Some Thoughts
Stage Mother is a pretty good film, but a lacklustre musical. Based on the backstage novel written by Bradford Ropes immediately after 42nd Street, and with Ropes as co-author of the screenplay, it is a much darker film than the Warner Bros adaptation of the earlier novel, the improbable happy ending notwithstanding. But it lacks 42nd Street’s humour and, most essentially, Busby Berkeley’s production numbers.
Albertina Rasch was no Busby Berkeley,and the two production numbers in Stage Mother, the first of which launches Freed-Brown’s ‘Beautiful Girl’, are mostly by-the-numbers parades of swaying chorus girls.
What saves Stage Mother is the central performance of Alice Brady, following up her benevolent mother in Broadway to Hollywood with a convincing portrait of the fixated stage mother. In an early scene with her dead husband’s parents and forbidding sister, she is very moving, entirely credible with her nervous laughter. Later, she is a ruthless blackmailer in her daughter’s supposed interests, even acting as a procurer for the gay dance instructor.
Maureen O’Sullivan was a lesser talent, and very inexperienced, but she holds her own as the manipulated, and later manipulative, daughter. The real problem with her performance is that she exhibits not one iota of the stage talent that everyone else in the picture is attributing to her.
Director Charles Brabin was beyond his best years when he made Stage Mother; he would only make two further films, before retiring to enjoy the wealth he and his wife, Theda Bara, had accumulated. But he was always more than a Hollywood journeyman, and he and cinematographer George J Folsey achieved a better-looking film than might be expected, often using unconventional camera angles.
Stage Mother has been described as a musicalized soap opera, and there is some justification in that. But it is an entertaining soap opera, let down only by a final scene in which all the blackmail and pimping is brushed to one side. It also contains an audition sequence in which Carl ‘Alfalfa’ Switzer and Mary Ann Jackson, together with an unnamed contortionist, demonstrate just how awful child performers can be.
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