Opinion
It’s a Great Life is, in almost every way, technically superior to The Broadway Melody, made only a few months earlier. But it was a flop, lost in the mass of backstagers which Richard Barrios holds partly responsible for the public’s turning away from musicals so soon after they were invented.
It is generally accepted that the Duncan Sisters would have starred in The Broadway Melody if they had been available, so the later film reworks its plot, though the love-object who is the subject of contention here is the younger sister, rather than the man. The relationship between the two sisters is cloying and somewhat incestuous, and this problematizes the cinematic cliché of the love triangle.
The film moves between often effective comedy (Rosetta Duncan was clearly a talented comedy performer) and drama verging on the tragic. The latter is handled less convincingly than the former. Bessie Love’s dressing room scene introduced a tragic moment organically into the generally light-hearted Broadway Melody. In It’s a Great Life, the rawness of the break-up between the two sisters sits uneasily alongside the humour.
In a bizarre moment, the delusional Babe’s ranting on her sickbed segues into one of the picture’s two Technicolor sequences, in which the Duncans, dressed as little girls, perform ‘Hoosier Hop’. The transition from black-and-white to colour involves an uncharacteristic stylistic flourish from director Sam Wood as a (presumably subjective) spiral pattern fills the screen.
The Duncan Sisters were a top vaudeville act, but their fanbase was unable to put It’s a Great Life into profit. They had signed a three-picture contract with Metro but, apart from some footage shot for The March of Time, they made no further films.
It’s a Great Life has its moments, and there were many worse musicals made in the 1929-31 period, but its greatest merit today is that it preserved, and revealed something of, a top vaudeville act that would otherwise be lost to time.
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