Saturdays with the Stars Season 4 Finale

Two of our stars this year, Lucille Ball & Ann Sothern

We ended the year on a Saturday (a first for our series), so I wasn't able to get this recap out in 2022 like we normally do, but I didn't want to finish our fourth season of Saturdays with the Stars without our annual recap.  While we are headed into a new season this coming Saturday focusing on western stars, I would be remiss if we didn't take a moment to talk through actors in television, and what I learned from our fourth season.

This year was really interesting for me for a couple of reasons.  For starters, it was really the first season where I didn't have "stars" at the center, and of course it was our first season with men.  As a result, there were actors this year where I was watching a movie where they barely showed up, character actors in Old Hollywood being harder to track their "most significant" roles.  As a result, our annual discussion below of "favorite performances" I ended up in some cases having less options.

But I also kind of loved that, as it underlined the main thesis of this year: that television gave these performers an opportunity that movies simply couldn't.  Some of these actors had great potential, but the public (or the studio heads) couldn't see it for what it was, and TV brought that talent out in them.  Others, quite frankly, needed the banality of television compared to the "make an impact every time" culture of movies because their star personas weren't as curated.  We'll be getting back to star culture in 2023 (while they might occasionally take supporting parts depending on our film, all 12 of our stars this year are generally considered to be "leading players"), I won't forget that lesson as I continue to watch the twelve stars we watched this past year in other films in the decades to come.  Below, I have created a little list celebrating the best of this year's stars.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for part or all of this year's season-I'm excited to have you back for season five's "When Cowboys Ruled Hollywood"!: 

Favorite Performance from Each Star 

January: Lucille Ball-Dance. Girl. Dance.

February: Jack Benny-George Washington Slept Here

March: Eve Arden-Comrade X

April: Ann Sothern-Lady in a Cage

May: Robert Young-They Won't Believe Me

June: Spring Byington-BF's Daughter

July: Loretta Young-Midnight Mary

August: John Payne-Silver Lode

September: Ward Bond-The Wings of Eagles

October: Walter Brennan-Come and Get It

November: Donna Reed-The Last Time I Saw Paris

December: Barbara Stanwyck-Baby Face

5 Favorite Performers (Alphabetical, and based solely on the films we watched as a collective & not on the rest of their careers)

Eve Arden

Lucille Ball

Jack Benny

Ann Sothern

Barbara Stanwyck

5 Favorite Performances of the Year (Alphabetical)

Lucille Ball, Dance. Girl. Dance.

Barbara Stanwyck, Baby Face

Barbara Stanwyck, The Furies

Ann Sothern, Lady in a Cage

Loretta Young, Midnight Mary

10 Favorite Films of the Year (Alphabetical)

Baby Face

Dance. Girl. Dance.

Forty Guns

The Furies

George Washington Slept Here

Lady in a Cage

Rio Bravo

The Stranger

They Were Expendable

They Won't Believe Me

Top 10 Performances of the Year (Not By Our Stars...and Yes, Alphabetical)

Judith Anderson, The Furies

James Caan, Lady in a Cage

Charles Coburn, George Washington Slept Here

Olivia de Havilland, Lady in a Cage

Susan Hayward, They Won't Believe Me

Walter Huston, The Furies

Percy Kilbride, George Washington Slept Here

Edward G. Robinson, The Stranger

John Wayne, Rio Bravo

Orson Welles, The Stranger

The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

Film: The Horn Blows at Midnight (1945)

