Melody Cruise

I've mentioned before that I tend to find musicals before 42nd Street to be pretty dire affairs. At RKO, it was really Flying Down to Rio at the end of 1933, with the pairing of Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, that revived the genre for that studio. Earlier musicals were either not very good, or else an absolute curiosity like Melody Cruise.

Phil Harris, who would go on to be a voice actor in Disney movies, plays playboy and confirmed bachleor Alan Chandler. He's going on a cruise in the dead of winter from New York to Los Angeles, through the Panama Canal. There are of course going to be a lot of eligible, good-looking young bachelorettes on the cruise, so Alan blackmails his traveling companion Pete Wells (Charlie Ruggles) into keeping him on the straight and narrow. Alan writes a letter detailing some of the married Pete's alleged dalliances, and sends that letter to Mrs. Wells (Marjorie Gateson) with a note saying that the letter is to be opened only in the event that Alan gets married.

So of course you know that he's going to get involved with some of the pretty ladies on board the ship. German Elsa (Greta Nissen) love him while he only liks her; Laurie (Helen Mack) is a little more the sort of woman Alan finally decides he's going to settle down with. It's enough to make Pete extremely worried.

Pete, for his part, has his own problems not involving Alan. You've probably seen any number of movies about cruises where the ship has somebody announcing in town-crier style, "All ashore who's going ashore!" Well, two young women at the bon voyage party get drunk enough that they pass out in Pete's stateroom and miss going ashore. So they have no cabin of their own and Pete has a wife. This results in his trying to pass the two young ladies off as his nieces, although when the ship gets to Los Angeles and Mrs. Wells shows up, she's going to know.

I said at the beginning that this is a musical, and that's the curious thing about it. The plot to Melody Cruise is pretty threadbare and not particularly well handled. The songs are one of the things that make the movie more interesting, being with one exception handled in a style pretty close to Rex Harrison's Sprechgesang that you can see in My Fair Lady or Dr. Doolittle. The people's voices, and other sound effects, are carefully edited to sound musical even if they aren't really. It starts off right at the beginning when there's a montage of people trying to avoid the winter, and really continues in the song "He's Not the Marrying Kind". The wipes used for scene transitions are also much better handled than the plain horizontal or vertical wipes used in most early 1930s movies.

Melody Cruise is worth one watch for its interesting use of film techniques much more than for the plot or acting. It would be nicer if it showed up on TV more instaed of having to watch a pricier Warner Archive DVD, since this is the sort of movie I don't have any real desire to watch multiple times.