Helen once told not to come back into her life until he made good, proposes by the end of the evening. Helen avoids giving an answer, and at the train station before he leaves, she tries but fails to confess her involvement with Van.
Despite advice from her friend Katherine, Helen, now in love with Paul, plans to return to her hometown of Greenfield, New York and tell him everything before they marry. In Greenfield, Helen finds that her younger sister Lorraine is infatuated with a wealthy boy from the southern school she is attending.
Her father, who has lost his job as a newspaperman, comes in drunk with friends, one of whom asks Helen to repay $200 that her father borrowed. When a boy in town makes insulting innuendos about Helen, her brother Bud defends her reputation, breaking a bottle over the boy’s head. After the sheriff tells Helen that the injured boy’s father will not press charges if he is paid for the hospital expenses, Helen reveals to Bud that the rumors are true.
He embraces her nonetheless, and Helen returns to New York where she placates Van by saying that Paul means nothing to her, and gets the money to bail Bud out of jail. Sometime later, on the night of a party Van demands she hold for some drunken business associates, Helen’s mother and father visit her apartment. That same day, Paul, who has come back from his trip, looks for her at the office, and meets Van instead.
When Paul announces their impending marriage, Van maliciously brings Paul to the party. Meanwhile, Helen’s mother has made lemonade for the surprised guests, while her father gets drunk with two of Van’s associates. When Van, in front of Paul, orders Helen to get him handkerchiefs from his drawer, Paul leaves in disgust. Helen leaves town the next day with her parents. They receive a telegram from Lorraine announcing her marriage, and Helen is happy that her sister is “safe.” Paul comes to the house, and as Bud and his mother watch from the window, Helen and Paul embrace and reconcile.
Cast: Marian Marsh, Owen Moore, Christian Rub, William Bakewell, Emma Dunn, Edmund Breese, Geneve Mitchell, Pat O’Malley, Syd Saylor
62 min
Plot
Herman Heupelkossel, a kindhearted orderly at a New York hospital, is teased by his fellow workers for the sympathy he gives patients. An unconscious, badly bleeding girl under twenty, the victim of a speeding, drunk driver, is brought in by the driver, twenty-four-year-old John Russell, who wants to be punished for his offense.
Herman sees that the girl, Julia Wilkins, will be alright in a few days and convinces John to hide his drunkenness so that he will be able to help Julia, rather than go to jail. With the aid of Limburger cheese, black coffee and Herman’s old pipe, John reluctantly covers up his alcoholic breath.
As Julia gets better, she and John fall in love, and when he brings her home to her roominghouse, he proposes. When the accident occurred, Julia had been on her way to meet her former suitor Stanley Colton, a wealthy playboy, and accept his offer to become his mistress in exchange for luxurious rooms, a piano, musical instruction and eventually a trip to Europe to study.
She now tells Colton, who is waiting at her room, that she only kidded herself into believing that she was a musical genius. Colton still extends an offer to help her, which John rebuffs. John, who has hidden from Julia the fact that he is the black sheep son of wealthy parents, takes her to his home, where his family, especially his snooty sister Doris, make the meeting unpleasant because they think she is after his money. As a result, Julia breaks off the engagement, which leads John to go on a drinking binge. When Herman learns of this, he calls Julia, who brings John to her room.
They plan to marry without financial help from his family, and this time, Julia, anxious to leave before anything else goes wrong, calls Colton to ask him for money. She goes to have dinner at his apartment, and after she refuses his entreaties that she break with John, he has her wait in his bedroom while he answers the door. John, whom Colton craftily had called and asked to visit after he heard from Julia, enters and accuses Julia of selling herself to Colton.
Their engagement broken again, Julia soon is kicked out of her room for non-payment of rent. After two weeks, she is taken to the hospital, suffering from pneumonia. Herman, thinking that John’s presence when she regains consciousness could determine whether she lives or dies, leaves the hospital to find him, at the risk of losing his job, but arrives at John’s house just after John has left to take a steamer to Europe.
Herman convinces John’s father of the urgency of the situation and they find John. As Mr. Russell is the hospital’s heaviest donor, Herman is not fired. Julia recovers and the couple are reconciled.
