George Orville Hively (1889-1950) was a screenwriter and film editor in Hollywood from 1916. In 1935 he was nominated for the Best Editing Oscar for John Ford’s The Informer, but his finest achievement was probably on Howard Hawks’s Brining Up Baby (1938).
Devil-May-Care is significant as the first MGM operetta, a sub-gene in which the studio achieved considerable success during the thirties, largely owing to the success of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy partnership.
Ramon Novarro had been a popular action star in silent films, following his star-making appearance in Ben-Hur (1925). But he had trained as a singer and always insisted that performing opera had been his great ambition. He was certainly a gifted tenor, and a much better actor than Eddy, both of which attributes he demonstrates in Devil-May-Care.
Armand (Ramon Novarro) completes his caricature of Louis XVIII on the wall of the prison cell
The film is loosely based on The Ladies’ Battle, a three-act comedy by Eugène Scribe and Ernest Legouvé, written in 1851. Its opening section is entirely new, the play beginning at the point at which the hero is disguised as a servant and falling in love with Léonie. As its title suggests, the play has a greater focus on the two female characters, whereas Armand is the subject of Devil-May-Care, as befits Novarro’s status as a major star.
Barrios has drawn attention to the terrible inadequacy of most of the operettas produced in 1929-31, starting with Fox’s The Desert Song (1929). But he singles out Devil-May-Care as being “slickly produced,” both an artistic and financial success. This is largely attributable to Novarro’s personality and a score by Herbert Stothard and Clifford Grey that achieves no great heights but serves its purpose very well. This was Stothart’s first major project, early on in his career at Metro, and he is partnered well with Grey.
There is also a solid performance by John Miljan as DeGrignon, the villain of the piece.
Devil-May-Care has one of the interpolated two-strip Technicolor sequences that were ubiquitous at the time. It serves no purpose other than to slow down the film when it should have been building to its climax.
Armand learns about Bonaparte’s return from exile
Leaving that aside, Devil-May-Care is a musical still capable of being enjoyed, which is more than can be said for many of its contemporaries.
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.
Jimmy (Lawrence Gray) accompanies Babe (Vivian Duncan) and Casey (Rosetta Duncan) in one of their several renditions of ‘I’m Following You’.
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.
Casey comforts the ailing Vivian as hapless Jimmy looks on
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.
