Count this one of the great Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. You may recall that Andrew Sarris, disparaging Mervyn LeRoy’s filmography in general, considered Irene Dunne’s performance in his turn-of-the-century Sweet Adeline as being “worth any number of clinkers.” Indeed, Dunne is magnificent as Adeline Schmidt, who, following her father’s foolish advice, trades in a loving boyfriend, a struggling composer, for a military man who ultimately wants to “keep” her without benefit of marriage. The music and lyrics are by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, the film being sort of based, that is, apparently remotely, on one of their plays.
It is ex-boyfriend Sid Barnett’s Broadway show that takes Adeline out of her father’s beer garden and makes her a star. Too bad that Elysia, who thought she had the lead role sewn up for herself, now wants to kill Adeline. Elysia is also a foreign spy!
The opening swooping crane shot into the beer garden is awesome and magical, and its import becomes clear only later. Know this much in advance: performance scenes of the show-within-the-film, in the manner of 42nd Street (1933) and other “stage musical” films of the time, impossibly stretch the bounds of the presumed stage, with lovers, for instance, taking a stroll that no theatrical stage could accommodate. But here this isn’t all delightful nonsense. Rather, the film reveals as it unfolds a remarkable confusion, even conflation, of film “reality” and stage performance. What would prove so hokey in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) works stunningly here, eventually causing the jaw to drop and tears most generously to flow. I don’t know whether the film is indebted to the musical play in this regard, but Erwin S. Gelsey is credited with the screenplay. It revolves around a brilliant conceit.
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SWEET ADELINE (Mervyn LeRoy, 1934)
By grunesCount this one of the great Hollywood musicals of the 1930s. You may recall that Andrew Sarris, disparaging Mervyn LeRoy’s filmography in general, considered Irene Dunne’s performance in his turn-of-the-century Sweet Adeline as being “worth any number of clinkers.” Indeed, Dunne is magnificent as Adeline Schmidt, who, following her father’s foolish advice, trades in a loving boyfriend, a struggling composer, for a military man who ultimately wants to “keep” her without benefit of marriage. The music and lyrics are by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, the film being sort of based, that is, apparently remotely, on one of their plays.
It is ex-boyfriend Sid Barnett’s Broadway show that takes Adeline out of her father’s beer garden and makes her a star. Too bad that Elysia, who thought she had the lead role sewn up for herself, now wants to kill Adeline. Elysia is also a foreign spy!
The opening swooping crane shot into the beer garden is awesome and magical, and its import becomes clear only later. Know this much in advance: performance scenes of the show-within-the-film, in the manner of 42nd Street (1933) and other “stage musical” films of the time, impossibly stretch the bounds of the presumed stage, with lovers, for instance, taking a stroll that no theatrical stage could accommodate. But here this isn’t all delightful nonsense. Rather, the film reveals as it unfolds a remarkable confusion, even conflation, of film “reality” and stage performance. What would prove so hokey in François Truffaut’s The Last Metro (1980) works stunningly here, eventually causing the jaw to drop and tears most generously to flow. I don’t know whether the film is indebted to the musical play in this regard, but Erwin S. Gelsey is credited with the screenplay. It revolves around a brilliant conceit.
Tags: Mervyn LeRoy/Grunes
This entry was posted on July 2, 2008 at 5:35 am and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.