Stars: Jack Benny, Alexis Smith, Allyn Joslyn, Guy Kibbee

Director: Raoul Walsh

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to finish our look at Jack Benny this month with what would end up being his last role as a leading man in movies, and one of the film's that Benny himself would make infamous.  The Horn Blows at Midnight was once again a Warner Brothers movie from Benny, and had the actor, then in the heyday of his radio stardom, playing an angel tasked with signaling the end of the world with a trumpet horn on earth.  The movie had the bad timing of being released just eight days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt unexpectedly died, at the tail end of World War II, and as a result a farce about the end of the world seemed, at the very least, in poor taste.  The movie was a huge flop, and basically after that Benny gave up on his film career, only appearing in movies in cameos for the remainder of his career, instead shifting his focus entirely to radio, and soon, television.  The Horn Blows at Midnight, though, would become a standard punchline in Benny's act for the remainder of his career, frequently getting disparaged by the comedian...but I was curious when I realized the terrible position that it played in his career if it was one of those "lost gems" or if this was worthy of Benny's ridicule.  Let's find out, shall we?

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie, as I said above, is about Athaneal (Benny), who initially is a struggling trumpet player who snoozes off during a radio show he's in the orchestra for (the whole movie is a dream sequence) and imagines he's an angel tasked with bringing about the end of the planet.  He's madly in love with a harp player named Elizabeth (Smith), who believes in him when no one else does. It turns out she is right...when Athaneal misses the midnight deadline to end the world (he's saving a woman from committing suicide, a mortal sin) he becomes a "fallen angel," and only Elizabeth can find a way to help him get another chance to "end the world."  Things get complicated when two other fallen angels, as well as two con artists, try to stop them from ending Earth because they, well, don't want to die.  In the end, Athaneal wakes up from his dream, and starts to devote himself more fully to his present life as a trumpet player.

The movie is about as silly as it sounds.  The plot is nonsense, and occasionally feels a bit repetitive (we literally do the "falling off the building" bit for at least ten minutes of the movies 78 minute run time).  That being said, taken out of the context of President Roosevelt's death, it's kind of fun in a stupid way.  Benny is charming as a foolish angel, and lands pretty much all of the physical comedy bits, the highlight of which is him being thrown into a gigantic cup of coffee suspended over the Manhattan streets below.  It's dumb, and they didn't need the dream framing device, but it's cute & a nice movie to watch when you want to turn off your brain a bit & just laugh.

As I said, though, Benny would be done with films after this, only taking bit parts in things like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and would instead become one of the pioneering earliest figures in television.  His show would become one of the earliest spots that many movie stars appeared on his show-both Marilyn Monroe & Humphrey Bogart made rare TV appearances on his program during its peak years.  Benny would have one of the longest-running shows of his era, ending in 1965, by which time only Lucille Ball & Ed Sullivan were still on regular television from the earliest days of Benny's career.  Benny would continue to do television specials and would become a headliner in Vegas, but failing health caught up with him & would die of pancreatic cancer in 1974 at the age of 80.  Next month, we're going to talk about an actress who was, like Benny, a one-time Warner Brothers contract player who gained a newfound respect in television in the 1950's.  Unlike Benny, though, she was generally considered to be a very good actor in her day...and even got an Oscar nomination to prove it.

Charley's Aunt (1941)

Film: Charley's Aunt (1941)

Stars: Jack Benny, Kay Francis, James Ellison, Anne Baxter, Edmund Gwenn, Laird Cregar, Richard Haydn

Director: Archie Mayo

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Well, I basically just skipped last week not only on the blog, but also in our Saturday article (I feel like we can all be forgiven for being distracted this past week).  This kind of works out for Jack Benny, though, because we get to look at twin sides of Benny's late film career as we close our month with him.  Much of the movies that Benny did were in the 1940's, when he was a big radio star but wanted to make it as a legitimate actor.  Last week we talked about both To Be or Not To Be and George Washington Slept Here, both films that are generally considered to be critical successes.  Today we're going to talk about two films, the first of which was a big deal, and arguably the closest that Benny came (save for To Be or Not To Be) to actually acting, and not just playing himself.  Later today (hey, it's still Saturday!), we're going to talk about the end of Benny's career, and the film that would become a running punchline for the rest of his career because the actor so despised it (and its failure).

