Some Thoughts
Going Hollywood has the potential to be a good musical, but does not quite get there. It has its moments, but fights a losing battle against the unusually lacklustre direction of Raoul Walsh, whose strengths the musical form does not play to.
Star Marion Davies would go on to make half a dozen more pictures, but she was in her mid-thirties by now, and her heart never seems to be in te portraying yet another ingenue. Her appearance in blackface as the world’s most unconvincing ‘mammy’ is a low point. Davies’s singing is kept to an absolute minimum, with all the heavy lifting done by co-star Bing Crosby, on loan from Paramount at Davies’s specific request. Which is a pity, because the film has the best score of any of her musicals, with Freed and Brown in good form.
MGM found itself in September 1933 shooting two pictures set in Hollywood. The other was Bombshell (1933), which has all the verve and insider knowledge that is lacking in Going Hollywood. The dead hand of William Randolph Hearst is probably a factor here: satire was not really his forte. And Marion Davies was no longer able to compete with twenty-two year old Jean Harlow.
The film’s musical highlights are ‘Going Hollywood’ and ‘Temptation’. The former is the big production number set at Grand Central Station, in which dance director Albertina Rasch seems to throw everything apart from the kitchen sink into the mix. Crosby sings ‘Temptation’, one of Freed and Brown’s best songs, into the sultry eyes of Fifi D’Orsay, achieving a depth of emotion that was generally lacking from his easy-listening style of crooning.
The comedy in Going Hollywood is left in the capable hands of Ned Sparks and Patsy Kelly, though both find slim pickings in Donald Ogden Stewart’s sub-par screenplay; it is difficult to believe he would go on to write Holiday (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940). On the subjects of comedy, Sterling Holloway also provides a few minutes of his always entertaining zaniness.
Going Hollywood is not exactly a bad film; it is just not a particularly good one.
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