Some Thoughts
At the heart of Broadway to Hollywood are two solid performances: a very good one by Frank Morgan and an excellent one by Alice Brady, essaying the first of her two show business mothers for MGM. The film as a whole, however, is underwhelming, especially as a musical, and the reason for that lies in its status as a hybrid of backstage drama and archival footage.
In 1929, producer Harry Rapf had an idea for a follow-up to his The Hollywood Revue of 1929. It was to be a lavish, three-part history of vaudeville. One section, the Old Timers, would showcase veteran vaudevillians, with the other parts presenting more contemporary performers. To that end, a range of great names from the past were filmed recreating past glories: Weber and Fields, Fay Templeton, Louis Mann, DeWolf Hopper, William Collier Sr, Josephine Sabel, Barney Fagan and Marie Dressler (the only one still in the public eye).
Filming proceeded well into 1930 but, having spent $750,000, the picture was summarily abandoned without having achieved even a rough-cut. MGM, like the other studios, had become aware that the American public was falling out of love with musicals, especially revues, and decided not to throw good money after bad.
There was a desire, however, to mitigate the loss by utilizing the March of Time footage elsewhere; which is where Broadway to Hollywood came in. MGM devised a multi-generational story about a vaudeville family, with a view to incorporating film shot for the abandoned project. This was not a bad idea in theory, but was badly let down by the execution.
For a start, the onstage sequences do not match the style and look of the dramatic scenes. It is almost entirely lacking in even medium shots, so most of the time the performers are unidentifiable. Weber and Fields are understood to be inside a stage horse costume during one sequence, but it could have been anybody. Fleeting is a generous way to describe the appearances of others.
Further dissonance is caused by the filmmakers decision to use shots of unnamed dancers as body doubles for the musical performances of actors like Russell Hardie and Madge Evans. Few MGM musicals, even from these early years, are so lacking in intimacy. Add in Moe and Curly Howard, almost unrecognizable as a disturbing pair of clowns, and you have the mess that is Broadway to Hollywood. And, if anyone was in doubt about where MGM stood on the matter, the people working in management in Hollywood are much kinder than those on Broadway.
