The Broadway Melody (1929) Director: Harry Beaumont
“Gee, this is elegant, ain’t it!”
★★★☆☆
The Broadway Melody was the first “talkie” to win an Academy Award for Best Picture and it was also the first musical to be released by MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), a studio which later became synonymous with spearheading extravagant Hollywood musicals. Notably, this film also features a brief scene of technicolor print –an extraordinary moment that helped ignite the cinematic color revolution (unfortunately, this technicolor scene survives today only in black and white). Despite being a trailblazer in many respects, The Broadway Melody is hardly a memorable film for me today except on several key points: namely as the first “talkie” to win Best Picture, its novel employment of technical cinematography, and its narrative which conveys a notable tone of underlying skepticism toward the glitz and glamor of Broadway. Perhaps small-town antipathy toward Broadway and Hollywood are as old as the institutions themselves. At any rate, The Broadway Melody tells the story of two sisters who flee their small town in pursuit of celebrity stardom on Broadway.
Two poor women, the “Mahoney sisters,” hail from a proverbial town who travel to New York to pursue their dreams on Broadway. Harriet or “Hank” (played by Bessie Love who delivers a terrific and fiery performance for which she was nominated for Best Actress) and Queenie Mahoney (played by Anita Page) enter the city wide-eyed and eager only to quickly find their dreams have been dashed. They gain minor success performing as a vaudeville duet but Queenie rapidly becomes the favored girl of the month on Broadway, and even Hank’s fiancee, Eddie (played by Charles King) falls in love with her. Queenie and Hank’s duet is then quashed by a young blonde woman named “Flo” (Mary Doran) who sabotages their audition. Queenie is chosen to be the central performer instead of Hank. Eventually Queenie is pursued by a wealthy philanthropist and theatre sponsor, until she realizes how possessive he is and she is eventually rescued by Eddie. She and Eddie get married, further straining the relationship between the sisters.
In the end, Queenie joins a duet performance with the young blonde Flo who initially sabotaged their original audition. The film closes with a distraught Hank at the train station as her younger sister has stolen her dreams and her fiancee. It is an odd ending to a somewhat forgettable winner of the second Academy Award for Best Picture (Director Harry Beaumont was also nominated for Best Director). This year, the awards were issued at the second Academy Awards ceremony held at the Ambassador Hotel in its renowned Cocoanut Grove nightclub (the hotel was later the site of the RFK assassination and today it is owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District in order to develop a school site). The ceremony was hosted by William C. DeMille (an old Hollywood screenwriter and brother of Cecil B. DeMille). At any rate in The Broadway Melody, there are a few great aerial shots of Manhattan, and some terrific little musical numbers such as “Give My Regards to Broadway,” though for being a movie about musical numbers there are surprisingly few song-and-dance routines. The Broadway Melody remains Director Harry Beaumont’s most notable film (he was mainly active during the silent era), though for me this is a bland, brow-furrowing selection for Best Picture in 1929.
Credits:
- Director: Harry Beaumont
- Written by: Sarah Y. Mason (continuity), Norman Houston (dialogue), James Gleason (dialogue), and Earl Baldwin (titles, uncredited)
- Story by: Edmund Goulding
- Produced by: Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten
- Starring:
- Charles King…..Eddie Kearns
- Anita Page…..Queenie Mahoney
- Bessie Love…..Harriet “Hank” Mahoney
- Cinematography: John Arnold
- Edited by: Sam S. Zimbalist and William LeVanway (uncredited)
- Musical Numbers: written by Nacio Herb Brown, lyrics by Arthur Freed
- Distributed by: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Other Notes:
- The 2nd Academy Awards ceremony was the first to be broadcast on the radio and the first to not announce the winners in advance of the ceremony.
- The musical numbers in this film included: “Broadway Melody,” “Love Boat,” “You Were Meant for Me,” “Wedding of the Painted Doll,” “Boy Friend,” “Truthful Parson Brown,” and “Lovely Lady.”
2nd Academy Awards:
How did the Academy Awards become such a massive event in Hollywood, considering the inaugural ceremony was a fairly simple, modest gathering? One big reason was William Randolph Hearst. He sought to arrange things so that his mistress, Marion Davies, would win an award. He then instructed his columnist, Louella Parsons, to write lavish columns about the ceremony, and so expectations were raised in subsequent years.
The 2nd Academy Awards ceremony banquet took place in the Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. It honored the best films released between August 1, 1928, and July 31, 1929. This was the only year in which no film won more than one Oscar. 1930 marked the only year wherein there were two Academy Awards ceremonies, the 3rd Academy Awards ceremony was held a mere seven months later.
The Broadway Melody became the second of seven films to win Best Picture without a writing nomination (preceded by Wings, and followed by Grand Hotel, Cavalcade, Hamlet, The Sound of Music, and Titanic), and the first of three to win Best Picture and nothing else (followed by Grand Hotel and Mutiny on the Bounty).