Cast: El Brendel, Maureen O’Sullivan, John Garrick, Marjorie White, Frank Albertson, Hobart Bosworth, Kenneth Thomson, Micha Auer, Ivan Linow, Joyzelle Joyner, Wilfred Lucas
The film starts with a preamble showing life in 1880, where the people believed themselves the “last word in speed”. It switches to 1930, with the streets crowded with automobiles and lined with electric lights and telephone wires. It then switches to 1980, where the tenement houses have morphed into 250-story buildings, connected by suspension bridges and multi-lane elevated roads.
In 1980, J-21 (John Garrick) sets his aircraft on “hover” mode in New York, lands and converses with the beautiful LN-18 (Maureen O’Sullivan). He describes how the marriage tribunal had refused to consider J-21’s marital filing and applications, and LN-18 is going to be forced to marry the conceited and mean MT-3 (Kenneth Thomson). J-21 plans to visit LN-18 that night.
RT-42 (Frank Albertson) tries to cheer him up by taking him to see a horde of surgeons experimentally revive a man from 1930, who was struck by lightning while playing golf, and was killed. The man (originally named Peterson now is called Single O) is taken in hand by RT-42 and J-21, where it is revealed that aircraft have replaced cars, numbers have replaced names, pills have replaced food and liquor, and the only legal babies come from vending machines.
That night, LN-18 feigns a headache, and her father and the despicable MT-3 decide to go to “the show” without her. The second they are gone, RT-42 and J-21 appear and woo B-27 and LN-18 respectively. MT-3 and LN-18’s father return quite early, as MT-3 was highly suspicious, and RT-42 and J-21 hide. However, the game is foiled by the moronic Single O (El Brendel), the man from 1930, becoming addicted to pill-highballs, getting drunk, and trying to get some more pill-highballs from J-21.
J-21 is depressed, but is contacted by Z-4, the scientist. He is told that Z-4 (Hobart Bosworth) has built a “rocket plane” that can carry three men to Mars. After a farewell party where J-21 works, on the Pegasus, a dirigible they call an “air-liner,” the rocket blasts off, carrying J-21, RT-42 and Single O, who has stowed away for the synthetic rum. Landing on Mars, they are received by the Queen, Looloo and the King, Loko. That night, Looloo and Loko take them to see a “show,” a Martian opera, where a horde of trained Martian ourang-outangs dance about.
They are suddenly attacked by Booboo and Boko, the evil twins (everyone on Mars is a twin) of the King and Queen. They escape and return to Earth, and as one of the first men on another planet, J-21 is permitted to marry LN-18. Finally, Single O is reunited with his aged son, Axel.
The massive, distinctive Art Deco city-scape, for which Just Imagine has come to be best remembered, was built in a former Army balloon hangar by a team of 205 technicians over a five-month period.
The giant miniature cost $168,000 to build and was wired with 15,000 miniature lightbulbs (an additional 74 arc lights were used to light the city from above). Other production credits include costumes by Alice O’Neil and Dolly Tree with graphics by Post Amazers.[1]
Special effects
The sequence in which the El Brendel character is revived from the dead features the first screen appearance of the spectacular electrical equipment assembled by Kenneth Strickfaden, seen again and more famously in James Whale‘s Frankenstein (1931).
Over 50 special effects shots combining previously photographed backgrounds with live foreground action were accomplished using the Dunning Process.[2] Rear projection technology of the scale and quality required was not available at the time.
Of the DeSylva, Brown and Henderson songs introduced in the film, “Never Swat a Fly” was covered as the classic 1930 recording by McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the 1967 revival by Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band, and more recent recordings by Doc Cheatham among others.
Reception
Mordaunt Hall called Just Imagine, “clever”, “highly imaginative” and “intriguing” and praised the costumes and set design.[4] This expensive film was a one-time-only novelty stunt, bolstered by the short-lived popularity of El Brendel.[5]Wonder Stories “cordially recommended” the film, saying it “shows us many of the wonders that our science fiction authors have been writing about”.[6]
Although a box-office flop, however, it was eventually able to make back some of its production costs in the studio shopping out clips of the futuristic sets for other films of the period. Clips of the cityscape from this movie were later used in the Universal serials Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; the mock-up Mars spaceship was reused in the former as Dr. Zarkov’s spaceship.
Also seen in the first Flash Gordon serial are the strange hand-weapons carried by J21 and RT42 on Mars, which are held under rather than over the fist, and re-used footage of dancing girls cavorting about and on a Martian idol with moving arms.[7]
By the time Just Imagine was released, movie musicals had greatly declined in popularity.[8] As a result, major American studios would not back another big budget science fiction film until 1951. There was to be only one other American science-fiction musical in that period, It’s Great to Be Alive (1933), which failed at the box-office. Film serials were an exception to this general trend, however.
