User Reviews

Want to know what vaudeville was like? This film will probably give you a pretty good idea.

I watched it because one of the stars is the great Eddie Cantor. It's sort of an ensemble picture, so you can't say that Cantor was THE star here, but let's face it, he was one of the truly greats. If there's a problem with Cantor here it's that he's playing a young fellow when he was 52! But he pulls it off...sorta. The gem of the picture is when he sings one of his standards -- "Makin' Whoopee". And, BTW, one of our other reviewers suggests that Cantor's character was clearly gay in this film. Bull toddy. Apparently wishful thinking.

I didn't watch this film because of George Murphy. I've never sat down to watch a Murphy film, but sometimes ran into him when he was also in a cast. Here I was quite impressed. A pretty smooth hoofer, and decent in the acting department. I may have to watch a few other films of his and re-evaluate.

Joan Davis never quite made it to the top, and was probably better suited for television than films (and she did later go into television; "I Married Joae"). She usually played a goof ball, as she does here, and she was pretty good at slapstick.

The surprise for me here was Nancy Kelly. I guess I've seen her in films before and not paid much attention. She is very good here.

Constance Moore...no more, please.

The plot here is...well, not thin, but typical. Boy meets girl, boy wins girl, couple lose baby, boy loses girl, boy becomes alcoholic, but eventually they live happily ever after. Nothing new, but nicely done.

Eddie, Joan, George and Constance - when did the, now codified, tradition of comics using their real given names for their characters really get started? Latter day examples abound, from Lucy and Ricky, to Everybody Loves Raymond. When did this really get started? Al Jolson's characters were sometimes named "Al" going back into the 1920s. Here the time honored tradition is used four-fold for the quartet of stars in this picture.

George Doane (George Murphy) is a successful burlesque performer who meets Eddie Martin (Eddie Cantor) backstage at an amateur night after George's performance. They hit it off, click and team up to be a hard-working and successful duo. Along the way, they meet a sister act, Joan Mason (Joan Davis) and Constance Ford (Constance Moore). George woos Constance relentlessly, while the four join forces as a show business four-some and eventually George and Constance marry. Joan, early on, sets her sights on Eddie who spends the rest of the picture evading her, providing a steady running joke throughout the picture.

This four person troupe hits the road and life's ups, and its downs of melodramatic proportions, befall them along the way, some of which are surprisingly serious for such a light and breezy story. All's well that ends well and Eddie and Joan, who do yeoman's duty applying all of the comedic heavy lifting, put a brilliant button on the proceedings at the curtain's close.

En route, we are treated to some real classics of Tin Pan Alley, and earlier, tunesmithery. No new songs, but some familiar chestnuts as well as a couple from Eddie Cantor's quiver such as "Making' Whoopee" and "I Don't Want To Get Well", among other American favorites, such as "Dinah", "I Want A Girl (Just Like The Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad)" and even a comic vaudeville treatment of the famous Sextette from Lucy (Lucia di Lammermoor). The charming "It Had To Be You" is sung multiple times, by both romantic leads and woven throughout the score, even converted to a minor mode for the sad moments, and generally is the signature tune for the romance angle of George and Constance throughout the story, from their first meeting to their final reconciliation. The musical numbers are by and large very entertaining and make up the best of this little sojourn through early 20c show business.

The "Dinah" number is done in cringe-worthy black-face, though, I must say, if one could ever say such a thing, that it was somehow done elegantly. Cantor and Murphy come out in black-face but smartly dressed in beautiful white satin top hats and tails and present the song nicely and, the black-face notwithstanding, with much dignity. Overall, certainly much better than the troubling treatments of such numbers as "Goin' To Heaven On A Mule" from "Wonder Bar" (1934) or "Abraham" from "Holiday Inn" (1939). Really, the black-face could have been left out, save for the flimsy justification that historically, in the time period of the story, pre-WWI vaudeville, this style of performance would typically have been in evidence. It's regrettable and I wouldn't have missed it at all if the number had been done without the black-face makeup. For today's audience, it is a screaming distraction at the very least and easily much more offensive than any supposed value it might add.

Interspersed between the musical numbers are many opportunities for Eddie Cantor's marvelous comedic schtick and Joan Davis' wisecracks and physical gags. They are hilarious and play off of each other very well. Cantor and Davis keep one watching when the story begins to bog down.