(Spoilers Ahead) Charley's Aunt is based on a play by Brandon Thomas that was told a few times in the early days of cinema.  It's about three friends: Jack (Ellison), Babbs (Benny), and Charley (Haydn).  Jack & Charley are desperately in love with two girls Amy (Baxter) and Kitty (Whelan), but assume that without money they can't convince the girls and their guardian Mr. Spettigue (Gwenn) to allow them to marry.  When Jack finds out he's broke and Charley's wealthy aunt doesn't show up, they put Babbs in a dress and make him pretend to be Charley's aunt, hoping that she'll convince the girls to marry them.  Things fall apart, though, when Mr. Spettigue falls madly in love with Babbs in drag...and when the real aunt (Francis) shows up...and falls in love with Babbs.

This sounds like it should work as a comedy, so I get why this was a popular story, but I wasn't a fan of it.  The supporting cast, despite boasting film veterans Baxter, Gwenn, & Francis, are all a bit dull and don't do much with the material, and the rest of the supporting cast can't hold up.  It doesn't help that Ellison & Haydn are so boring as to be interchangeable (as, to be fair, are Baxter & Whelan) or that the jokes all feel dated even in 1941-how many times can you go to the same "man in a dress" well and expect that alone to be a joke, Classical Hollywood?

I have to say, for the first time, that Benny also doesn't work for me here.  This is the closest he's come to playing another person; while there's definitely scenes where he's going after the Benny schtick that he'd become famous for, he largely is playing Babbs as a real person...but he's not a strong enough chameleon to pull it off.  This happened quite a bit with comedians of Benny's era-Cary Grant was marvelous at playing Cary Grant...which is why he rarely played anything else.  Benny in a different motif didn't work.  His jokes didn't land as sharply as they should have, and the film itself feels stale & lifeless & overlong.

OVP: George Washington Slept Here (1942)

Film: George Washington Slept Here (1942)

Stars: Jack Benny, Ann Sheridan, Charles Coburn, Percy Kilbride, Hattie McDaniel, William Tracy, Joyce Reynolds

Director: William Keighley

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

1942 was an interesting year for Jack Benny as an actor, and certainly the height of his film career.  At the time, Benny was one of the most important names in radio, a major star who was coming into homes across America.  It made sense, therefore, that films would continue to invest in him as an actor because he was a known commodity.  During 1942, he made what many now consider to be his best film, To Be or Not to Be, a black comedy from Ernst Lubitsch starring Carole Lombard.  Though its initial reviews were tepid, and audiences were not comfortable with the American Benny sporting a Nazi uniform (even in jest) during the middle of World War II, it has later been saved by critics and is considered one of the greatest examples of the Lubitsch Touch (if you click on over to the review, I give the film & Benny a rave).  We only watch films that I've never seen before for this series, though, and so today we're going to be focusing on a different comedy hit that Benny made in 1942, one that didn't need time for critics to warm up to it, George Washington Slept Here.

(Spoilers Ahead) Connie (Sheridan) & Bill Fuller (Benny) are a normal American couple living in New York City, but Connie wants something more.  After they are evicted from their apartment (due to Connie's misbehaving dog), she buys a dilapidated old house that supposedly belonged to George Washington without Bill's knowledge.  With the help of local man Mr. Kimber (Kilbride) who seems to gouge the couple at every chance, they start to build up the place, but learn initially that it was Benedict Arnold, not George Washington, who had slept at the house (ruining its place as a spot of Americana).  Bill hates the house initially, but grows to like it as the film goes on, but there's a catch-they have overspent and will have to give the property to their cantankerous neighbor if they don't find the mortgage payment. While they initially try to get it from Connie's rich Uncle Stanley (Coburn), when it turns out he's broke they attempt increasingly far-fetched paths to the cash before finally realizing that, due to a letter their dog finds in an old boot in the yard, that the house did have connections to George Washington, and they can sell the letter to pay for their house.

