* The opening of this song is very similar to ‘Don’t Wake Me Up, I’m Dreaming’ (1910) by Herbert Ingraham and Beth Slater Whitson, but the lyrics are different and more relevant to the film. It may be that the filmmakers took the Edwardian original and tweaked it. If so, the lyrics are probably by Clifford Grey.
Jack Vibart, “the fastest young blood in town,” leaves the Florodora show with his friend Lord Rumblesham.
The six Florodora Girls
In their dressing room, the chorus girls discuss Jack and his reputation. Daisy Dell is the only one from the original Florodora sextet not to have bagged a millionaire; all she has is little Georgie Smith from the cigar store. Daisy does not want to land a man just for his money. Her friends Fanny and Maude encourage Daisy to play the game, which means playing hard to get. “When a man is fascinated, the first thing he wants to do is buy you something expensive”.
To her surprise, Daisy receives an invitation to supper from Jack. Her friends force her to refuse: if he is serious, he will come back. Daisy watches Jack smile fondly as his flowers are returned to him [Don’t Wake Me Up, I’m Dreaming].
All the girls meet their stage door johnnies, leaving Daisy alone. Georgie arrives to take Daisy for a tandem ride, and she makes him stop at the saloon to collect her father [My Mother Was a Lady].
The next day, the performers from the show and their followers are at a beach party. While Daisy is swimming, she sees Jack and pretends to be drowning. Jack ‘saves’ her and carries her back to shore, where considerable efforts are made to revive her. [Pass the Beer and Pretzels; In the Good Old Summertime; A Hot Time in the Old Town; Little Annie Rooney; Obadiah (Swing Me Just a Little Bit Higher); On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away].
Daisy (Marion Davies) has been ‘saved from drowning’ by Jack (Lawrence Gray)
Fanny and Maude continue to be cynical about Jack’s intentions and remind Daisy to make sure she gets a gift from him. When Jack comes over, Fanny and Maude refuse to leave the couple alone. They tell Jack that Daisy has dozens of beaux. Finally, Daisy and Jack go for a walk and sit together on a swing. They swing high and a rope breaks, sending them flying into the bushes.
Fanny and Maude attend a big college football game, but do not tell Daisy that Jack had invited her. They tell Jack that Daisy is at the Vanderbilt party, but then she arrives with Georgie on the tandem.
Georgie points out Harry Fontaine, the big gambler, who is one of his customers. Jack tells Fanny and Maude that Fontaine is one of the biggest crooks in racing. Daisy waves to Jack, but he acknowledges her frostily. Fontaine gets Georgie drunk and then approaches Daisy. The crowd surges and Daisy ends up on Fontaine’s arm. Jack sees Fontaine making advances, and goes over to take Daisy away.
On the ride home Daisy tells Jack that her friends had not passed on his invitation to the game. She explains that they have been trying to teach her how to fascinate a rich man. After she tells him the truth about herself, Jack declares that now he will be the one who has designs on her. Jack’s mother passes in another carriage and wonders who Daisy can be. Jack is reluctant to tell Daisy who the girl riding with his mother was.
At home, Mrs Vibart questions Jack, who says Daisy is “just one of the Florodora sextet”. She asks Jack when he is going to stop philandering and marry Constance. He says he will marry her in June, and assures her that a man in his position could never take a girl like Daisy seriously.
The next day Jack arrives to collect Daisy in his horseless carriage and takes her for tea [You’re My Kind of a Girl]. Jack gives Daisy a bracelet and tries to persuade her to let him find her an apartment where he can stay over. Daisy is offended, gives back the bracelet and slaps him.
Some time later, Rumblesham calls backstage to see Daisy. He invites her to Mrs Commodore Carraway’s ball. Fanny and Maude persuade her to go and dress her up in a costume from the show.
Daisy and Lord Rumblesham (Claude Allister) at Mrs Commodore Carraway’s Ball
Daisy is approached by Jack at the ball, but she refuses to talk to him. Rumblesham tells Daisy that Jack has been engaged to Constance for a long time. Daisy runs away and Jack follows her. He apologizes to her for his behaviour, and tells her that, while originally he had been playing with her, he now realizes that he loves her. His mother wants him to marry Constance for her money, but when his horse Firebird wins the sweepstake tomorrow, he will have enough money to ignore his mother and set himself up in business.
But Fontaine has got to Firebird’s jockey and the horse does not win. Jack loses everything. At a party to mark Daisy and Jack’s engagement, he asks Rumblesham not to tell Daisy what has happened.
Mrs Vibart sends a carriage for Daisy and tells her that Jack lost their entire fortune at the races. She and her daughters can only be saved from ruin if Jack marries Constance. Daisy agrees to give up Jack.