The first Flash Gordon serial from 1936 had an unusually large budget for a serial of the time, and Gene Autry’s The Phantom Empire from 1935 can loosely be considered a science fiction musical serial.
Altman, Rick. The American Film Musical. Bloomington Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1987. ISBN 978-0-253-20514-8.
Kreuger, Miles ed. The Movie Musical from Vitaphone to 42nd Street as Reported in a Great Fan Magazine. New York: Dover Publications, 1974. ISBN 0-486-23154-2.
Film Collectors Corner
Watch Just Imagine Now – Instant Video on You Tube
Cast: Conrad Nagel, Leila Hyams, Tommy Conlon, Claire Windsor, Stanley Fields, Fred Kohler, Alexander Carr, Robert Ellis, Lionel Belmore, Ruth Clifford, Mickey Daniels
76 min
The Constant Woman (1933), also known as Auction in Souls and Hell in a Circus, is an American Pre-Code film directed by Victor Schertzinger. It is based on an early Eugene O’Neill play called Recklessness.
Plot
Marlene Underwood is a star circus performer, whose husband Walt buys the circus while their son Jimmie worships everything his mother does. Marlene leaves them both to go join a larger show, then is killed in a fire, resulting in Walt going into a downward spiral of alcohol and sorrow.
A woman called Lou helps restore Walt’s faith in human nature, but she is resented by young Jimmie, who feels she is trying to take his mother’s place. Walt gets back on his feet, but now must try to stop Jimmie from joining the circus himself.
Cast: Jeanette Loff, Ben Alexander, Arthur Tracy, Emma Dunn, Franklin Pangborn, Al K Hall, Cissy Fitzgerald, Helen McKellar, William Pawley, Corky
58 min
Plot
When Dudley, a young man from the country, comes to the city with his dog “Corky,” he falls in love with an actress named Nancy.
Dudley loses Corky, but when the dog shows up and causes a disruption while Nancy is singing onstage, she is fired. A short time later, Nancy discovers that her mother, who has been led to believe that Nancy is happily married with a baby, is coming to town. To maintain the deception, Nancy convinces Dudley to pretend to be her husband and “borrows” a baby.
The ruse is soon discovered, but by then Nancy and Dudley have fallen in love. Nancy then marries Dudley and they move to his home in the country.
Cast: William Powell, Mary Astor, Eugene Pallette, Ralph Morgan, Robert McVade, Robert Barratt, Frank Conroy, Etienne Giradot, James Lee, Helen Winson, Paul Cavanagh, Jack La Rue
Philo Vance’s dog does not make it into the final of the Long Island Kennel Club’s dog show.
Fellow competitor Archer Coe (Robert Barrat) is disappointed, having hoped to savor a victory over Vance. Coe is found dead the next morning in his bedroom, locked from the inside. District Attorney Markham (Robert McWade) and Police Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette) assume it was suicide, because he was shot through the head and was found holding a pistol.
Vance is not convinced. He soon finds evidence that Coe was murdered. Coroner Dr. Doremus (Etienne Girardot) determines the victim died of a stab wound.
There is no shortage of suspects; Coe was very much disliked. His niece Hilda Lake (Mary Astor) resented her uncle’s tight control of her finances and jealousy of any men who showed interest in her.
Her boyfriend, Sir Thomas MacDonald (Paul Cavanagh), suspected Coe of killing his dog to ensure winning the competition. Raymond Wrede (Ralph Morgan), the dead man’s secretary, was in love with Miss Lake, but had been laughed at when he sought Coe’s support.
Coe’s next-door neighbor and lover Doris Delafield (Helen Vinson) had been cheating on him with Eduardo Grassi (Jack La Rue). When Coe found out, he cancelled a contract to sell his collection of Chinese artworks to the Milan museum for which Grassi worked.
Liang (James Lee), the cook, had worked long, hard, and illegally to help Coe amass his collection. He warned his employer against the proposed sale and was fired as a result. Even Coe’s own brother Brisbane (Frank Conroy) despised Coe. Finally, Gamble (Arthur Hohl), the head servant, had concealed his criminal past.
