The Cat and the Fiddle

Some Thoughts

Risqué lyrics? Check. Central couple living in sin? Check. Leading lady in her underwear? Check. Yes, The Cat and the Fiddle is definitely a Pre-Code Jeanette MacDonald musical, to the extent that it was rejected for re-release after the Production Code was fully enforced. First released in February 1934, it just sneaked under the wire.

Kern and Harbach’s musical was first staged in 1931, and focuses on the clash between the traditional music of European Victor Florescu and the jazz-influenced compositions of American Shirley Sheridan. This binary opposition, which is central to so many later musicals, is touched on early in the film, in the reaction of Victor and the Professor to Shirley’s (actually Kern’s)  ‘Impressions in a Harlem Flat’. But the theme is more or less sidelined for a more conventional troubled romance.

The Cat and the Fiddle is, nonetheless, an enjoyable musical, well shot by William K Howard and Charles G Clarke, and not noticeably damaged by retakes shot by Sam Wood and Hal Rosson. It looks good, especially Alexander Tobuloff’s set designs in the early scenes set in Brussels, and there is an excellent Slavko Vorkapich visual and aural montage sequence when Victor searches for the taxi containing his music.

This was Jeanette MacDonald’s first picture for MGM and, again in the first half, shows her at her liveliest. After The Merry Widow, she would be confined to greater blandness in the series of films featuring the wonderful singing and wooden acting of Nelson Eddy. The Cat and the Fiddle also marks the start of MacDonald’s long working relationship with composer Herbert Stothart, whose reworking of Kern melodies and interpolation of natural sound (see the bedroom scene after Victor leaves Shirley) makes the film’s soundtrack stand out as ambitious and creative.

Ramon Novarro, in his penultimate MGM musical, and approaching the end of his stardom, cannot match Eddy’s voice, but is a livelier partner for MacDonald, albeit a frequently irritatingly cocksure character.

Frank Morgan looks like a lecherous older man, but is too affable to really bring it off, while Charles Butterworth looks like an idiot and proves to be one.

The songs by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach are not classics, but are nevertheless strong and memorable. Unlike in many other adaptations of Broadway hits, MGM retained most of the original songs and did not interpolate numbers by other hands.