The movie supposedly has some similarities to Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, a movie I have always meant to see (I love Cary Grant, and this is maybe the biggest movie in his filmography that I've never caught before), but since I hadn't this was new to me, and I was delighted.  What initially felt like it was going to be a boring marital strife movie (Sheridan, whom I'm generally a fan of in comedies, doesn't hit her stride until the second half of the picture & never quite gels with Benny as a believable couple) is lifted in the second half by bravura performances from Kilbride & Coburn, both coming in to steal large swaths of the picture.  Benny is good too, even if, once again, he proves that it was more his casting director making him work in these films than his expansive acting talent (I have yet to see a film role where Benny wasn't just playing some version of his public persona, and this is the case here, even if it fits well).

The film won one Academy Award nomination, for Best Art Direction.  This is a knowing nod to the film itself, as the movie's entire point is to focus on this house and the way it's cleaned up.  It is, admittedly, a fun house for the camera to explore, but if we're being technical, it does also feel like there's not enough scenes before it becomes this glamorous little property in the middle-of-nowhere.  We essentially jump from shack to palace in far too quick of a fashion for a movie that's entirely focused on the house as a main character.  Still, it's a nice house-I get the urge from Oscar to go there with this movie.

OVP: The Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)

Film: The Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935)

Stars: Jack Benny, Eleanor Powell, Robert Taylor, Una Merkel, Sid Silvers, Buddy Ebsen, June Knight

Director: Roy Del Ruth

Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Original Story, Dance Direction*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Jack Benny click here to learn more about Mr. Benny (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to start a few years into Jack Benny's career primarily because Benny's early film career, with the exception of one film, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, has nothing really of note.  He signed a contract in 1929 with Irving Thalberg to work at MGM, but after his movie Chasing Rainbows flopped, Benny was basically out of the film industry and quickly returned to Broadway, and then radio in 1932.  Radio would become the primary home of Benny's career for most of the next twenty years, as his eponymous radio show would be what he was most known for until his TV show in the early 1950's.  That being said, Benny would continue to make a number of movies, still trying his hand at a film stardom that would never happen.  One of the more important films from this portion of his acting career, when he was starting out as a big radio star was MGM's The Broadway Melody of 1936, which he gets prime billing on even though he's definitely third lead behind two figures who were about to become superstars on the MGM lot, Eleanor Powell & Robert Taylor.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like many of the musicals in the Broadway Melody series (which would spawn four films in its combined run), the movie's plot is secondary to the musical numbers, but essentially we have Broadway producer Robert Gordon (Taylor) who is being wooed by his wealthy backer Lillian Brent (Knight), but is clearly destined to pine for his childhood sweetheart Irene Foster (Powell), newly in town & looking for a gig in his show.  Gordon is being chastised by newspaper writer Bert Keeler (Benny) who is being forced to disparage Gordon, even to the point of making up an actress that Gordon can't get into his show, in order to sell newspapers.  When Irene pretends to be that actress, unbeknownst to be both Bert & Robert (she's in disguise), everything comes crashing down for them all...until of course everyone involved gets their happy endings.

The movie is cute, and was a pretty big deal for pretty much all involved.  Eleanor Powell got her first leading role here, and as the movie was a smash hit, she'd soon become one of the bigger stars on the MGM lot (she also does a terrific impersonation of Kate Hepburn that's honestly worth the price of watching alone).  Tap dancer Buddy Ebsen also got his film debut here as a wayward friend of Irene's.  The film won three Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, making it (at least nominally) the first sequel to ever be cited for the prize.  In retrospect this isn't a great movie, but it has some funny one-liners and unlike many musicals of the era, at least it makes sense (a plus for the Original Story category).