The big controversy this year concerned the award for Best Actress. Mary Pickford, a founding member of the Academy and married to its first president, was determined to use her connections and influence to sway the vote in her favor, despite her performance in Coquette being relatively mediocre by all accounts. She did everything she could to win, even inviting many members of the Academy over to her house (the famous “Pickfair” mansion) for tea. This was believed to be the first ever Academy Awards campaign. It caused quite a large public stir leading to the eventual adoption of the rule of “one member, one vote” for Academy judges. The strategy hardly worked for Mary Pickford. After appearing in some two hundred silent films, she made only two more talkies before retiring from acting in 1933. She remained an active producer until 1949 and received an honorary Academy Award in 1979, four years before her death. In contrast, Marion Davies was an accomplished comic actor but was forced into unsuitable serious dramatic roles until she retired from acting in 1937, never having received an Academy Award nomination.
The Best Picture winner at the 2nd Oscars was the year’s top-grossing film, The Broadway Melody. It was the first sound film to win an award and the first to feature a technicolor sequence.
- Best Picture: The Broadway Melody
- Alibi
- The Hollywood Revue of 1929
- In Old Arizona
- The Patriot
- Best Director: Frank Lloyd – The Divine Lady.
- Note: This was the only time in Oscars history that a director won for Best Director without the film being nominated for Best Picture.
- Harry Beaumont – The Broadway Melody
- Frank Lloyd – Drag
- Irving Cummings – In Old Arizona
- Lionel Barrymore – Madame X
- Ernst Lubitsch – The Patriot
- Frank Lloyd – Weary River
- Best Actor: Warner Baxter – In Old Arizona as The Cisco Kid
- George Bancroft – Thunderbolt as Thunderbolt Jim Lang
- Chester Morris – Alibi as Chick Williams
- Paul Muni – The Valiant as James Dyke.
- Note: Throughout his career, Muni would be nominated five times for Best Actor, winning in 1936 for The Story of Louis Pasteur.
- Lewis Stone – The Patriot as Count Pahlen
- Best Actress: Mary Pickford – Coquette as Norma Besant
- Ruth Chatterton – Madame X as Jacqueline Floriot.
- Note: This nomination was Chatterton’s first of two Oscar nominations and it vaulted her career into the spotlight before she later returned Broadway.
- Betty Compson – The Barker as Carrie.
- Note: Compson was a prolific actress throughout the silent era, producing films through her own production company, and later appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s screwball comedy Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
- Jeanne Eagels (posthumous nomination) – The Letter as Leslie Crosbie.
- Note: Eagels became the first and to date the only posthumously nominated actress at the Oscars. She became an alcoholic and drug addict which suddenly killed her. She was later portrayed by Kim Novack in a fictionalized biopic in 1957.
- Corinne Griffith – The Divine Lady as Emma Hart.
- Note: Two years after this nomination, Griffith retired from filmmaking.
- Bessie Love – The Broadway Melody as Harriet “Hank” Mahoney.
- Note: Love was prolific actress throughout the 20th century, beginning with D.W. Griffith’s films like Intolerance.
- Ruth Chatterton – Madame X as Jacqueline Floriot.
- Best Writing: The Patriot – Hanns Kräly, based on Ashley Dukes’ translation of the play Der Patriot by Alfred Neumann, and the story “Paul I” by Dmitry Merezhkovsky
- The Cop – Elliot Clawson
- In Old Arizona – Tom Barry, based on the story “The Caballero’s Way” by O. Henry
- The Last of Mrs. Cheyney – Hanns Kräly, based on the play by Frederick Lonsdale
- The Leatherneck – Elliot Clawson
- Our Dancing Daughters – Josephine Lovett
- Sal of Singapore – Elliot Clawson, based on the story “The Sentimentalists” by Dale Collins
- Skyscraper – Elliot Clawson, based on a story by Dudley Murphy
- The Valiant – Tom Barry, based on the play by Halworthy Hall and Robert Middlemass
- A Woman of Affairs – Bess Meredyth, based on the novel The Green Hat by Michael Arlen
- Wonder of Women – Bess Meredyth, based on the novel Die Frau des Steffen Thromholt by Hermann Sudermann
- Honorary Awards: None (they were then called “Special Awards”)
Did the right film win Best Picture?
Decidedly not. The Broadway Melody is a mediocre film in my view, and though the year in question (1928-1929) was not exactly a banner year for movie-making, other films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929); Josef von Sternberg’s The Docks of New York (1928); Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928); or even Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade (1929) would have been far more suitable alternatives. Of course, if eligible, I would undoubtedly have selected Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece La Passion de Jeanne D’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc) (1928).
Click here to return to my survey of the Best Picture Winners.
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