And bogging down the proceedings are the romantic leads, Constance Moore and George Murphy. Murphy comes across as a little too thinly veneered and lightweight in the acting skills department to really carry the melodrama quotient to any meaningfully felt level. The George Doane character comes across as likable enough though he simply cannot evince any great pathos that might move the viewer to feel anything much in the way of empathy. Constance Moore was, sadly, very disappointing. She comes across as rather cold and cross too much of the time without giving much in the way of a warm and loving payoff, much needed and sorely lacking, to allow the audience to fall in love with her as well as to bring this story all the way home to its happy conclusion.

The story, lacking much meat on its bones, doesn't give us thoughtful lead-ins or transitions through the many ups and downs of our four-some on the boards. Some plot turns come seemingly from out of nowhere and are as such rather jarring, leaving the viewer puzzled. It is almost as if the writers decided "okay, now we have to have boy lose girl" without first laying much in the way of proper groundwork. The wrap up feels slapped on and the happy ending comes too easily for the audience to feel that the characters earned it, but, by the end, all surely is well that ends well.

In the final reckoning, what makes this film a delight to watch and a fine relic worthy of being preserved is that we get another opportunity, with better and more modern production values than were available in the early 1930s, to see Eddie Cantor masterfully work through some comic business and it is his contributions, along with those of Joan Davis, which really make this film a must see - right up to the curtain's close!

I give this a generous 8 out of 10 stars largely on the strength of this being one more rare example to be able to see Cantor work his magic.

This is more of a show business drama than an actual musical comedy, although there are some light-hearted moments with veteran song and dance man Eddie Cantor and funny lady Joan Davis that will give you some laughs. "I just love that boy!", Davis keeps saying directly into the camera, and it's a bit of a distraction from the more serious elements of the plot that involves the marital problems of vaudeville team George Murphy and Constance Moore. All of these stars, as well as "other woman" Nancy Kelly, get to use their first names for their characters, with Constance Moore taking on "Ford" as her last name, obviously no relation to the great Constance Ford who played the abusive mother of Sandra Dee in "A Summer Place" and starred for years on the daytime soap "Another World". Murphy starts off in burlesque, discovers Cantor when he appears as an amateur night, helping him develop his fast moving, prancing and clapping image by telling him to move faster when the audience begins to throw fruit at Eddie. A meeting with Moore and her friend Donald Douglas in a local restaurant after the show introduces Cantor to Davis (who pinches him when he asks someone to metaphorically out of disbelief over his sudden success), and before long, they have all moved from the low class world of burlesque to the higher paid world of vaudeville which always leads to the hope of Broadway.

Murphy's character is a bit of a heel, spending time with Nancy Kelly on the night Moore gives birth to their baby, in a very tragic sequence that is quite sad considering the tone of the film surrounding these sequences. Another scene has Cantor pretending to be a serious alcoholic with his hotel room filled with booze bottles, obviously trying to get the even more troubled Murphy to go through an intervention for him to wake him up to his own problems. The sequence makes no sense, basically going into a sequence of Cantor in negotiations with Florenz Ziegfeld (off screen) to star on Broadway in "Whoopee", and a shot of the Broadway theater has "Eddie Martin in Whoopee!" on it to make it appear that it was Eddie Martin, not Eddie Cantor, who originated that part on stage. Cantor gets to recreate his hit stage role once again just as he did in the 1930 movie version, although the full movie was in color, while this is in black and white.

Among the musical highlights are Murphy and Moore's repeating of "It Had to Be You", a Hawaiian song and dance number, a comical number with Davis lipsinking to "Lucia di Lammermoor" (complete with oversized bust), the upbeat "Alabamy Bound" and Cantor repeating another hit of his, "Dinah". It's a mixed bag to say the least with no real motivations in Murphy's character for being so messed up. The story by Bert Granet is very similar to the Broadway play "Burlesque" (the subject of several Paramount films) that would be revived on Broadway right after this. Cantor and Davis, who don't really get much of a chance to do anything but play support to Murphy and Moore, would repeat their roles (given different names) in "If You Knew Susie" where they refer to their co-stars here, a confusing bit of trivia considering a sequence from this movie used in the other film.