It's the music, though, that is the best part.  It's sometimes hard to tell with films of this era what is an original and what isn't, but it does appear (at least from what I can find on the internet, correct me if I'm wrong oh readers) to include such standards as "You Are My Lucky Star," "Broadway Rhythm," "I've Got a Feelin You're Foolin" and "Sing Before Breakfast" in their original incantation, which makes the fact that it didn't get a Best Original Song nomination a true crime.  The best numbers are probably Powell's manic tap dancing to "Broadway Rhythm" (honestly, it's a race between Powell & Ann Miller over who was the best hoofer in Classic Hollywood), and Buddy & Vilma Ebsen tripping the light fantastic while dressed like Seurat characters to "On a Sunday Afternoon."  There are a lot of great musicals in 1936 to compete for Dance Direction, so I can't say for certain whom I would've picked for the Oscar, but know that AMPAS did itself proud by giving Broadway Melody this prize.

And Mr. Benny?  He's really funny.  The persona of this character is very similar to the "Jack Benny" creation he would have on his television show, but it works.  He lands virtually all of his punchlines, frequently at his own expense, and plays the "villain" with enough charm that his about-face at the end (when he helps a forlorn Powell), feels authentic.  This isn't a great performance, but it works within the confines of the movie...I am curious as we go throughout the month to see if this is all Benny could play, or if he has more in him than just "Jack Benny" but he was very good at playing Jack Benny.

Saturdays with the Stars: Jack Benny

Each month of 2022 we will be taking a look at one-time film actors who became foundational figures in the early days of television, stretching from the early 1950's into the mid-1960's.  Last month, we focused on the quintessential "failed movie star, TV success" actress Lucille Ball, who would dominate the early medium of television in a way virtually no one else could.  This month, we are going to finally have our first (after over three years) male star of the month, and we will be focusing on a man who inspired Ball's decision to get into radio & television, someone who entered into television even earlier than Ball did, and enjoyed success he could've never dreamt of when he was making movies.  This month's star is Jack Benny.

Benny grew up the son of Jewish immigrants in the Chicago suburb of Waukegan.  A violin prodigy at a young age, after being expelled from school he entered the vaudeville circuit in his younger years, where he would become friends with Zeppo Marx (one of the famed Marx Brothers) through whom he met his wife Mary, whom Benny would remain with for nearly fifty years.  In 1929, Benny tried to get into movies, signing a contract with MGM, but after a solid success in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, he couldn't cut it as a leading man, and was dropped from his contract.

This led to what would become Benny's principle vehicle to fame: radio.  Benny's program would run on radio from 1932-1955, and was one of the highest-rated programs in the country.  Benny would use his public persona as an "untalented musician" & miser to be the butt of a grand series of jokes, and would have a large troupe of actors including Eddie Anderson, Dennis Day, & Mary Livingstone (his wife) in the cast.  The radio show was such a big hit that it eventually made the transfer into television, and The Jack Benny Show would air on CBS from 1950-64 (followed by one season on NBC before it ended in 1965), being one of the first true hit shows in the medium.  Benny during this time became one of the most famous figures in America, on par with figures like Ed Sullivan & Bob Hope.

Benny, though, made movies throughout this time, albeit quite sporadically.  I'm very familiar with Benny from his television show and his many appearances on programs like What's My Line during the era, but I know very little about what he's like when he's not, well, playing Jack Benny.  During the 1940's he appeared in one classic movie (Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling To Be or Not To Be), but that's the only one of his leading man movies I've seen.  So this month, we're going to take a look at Benny's career in pictures, a "side hustle" that still resulted in some major studio work, hopefully learning why Benny was able to have such success in radio & television, but like Lucille Ball, simply couldn't cut it as a film star.

OVP: To Be or Not To Be (1942)

Film: To Be or Not To Be (1942)
Stars: Carole Lombard, Jack Benny, Robert Stack, Felix Bressart, Sig Ruman
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I always marvel at the idea that I'm seeing a classic movie for the first time.  There's only so many such films that still exist in my world, and it's very rare that I get to do this activity anymore, particularly for a film that isn't a "modern classic" but in fact something from eons ago.  This is why I was so thrilled to get to investigate To Be or Not To Be, one of those great Lubitsch pictures and the final movie of Carole Lombard's career.  I thought in a way I might be tempting fate a bit watching this movie on a plane (considering Lombard's ultimate demise), but figured I'd go with it as it was the next movie in my Netflix DVD queue, and I wanted to give it a try.

