This is
most definitely not a movie. If I were
to compare it to anything we have nowadays, it’d be somewhere between an awards
show and a telethon, only without awards to give out or money to raise for
charity. Rather, this is a lavish revue
featuring brief performances from all of MGM’s top stars, something of an
extended ad for their talents (which is also part of the function of an awards
show.) And if I’m placing this correctly
in context, this revue came out pretty much right as MGM was getting into sound
movies, so one of its additional draws was getting all its stars in one place
and letting audiences hear them both talk and sing.
For the
awards-show aspects, we have lots of celebrities (Norma Shearer, Laurel and
Hardy, Joan Crawford, and Jack Benny, just to name a few) all rubbing elbows on
the same soundstage for a couple of hours.
There’s the same sort of staged banter with the same sort of winking
nods, and there’s plenty of fawning introductions and self-congratulatory
airs. For the telethon aspect, we see
these stars, not just standing around being lovely and impressive, but
performing for the viewers. It’s pretty
much wall-to-wall song and dance interspersed with introductions and broken up
by an occasional skit. This is,
essentially, MGM’s way of saying, “When you’ve got it, flaunt it!”, and for
many people watching it in the theater, it’s seeing their favorite stars show
off talents they might not have seen before (definitely not, in the case of the
singing and speaking.)
Really,
much of it isn’t for me, but that’s mainly because I’m just not familiar enough
with enough of these stars or the songs they’re performing to get too drawn in
(I mean, I know who plenty of them are,
but I’ve only got one idol in the bunch, and that’s Buster – more on him later,
of course!) That said, I know that if
someone told me I could watch all of today’s big-name actors sing and dance in
a movie for two hours – no plot in sight, just celebrities strutting their
stuff – I’d be there yesterday. So I’m sure this was awesome back in its day;
I’m just too removed to appreciate it from that vantage point.
But what
I do appreciate? Buster all over. Seriously, Buster is the man in this thing. Other
than a quick camera pan in a group number at the end, he’s only in one main
scene, but he’s awesome in it. Even if
you don’t want to watch The Hollywood
Revue of 1929 in its entirety, watch his scene on YouTube. As I’ve written about before, it’s his
“Princess Rajah” dance that he started doing back in his vaudeville days and
later used to entertain the troops when he was overseas during WWI. And it’s amazing.
Everything
about this dance is utterly fantastic.
His cobbled-together “Arabian princess” costume is fabulous (I
especially love the ladles hanging from the skirt, and the slap sandals are
awesome,) his little bits of random business are hilarious, and his acrobatic
slapstick dancing is off the hook. We
get a series of no-handed cartwheels like in Back Stage, as well as his patented move of trying to hoist himself
onto something one leg at a time (it’s hard to describe, but it’s still magic
to see every time.) Even as a
decidedly-biased person, I have think this performance, among the rest of the
revue, is in a class of its own. Buster
was such a pro, and here, he shines in every moment.
(Sadly,
this film comes right after his two silent features for MGM and just before the
start of his sound pictures, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it was all
downhill from here.)
But no
matter what came after, it can’t take away from this scene. Buster’s comedic dancing prowess was always
on point and he put it to good use during his film career, but even though he
has other dances that borrow from this one, I’m so glad it got recorded in its
entirety. Routines that originated on
vaudeville in The Three Keatons can feel a bit mythic almost – reading accounts
of tremendous physical humor that doesn’t exist anymore – and the only way
we’re able to experience them for ourselves is in situations like this, where
Buster takes a bit from the stage and puts it in front of a camera, making a
record of it for us to see that will last long after news clippings of old
vaudeville reviews fade.
Warnings
A bit of
slapstick violence.
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