Broadway (1929)

[Lokke Heiss]

I'm reposting this from the Talkie News section, since I want to discuss this film in relation to rest of the Universal restorations screening this month at MoMA -

I saw the restored Broadway (1929) this weekend at MoMA and here are my thoughts:

After watching the spectacular King of Jazz, the next film on the program, Broadway by director Paul Fejos, was an inevitable let down. Although the non-talking parts of the film had a certain style, overall the film to me played very flat, which in part must be the fact it was adapted from a stage play. But some of this is 'on' Fejos - the characters of the film come off as types rather than individuals, and worse, Fejos often cuts from the musical numbers to get to the far less interesting gangster hijinks going on behind the scenes. This I thought, might be a holdover from how this film would be cut if it was silent - after all, there would be less reason to hold a scene for an entire song that you can't hear anyway.

And Fejos, who is Hungarian, was very aware of German and Soviet editing, and might have picked up some ideological disdain for the idea of a capitalist Broadway musical. Indeed, for large parts of the film, it almost seemed like a 'anti-musical' - for example, I thought the most interesting scene in Broadway happens AFTER the first night of the show - we see the workmen come in, and while we linger on a shot of women scrubbing the floor, I had the distinct feeling that Fejos would have been much happier doing his version of Berlin: Symphony of a City (perhaps he could have titled it: Broadway: Symphony of a Musical?). So an interesting movie if not a great one - I think in hindsight, Fejos was not the guy to direct this film - he had no real background or experience in live venue theatrical musicals of that era, and if you cut his veins, they did not drip Broadway musical songs - he was just more interested in the more sociological - or you might say, anthropological aspects of filmmaking - casting as type vs rounded character, more interested in the formalism of 'The Last Laugh' filmmaking rather than understanding the different kind of stylization that musicals demanded.

But in the very last scene, we have a 2-strip technicolor musical number where Fejos does finally let them go all out to do their thing, and we see the potential of Hollywood musical start to develop before our eyes.

[greta de groat]

I think you nailed it, Lokke, a musical directed by someone with no interest in musicals. Unfortunately the other stuff isn't as interesting.

Greta

[Mitch Farish]

I think you nailed it, Lokke, a musical directed by someone with no interest in musicals. Unfortunately the other stuff isn't as interesting.

Greta

The initial visual pyrotechnics supplied by Universal's new camera crane become tiresome, and whenever the cranes stops, everything stops, demonstrating the superiority of silent film over talkies in the early days. I still contend that movies have never fully recovered from the switch to sound, and that Hitchcock is the only director who got it exactly right.