(Spoilers Ahead) The strange thing about Hollywood in the 1940's is that they continually made movies about the Nazis and World War II as it was happening (Casablanca is the most famous example, but there are lots of them).  I don't know why, but that always shocks me.  I'm aware that we made movies about the Iraq War while it has still been being fought, but because it is so alien to the news (whereas World War II was constantly a part of the day-to-day life of every Americans what with the draft and rations, as well as attacks on actual American soil), it doesn't quite feel the same.

The movie unfolds during World War II, specifically looking at Maria (Lombard) and Joseph Tura (Benny), an acting couple who have lost some of the spark in their relationship, and are playing Hamlet in Poland just before the occupation.  Maria is being pursued by a handsome young pilot named Sobinski (Stack), who meets with Maria one night after excusing himself during the famed "To Be or Not To Be" speech of Shakespeare's play, much to the chagrin of the easily-annoyed Benny.  The film unfolds with Maria and Joseph both having regular run-ins with the Nazis, and Joseph having to deal with his wife conducting an emotional affair even if she didn't mean it as anything more than friendship, and the entire acting troupe trying to pull one over on Adolf Hitler & his Gestapo, particularly the bumbling Col. Erhardt (a precursor to Hogan's Heroes in a lot of ways, and the role that would win Charles Durning an Oscar nomination with the remake).  The movie ends, in typical comic fashion, with the good guys winning even though the war still rages on, and both Benny & Stack confused by a different handsome solider getting up during his "to be or not to be" speech.

The film is shocking in its attitude toward the war in a way I don't know that I've seen outside of a Mel Brooks comedy, and The Producers came out decades after the fighting had stopped.  Seeing Benny decked out in a Nazi uniform is startling, and the Nazi salute is so frequently and comically used I felt uncomfortable sitting next to the guy on the plane while I was watching it, eventually informing him when he inquired that I run a classic film blog which is why I was watching the picture.  The movie's cavalier attitude occasionally goes into the insensitive, particularly when it juxtaposes the absurd against Felix Bressart's impassioned speeches as Shylock.  Still, though, it's marvelously entertaining, particularly Lombard who has never looked so beautiful and is by far the film's biggest highlight.  Stack does little more than is required of him (to be handsome), but he succeeds on that front, and Benny, well, always played Jack Benny and if you like that sort of thing this will work well for you (I love Benny-I think he's marvelous in interviews, so I was frequently chuckling at his antics, even though his range as an actor is essentially one character-himself).

The movie received a sole nomination for Best Score, an odd citation as it wasn't memorable at all.  In fact, of all of the aspects of the movie (acting, writing, costumes), it's one of the areas that stand out the least, and seems like pretty standard-fare trumpets that you'd expect from the era.  Still, it's nice to know such a sharp and edgy film (for its day) got picked up by AMPAS in at least one category so we get to include it in the OVP.

The movie is definitely worth a see, and if you have, please share your favorite moments in the comments!  I was partial to Lombard's lusty comment about "five tons of dynamite," but there's many to sort through.  And for those who haven't seen it, share your favorite moments in the filmographies of Lombard, Benny, and Stack!  The comments await!

OVP: The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1929)

Film: The Hollywood Revue of 1929
Stars: Conrad Nagel, Jack Benny, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Anita Page, Marie Dressler, Buster Keaton, John Gilbert, Norma Shearer, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy
Director: Charles F. Reisner
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars (with a caveat below)

Contrary to what it says below, this is not my first Best Picture nominee-it's actually my 275th.  But it is the first nominee since I've started chronicling the OVP on the blog, so hooray for Best Pictures!  And what a strange but spectacular film to start with.

