"But really I'd rather find out what you've seen at the movies lately and how you felt about the cast. It's much more interesting."
I thought you'd never ask.
Last week I saw two really interesting films at FilmForum (as part of the "Paramount before the Code" series) : FOLLOW THRU (1930) with Nancy Carroll & Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, and JUNE MOON (1931) with Jack Oakie & Frances Dee, which has not been screened in NYC since its original release and has never been on television or available on tape or DVD.
I had seen FOLLOW THRU about five years ago and was anxious to get another look. The most perfectly preserved two-strip Technicolor film that exists, its survival is an accident. For some reason - problems with the rights, or being so far back on the shelf - the negative was spared when Technicolor did a thorough housecleaning in the mid 1950s, when the flamable nitrate negatives for all the then-obsolete two-color process films (made from the early 1920s to 1933) were destroyed in what a friend of mind refers to as "a Dachau of film". Dozens of Technicolor films (most of them early musicals) were lost, the only survival being dim and grany black and white dupes.
A Broadway-to-Hollywood musical about women golfers (Carroll & Thelma Todd) feuding over Rogers (who was adorably boyish) with too few DeSylva-Brown & Henderson songs (including "Button Up Your Overcoat" and "I Want to be Bad", FOLLOU THRU has gorgeous outtdoor photography and a pretty lamebrained plot. Neither Carroll nor Rogers can really sing and the best numbers are taken by Jack Haley and zesty Zelma O'Neal (who were both from the original Broadway production of 1928....), the latter belting out "I Want To Be Bad" in a perky red devil's suit. The talky stretches were too long between numbers but it was always pretty to look at. There were only a few pre-code moments: Once when Haley and Eugene Pallette disguise themselves as Italian plumbers to retrieve a ring from O'Neal in a woman's locker room (an excuse for a Techicolor parade of VERY scantily dressed women in flimsy underwear) and the other, a bit of racy dialogue between Haley (who got the ring from O'Neal) and O'Neal, who finds out that Haley (her husband to be) had seen her nude. "Oh, Gee! Now I won't have any surprises for you." Wiggling his eyebrows, Haley responds "Yeah, but don't worry - I've got a BIG surprise for YOU!"
Even better was JUNE MOON, with a snappy screenplay (from the Broadway play) by George S. Kauffman and Ring Lardner. Oakie (whom I can usually take in small doses) was excellent as a rube from Schenectady who comes to NYC to break into the songwriting business. He meets sweet Dee on the train, but gets diverted by the family of his songwriting partner Ernest Wood, particularly tricky golddigger June MacCloy, the sister of Sears' wife (Wynne Gibson) . It is left to his Oakie & Woods piano playing pal Harry Akst (in real life, a songwriter who helped write such hits as "Baby Face", "Dinah" and "Am I Blue" as well as others like "On the Rancho With My Pancho") and to fix things up between Oakie & Dee.
Throught the film there were intentionally funny-awful musical interludes as various songwriters perform their compositions for music publisher Sam Hardy (I wish I could remember more of one song: "I'm flying off to Tokyo, its no Jokey-o that you make my heart smokey-o" etc.)and there are such quips as "I can't talk to you now, George Gershwin just came in!" and this exchange about the ever popular "mammy" songs:
Oakie: "Songwriters love writing about their homes, thier mother and where they came from!"
Akst: "Hmmm. I never realised that Tennessee had such a heavy Jewish population."
"Christ, Bette Davis?!?!"
Updated On: 7/5/05 at 10:52 AM