Films With A Broadway Setting — Page 2

The Jazz Singer

Glorifying the American Girl, 1929, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, about a would-be chorus girl who dreams of being in the Follies; the last third of the film ls in early Technicolor and recreates a typical Follies production with real Follies showgirls, Eddie Cantor, Helen Morgan, and an uncredited Johnny Weissmuller wearing less than a thong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorifying_the_American_Girl

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0019933/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7gEgDVm50

Updated On: 9/3/13 at 01:36 AM

Stage Door, 1937, starring Katherine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolph Menjou, Andrea Leeds and Lucille Ball, set in a Manhattan boarding house occupied by aspiring young actresses.

Hepburn, onstage: “The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower—suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died.”

An in-joke. The lines originally occurred in Hepburn's most infamous stage
failure, "The Lake," the show about which Dorothy Parker wrote "[Hepburn]
ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."

Updated On: 9/3/13 at 02:15 AM

Valley of the Dolls

^No but two of its four main characters are Broadway actors, one of them is their long-suffering wife and mother, and the fourth is their son and brother in addition to being based on someone destined to change Broadway as we know it forever. The characters sometimes pivotally reflect on their life as a stage family, on the road, in Broadway hotels, on NY nightlife, and on a subject crucial to the Broadway experience - that of commercially selling out or artistically committing to the theatre:

"That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in – a great money success – it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune." (4.1.139)

I included it because it is about four people whose lives were inextricably tied up with the American theatre.

Updated On: 9/3/13 at 11:00 AM

Oh, Life With Mikey was one of my favorite movies when I was in elementary school. It's so cute.