There's a part of me that wants to address the caveat right now, and so I will (hell, I'm the one who is writing here).  This film is not a narrative film in the traditional sense, and so therefore it's difficult to rank it alongside the other films of the year, and indeed, alongside other Best Pictures).  There are parts of the film, which I'll get to in a minute, that are pure and utter joy-a 5/5 star cavalcade if there ever was one.  But this is essentially a variety program-it's not the sort of film you'd ever see today, because you'd see it on television (or you would, if we still did variety programs instead of just results night on American Idol and The Voice).  So I'm going with a 3/5 because some of the musical numbers work well, some are horribly dated and probably weren't that great to begin with, and that seems to be a solid compromise.  I've seen none of the other 1928-29 nominees (and one of them is purportedly lost for all time-The Patriot by Ernst Lubitsch, check your attics!), but if none meet the 3/5 star ranking, this will almost certainly be my strangest Best Picture choice.

But let's get into the movie.  A musical revue, our masters of ceremony are Jack Benny and Conrad Nagel, though Nagel seems to disappear after about twenty minutes (being one of the studio's biggest stars at the time, he was probably rushed off to a different film), and so Benny does most of the heavy lifting in his film debut.  From a retrospective angle, the fascinating thing for me was the sort of, "where are they now?" aspect of the movie.  Not the actual question (this film is from 1929-they are all long gone), but the celebrity status of everyone.  In 1929, these were some of the biggest stars in the world, largely on equal footing from the poster.  Over eighty years later, Joan Crawford and Buster Keaton are still huge names, and Laurel & Hardy and Norma Shearer are somewhat familiar at least to cinephiles, but Marie Dressler, Conrad Nagel, and John Gilbert are names only known to the most devoted of film fans.

Crawford, by the way, does a song-and-dance to start the film, which is thoroughly enjoyable for the sheer sake of seeing Joan doing her flapper routine for the world to see.  Crawford, one of the biggest stars in film history, was always a trooper, doing whatever a film required, and she dances and sings with the best of them at the beginning of the film.  The bits with Keaton and Laurel & Hardy are slightly less adventurous, as anyone familiar with them have seen these bits a zillion times before.  The truly amazing performances are the ballet contortions and extended sequences, which include, and I'm not kidding here, a woman being used as a jump rope by three other men in a scene that OSHA would have killed in a nanosecond decades later.  There's a number of random song-and-dances, including hammy late-in-life success Marie Dressler (who was about to have two of her biggest career successes and her only two Academy Award nominations in the next couple of years).

And of course, there's the technicolor sequences, so vibrant and bold, and the two scenes that were ripped off by the most classic of musicals, Singin in the Rain.  The first, the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet (played by Norma Shearer and John Gilbert), which Jean Hagen and Gene Kelly would memorably spoof, which isn't nearly as awful as you would think-Gilbert would be the most high profile of actors to lose their career from the silent-to-sound transition, and though he has a serviceable tenor, it is markedly different from the strong lady's man he was trying to portray on-screen.  Shearer, of course, would find mad success in the "talkies" and become one of MGM's biggest stars in the coming decade, with an incredible six Oscar nominations.

And finally, the film ends with the classic Hollywood song "Singin in the Rain," with the entire cast coming out for the number (if you ever wanted to see Joan Crawford channel Gene Kelly, here's your chance, and notice Buster Keaton, who was not yet allowed to speak on screen, being the only person on stage not singing).  I do have to admit that it would have made the film twice as nice had they figured out a way to get Garbo into the movie (can you even imagine Garbo in a vaudeville act?!?), but as I stated above, a fun but hit-and-miss movie the likes of which you wish you could see again today, if only for the nostalgia of it all.

What about you-do you have a favorite number from this movie?  Are you, like I, not as well-versed in the late 1920's cinema or are you secretly listing the filmographies of Marion Davies and Bessie Love right now?  And what do you think Garbo would have done had she been in the picture (she was scheduled to star, but was pulled due to scheduling)?