Brisbane Coe becomes Vance’s prime suspect. His alibi of taking a train at the time of the murder is disproved. When he is found dead in a closet, Vance is both puzzled and enlightened. Among Brisbane’s effects, Vance finds a book titled Unsolved Murders; a bookmarked page details a method of using string to lock a door through the keyhole without leaving a trace. Part of the mystery is solved.
Later, an attempt is made on the life of Sir Thomas using the same dagger used to kill Coe. Finally, a Doberman Pinscher belonging to Miss Delafield is found seriously injured, apparently struck with a fireside poker. From these and other clues, Vance finally solves the crime.
It turns out that two men sought Coe’s life that night. The successful murderer struggled with Coe and stabbed him, leaving him for dead. Coe awakened soon after. Too dazed to recall the fight or notice that he was mortally wounded, he went upstairs to his bedroom and opened his window before dying.
Brisbane entered the chamber, saw his brother apparently asleep in his chair. He shot the corpse and arranged the scene to look like a suicide. Downstairs, he ran into the actual killer, who had seen that Archer Coe was still alive and came back to finish the job. In the darkness, he mistook Brisbane for Archer and killed the wrong man. Delafield’s dog then wandered in, attracted by the commotion, and attacked the murderer.
While sure of the killer’s identity, Vance has no proof. He therefore arranges for Sir Thomas and Wrede to quarrel over Hilda Lake. When Wrede instinctively reaches for the poker to strike his rival, the Doberman recognizes its attacker and leaps on him. Wrede confesses he became enraged when Coe refused to assist his courtship of Miss Lake, precipitating the stabbing.
Many film historians (including William K. Everson, who pronounced it a “masterpiece” in the August 1984 issue of Films in Review) consider it one of the greatest screen adaptations of a Golden Age mystery novel, and rank it with the 1946 film Green for Danger.
Film Collectors Corner
Watch The Kennel Murder Case Now – Amazon Instant Video
Cast: William Powell, Bette Davis, Frank McHugh, Hugh Herbert, Verree Teasdale, Reginald Owen, Henry O Neill, Phillip Reed, Gordon Westcott, Dorothy Burgess, Nella Walker
The film stars William Powell, Bette Davis, Hugh Herbert and Frank McHugh, and has songs by Sammy Fain (music) and Irving Kahal (lyrics). (Sometime after the initial release, the title “Fashions of 1934” was changed to “Fashions”, replacing the original title with an insert card stating William Powell in “Fashions”).
When the Manhattan investment firm of Sherwood Nash (William Powell) goes broke, he joins forces with his partner Snap (Frank McHugh) and fashion designer Lynn Mason (Bette Davis) to provide discount shops with cheap copies of Paris couture dresses. Lynn discovers that top designer Oscar Baroque (Reginald Owen) gets his inspiration from old costume books, and she begins to create designs the same way, signing each one with the name of an established designer.
Sherwood realizes Baroque’s companion, the alleged Grand Duchess Alix (Verree Teasdale), is really Mabel McGuire, his old friend from Hoboken, New Jersey, and threatens to reveal her identity unless she convinces Baroque to design the costumes of a musicalrevue in which she will star. Baroque buys a supply of ostrich feathers from Sherwood’s crony Joe Ward (Hugh Herbert) and starts a fashion rage.
Sherwood then opens Maison Elegance, a new Paris fashion house that’s a great success until Baroque discovers Lynn is forging his sketches. He has him arrested, but Sherwood convinces the police to give him time to straighten out the situation. He crashes Baroque and Alix’s wedding and promises to humiliate the designer by publicly revealing who his bride really is unless Baroque withdraws the charges. The designer agrees and purchases Maison Elegance from Sherwood, who assures Lynn he’ll never get involved in another illegal activity if she returns to America with him.
The actress, who had been trying to convince the studio head to loan her to RKO so she could portray slatternly waitress Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage, was appalled at the transformation, complaining they were trying to turn her into Greta Garbo.[2] In an interview with Photoplay editor Kathryn Dougherty, she complained, “I can’t get out of these awful ruts. They just won’t take me seriously.