The other Florodora girls assume the engagement is off because Daisy will not marry a poor man. Daisy has asked Fontaine to take her to a slumming ball on the Bowery. She does not enjoy being with Fontaine, but pretends to be when Jack enters. Jack asks her to come away with him, but she tells him they are through because she is not fool enough to take him when he is broke. Jack leaves and Fontaine comforts her.
Four months later, Fanny and Maude tell Daisy they are engaged. Jack has gone into the horseless carriage business and made a fortune, so he has not married Constance. [Tell Me Pretty Maiden]. Jack tries to speak to Daisy and absentmindedly walks onto the stage with her. He says he loves her and asks her to marry him. When she refuses, Jack picks her up and carries her outside, where the waiting Mrs Vibart says “My dear, this time, we have come for you”.
In Gay Madrid is a strange title for a film that is almost entirely set in Santiago, over 300 miles from Madrid, typical of MGM’s cavalier attitude to naming its earliest musicals. It is a campus musical with a Spanish setting, like Good News with duelling.
The film reunited Ramon Novarro and Dorothy Jordan immediately after Devil-May-Care (they would work together once more in Call of the Flesh). Novarro was by now proving himself a very competent actor in talking pictures, though his accent sometimes throws off his line readings. His early scene with Claude King, playing his father, is nicely underplayed to comedic effect.
Ricardo (Ramon Novarro) enquires why Carmina (Dorothy Jordan) does not like him
Jordan’s performance is less satisfying, all played on one note and with long pauses. But then most of her scenes are stolen by the much lovelier performances of Novarro and Beryl Mercer, playing her aunt.
The worst piece of casting is Lottice Howell as Goyita. Howell’s voice is okay, but she is nobody’s idea of a seductive nightclub singer. It is unsurprising that this was her last musical outing for MGM.
Robert Z Leonard’s direction is much more confident than it was in Marianne, with a less static camera. He continues the tendency, begun in Devil-My-Care, for Ramon Novarro’s musical films to be integrated. With the exception of Lotice Howell’s opening nightclub number, all of the songs are performed in non-theatrical settings to non-diegetic music, and arise naturally from the actions of the characters. All have lyrics that reflect on or develop the narrative.
One of the best sequences is the garden scene where Ricardo helps his friend (a large young man with the unlikely name of Corpulento) to serenade a girl. The action takes place within a large three-dimensional space and Leonard’s camera placement ensures that we always know where we are and whose point of view we are seeing.
Ricardo sings and plays while Corpulento (Bruce Coleman) mimes
The Ahlert-Turk and Stothart-Grey partnerships provided the words and music, with the latter pair being joined by Xavier Cugat, who would later make a successful series of appearances in front of the camera.
Francesc d’Assís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (or Xavier Cugat i Mingall for short, 1900-1990), was one of the more idiosyncratic performers to work on musicals at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, reliably introducing an element of camp to every film he appeared in.
Born in Catalonia, Cugat and his family emigrated first to Cuba, and then to the United States in 1915. His beginnings in show business were as a classical violinist. He took time out to work as a cartoonist, and then formed his own band, which ended up performing at the Coconut Grove in Los Angeles. Specializing in Latin music, Cugat, clutching his signature chihuahua while conducting or performing, became known as the ‘King of Rumba’.
Cugat’s first involvement in a Metro musical was behind the scenes, working with Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey on a couple of numbers for In Gay Madrid. Fourteen years later he made his debut on screen for Metro (having made a few musicals at Paramount), in Two Girls and a Sailor. Here, as on every other occasion, he played a fictionalized version of the band leader Xavier Cugat.
Cugat appeared in four Esther Williams vehicles: Bathing Beauty, On an Island with You, This Time for Keeps and Neptune’s Daughter. He also supported Jane Powell in Holiday in Mexico, A Date with Judy and Luxury Liner, and showed up in No Leave, No Love.
Edwin Justus Mayer (1896-1960) was a journalist and occasional playwright who, quite enterprisingly, wrote an autobiography when he was 25 and had achieved very little. From 1927 to 1945 he worked on a number of Hollywood films; in his own words, “I never gave up the stage, the stage gave me up. The pictures gave me a living and the theatre wouldn’t. I see no shame in using your professional weapons to make a living.” His crowning achievement was his final screenplay, for Lubitsch’s To Be Or Not to Be (1945).
Mayer had earlier been one of the three writers credited with the script for In Gay Madrid.
Edward Salisbury Fields (1878-1936) was, amongst other things, a popular playwright, several of whose comedies were adapted into films.
In the early 1930s Fields undertook writing projects for various Hollywood studios. Amongst these was a contribution to the screenplay for MGM’s In Gay Madrid.
Robert Howard Ober (1881-1950) was an actor with considerable stage experience when he started taking screen roles in the early 1920s. His most notable appearance was as John Gilbert’s brother in King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925).
Although he never directed a film, Ober does appear to have been assigned some directorial tasks by MGM, one of which was to shoot retakes for In Gay Madrid after Robert Z Leonard had moved on to his next film.
