The Rogue Song

Opinion

It is impossible to give an opinion on the merits of The Rogue Song, a film no one has seen in its entirety for many years. Its status as the only ‘lost’ MGM musical, combined with its status as Laurel and Hardy’s only colour picture, has made it one of the holy grails of lost films. To date, about 22 minutes of footage has been unearthed around the world, less than a quarter of the total 103 minutes. Fortunately, the audiotrack has survived in its entirety. This, combined with the continuity script, has enabled YouTube provider Unreeled8 to produce a quasi-restoration of The Rogue Song, combining the soundtrack, surviving footage, stills, posters and AI  into a simulacrum of the original film. 

The loss of The Rogue Song is sad for many reasons, not the least because it was the first all-Technicolor musical made at the studio now synonymous with Technicolor musicals. It was also the first to feature a great singer, rather than crooners like Charles King and Lawrence Gray. Edwin M Bradley has described the challenge posed to Douglas Shearer’s sound department by the power of Tibbett’s voice. The engineers found they had to put the microphone fifteen feet away from Tibbett in order to capture his singing voice correctly. (As a sidenote, when Tibbett recorded the medley for the flogging sequence [see below], he was stripped to the waist and tied to posts in the recording studio.)

The available evidence suggests that The Rogue Song was a rummy sort of musical. Not many musicals, for example, have rape and suicide as significant plot elements, or a scene in which the hero sings a medley of songs while being publicly whipped (“The lash cries for blood!”).  It may have been these melodramatic aspects that led Irving Thalberg to assign the direction of this important picture to the otherwise entirely unsuitable Lionel Barrymore.

The melodrama, combined with plodding direction, raised alarm bells after four weeks’ shooting, prompting the producers to inject some comic relief. This came in the form of Laurel and Hardy, the most unlikely of all Caucasian bandits. They feature in nine sequences, all directed by Hal Roach and separately from the rest of the picture (Stan and Ollie only worked for two days with the other actors).

Ostensibly based on Franz Lehár’s operetta Gypsy Love (1910), the plot has been completely changed and very little of Lehár’s music retained. The new songs are by Herbert Stothart and Clifford Grey.

The Rogue Song got good reviews and grossed over $1.1 million worldwide, but turning only a small profit because of its high production costs. Lawrence Tibbett, who sings all the film’s eight songs, appears to give a good performance by the standards of the day; he was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.