Look at me in this picture – all done up like a third-rate imitation of the MGM glamour queens. That isn’t me. I’ll never be a clothes horse or romantic symbol.”[3] To Gerald Clarke of Time she lamented, “I looked like somebody dressed up in mother’s clothes. But it was a great break because I learned from the experience. I never let them do that to me again. Ever!”[4]
Working titles for the film, which was filmed at Warner Bros. Burbank studios in 1933, were King of Fashion and Fashion Follies of 1934. Warners listed writers Gene Markey and Katherine Scola as having adapted the original story that was the basis of the film, but according to the Screen Writers Guild they had nothing to do with the film.[5]
Songs
The film’s musical numbers included “Spin a Little Web of Dreams” and “Broken Melody” by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal and “Mon Homme (My Man)” by Maurice Yvain, Albert Willemetz, and Jacques Charles. Harry Warren wrote the untitled theme that accompanies the fashion show.
Critical reception
The New York Times described it as “a brisk show” and added, “The story is lively, the gowns are interesting and the Busby Berkeley spectacles with Hollywood dancing girls are impressive . . . William Dieterle, that expert director who has been responsible for several imaginative pictures, does well by this particular production.”[6]
Variety called it “a bit far-fetched and inconsistent . . . but it has color, flash, dash, class, girls and plenty of clothes . . . Just why and how Bette Davis enters the picture never quite rings true.”[7]
Director: Lothar Mendes (silent version), Roy Pomeroy ( sound version)
Cast: Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook, William Powell, Doris Kenyon, Brandon Hurst, Tom Ricketts, Louis Payne, Wilfred Noy, Donald Stuart, Raymond Lawrence, Clyde Cook
The film was based on the play Interference, a Play in Three Acts by Roland Pertwee and Howard Dearden. When a first husband turns out not to be dead, blackmail leads to murder.[1]
Cast: William Powell, Marion Shilling, Natalie Moorhead, Regis Toomey, Paul Hurst, George Irving, Frederick Burt, James Durkin, Richard Tucker, Walter James, Broderick O Farrell
A woman being pursued by an intoxicated man breaks into John Nelson’s apartment, imploring his help. Nelson, a young engineer, confronts the man, who accidentally topples through a window to his death.
Unable to prove the circumstances, Nelson is convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. With the aid of his cellmate, he escapes and under an assumed name becomes manager of a textile mill in North Carolina.
Later, his former cellmate, Pete, is commissioned to find Ethel Barry, the woman who can clear him so that he may marry Edith, the mill owner’s daughter; but Ethel forces his hand through blackmail.
Detective Mike Kearney tracks him down, but when Montgomery (Nelson) mutilates his hands in a machine to erase his fingerprint identity, Kearney decides to force Ethel to clear him.
Cast: Richard Arlen, Fay Wray, Clive Brook, William Powell, Theodore von Eltz, Noah Beery Sr., Zack Williams, Noble Johnson, Phillippe De Lacy, Harold Hightower, Rex Ingram
Cast: William Powell, William Stage Boyd, Eugene Pallette, Paul Lukas, Natalie Moorhead, Richard Tucker, May Beatty, E H Calvert, Mischa Auer, Guy Oliver
New York dilettante Philo Vance decides to assist the police in investigating the death of another man-about-town because he finds the psychological aspects of the crime of interest, and feels that they would be beyond the capacities of the police, even those of his friend District Attorney Markham.
Vance investigates the circumstances under which the body was found and reconstructs the crime sufficiently to determine that the murderer is five feet, ten and a half inches in height. Together, Vance and Markham investigate Benson’s business associates and romantic interests until Vance manages to pierce the murderer’s alibi for the time of the murder and force a confession.
Literary significance and criticism
The novel was very loosely based upon a real-life case that had made headlines, the unsolved 1920 murder of bridge expert Joseph Bowne Elwell.
It was considered a roman à clef because the circumstances under which Elwell’s body was found—he was shot to death in a room in his home which was found to be locked from the inside, and he was not wearing his toupee—are duplicated in the novel. Modern knowledge of ballistics reveals that one of the central premises of the novel is fanciful, because the reconstruction of the height of the murderer is impossible (Dashiell Hammett had said as much at the time, in a 1927 book review).
“The first and best, partly because Van Dine had the real-life model of the Joseph Elwell murder (1920) to hold his fancy in check.”[1]
“Vance spots the murderer almost immediately but doesn’t reveal him, allowing Markham and Sergeant Heath to fix the guilt on five successive persons by circumstantial evidence.”[2]
Film adaptations
Paramount Pictures released The Benson Murder Case (1930) a film version directed by Frank Tuttle and starring William Powell as Philo Vance. The film was moderately faithful to the plot of the novel. Paramount also released a Spanish-language version, El Cuerpo del Delito, written by Catalan writer Josep Carner Ribalta (1898–1988), and co-directed by Cyril Gardner and A. Washington Pezet.
References
Jump up^Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8
Directors: Dorothy Arzner, Otto Brower, Edmund Goulding, Victor Heerman, Edwin H Knopf, Rowland V Lee, Ernst Lubitsch, Lothar Mendes, Victor Schertzinger, A Edward Sutherland, Frank Tuttle
Cast: Maurice Chevalier, Richard Arlen, Jean Arthur, William Austin, George Bancroft, Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Mary Brian, Clive Brook, Nancy Carroll, Kay Francis, Richard Skeets Gallagher, Gary Cooper, Ruth Chatterton, Mitzi Green, Fredric March and many others
Paramount also produced a French-language version Paramount en Parade directed by Charles de Rochefort and a Romanian-language version Parada Paramount (Chevalier and Martini also starred in the French version, and Romanian actress Pola Illéry starred in the Romanian version. There was also a Dutch version, Paramount op Parade with Theo Frenkel. The Scandinavian version starred Ernst Rolf and his wife, Tutta Rolf.
Preservation status
Paramount on Parade featured in a 1930 advertisement for Technicolor
The film, including some of its Technicolor sequences, has been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The original title sequence and chorus girl number immediately following it, however, are still lost. The sound for two of the Technicolor sequences (“Gallows Song” and “Dream Girl”) are also missing.
According to Robert Gitt, film archivist now retired from UCLA, in a lecture at Pacific Film Archive at UC Berkeley, the film was also released with sound-on-disc for those theaters not equipped for sound-on-film. The archive had a report of the soundtrack for this film still existing on disc until the 1994 Northridge earthquake destroyed a set of discs that a collector was planning to donate.
In August 2010, CapitolFest in Rome, New York showed a 102-minute version restored by UCLA Film and Television Archive. Some sequences are still missing the sound, for some sequences only the soundtrack exists.
“The Schoolroom” Helen Kane, Mitzi Green. Kane sings “What Did Cleopatra Say?” to her class
“The Gallows Song” Skeets Gallagher and Dennis King (Technicolor footage survives; sound missing, current prints use King’s commercial vocal recording of the song.)[3]
“Rainbow Revels” finale Chevalier and girls’ chorus (including Iris Adrian and Virginia Bruce) sing “Sweeping the Clouds Away” (in Technicolor; survives only in black-and-white)[3]
Parada Paramount (Romanian) with Pola Illéry; directed by Rochefort
Paramount op Parade (Dutch) with Theo Frenkel Jr., Mien Duymaer van Twist, and Louis Davids; directed by Job Weening
At Paramount’s Hollywood studio, Ernst Rolf and his Norwegian wife, Tutta Rolf, filmed introductions and sequences for the Scandinavian version. Japanese comedian Suisei Matsui introduced the film in Japan. Mira Zimińska and Mariusz Maszynski appeared in the Polish version, and Dina Gralla and Eugen Rex appeared in the German version. Paramount filmed most of the above versions, along with Czech, Hungarian, Serbian, and Italian versions, at their Joinville Studios in Paris.
Joyce and Cliffe Wheater, a much-divorced American couple, leave their seven children to fend for themselves as they tour the smart resorts of Europe. Judith, the eldest, takes care of the group. Martin Boyne, an American tourist, meets Judith and the children at the Lido and remembers that he knew their father in America; attracted to Judith, he is quick to sympathize with the problems of the children.
Although he is the way to Switzerland to meet Rose Sellers, his fiancée, Martin delays the trip to help the children through a crisis that threatens to separate them. When he leaves, Judith despairs, feeling that he regards her as only a child, and she decides to take the children to Switzerland; there Martin realizes he loves her, and when Wheater, repenting of his neglect, telephones him to bring the children back, Martin declares that he is marrying Judith and will himself care for the children.
Gardoni, a down-on-his-luck vaudeville performer, is taken in by a fellow performer, a clown who has a bicycle riding act. Gardoni shows his appreciation by stealing the clown’s act and his girlfriend, whom he marries.
Mordaunt Hall, film critic of the New York Times, praised the performances of Powell (“excellent”), Wray (“pleasing”), Skelly (“goes about his part with earnestness and intelligence”), and Francis (“does nicely”), but noted “the story is rather limp and disappointing.”[1]
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