Broadway Babies

Musicals from before 42nd Street can often be a difficult slog to get through. But I'm always interested in an early talkie I haven't seen before, so when I saw the 1929 film Broadway Babies on the TCM schedule, I made it a point to record it and watch it.

Although there are a couple of musical numbers, Broadway Babies isn't as much of a musical as other movies calling themselves musicals. Alice White plays Dee Foster one of three "Broadway Musketeers" living together in a rooming house with Florian (Marion Byron) and Navarre (Sally Eilers). Their motto is to do things their own way, all for one and one for all. Dee has a boyfriend in Billy Buvanny (Charles Delaney), who is a stage manager for the show in which the three women are chorines, and thinks he can get Dee a starring role.

The theater where the cast rehearses is across the alley from a hotel where Perc Gessant (Fred Kohler) and his entourage are staying. Perc is a bootlegger from Detroit distributing alcohol to New York. The men look into the windows of the theater with their binoculars, and see those lovely leggy ladies, and want to meet them. With that in mind, the producer of the show brings them backstage and introduces them to Dee and her friends, asking them to show Perc and his friends a nice evening out.

Dee is of course reluctant to do so at first, since by now she's engaged to Billy. But she sees Billy talking to Blossom, another woman in the cast, and gets the wrong impression that perhaps Billy doesn't really care about her. So she decides she's going to spend some time with Perc after all.

Perc, for his part, is that rare good-hearted bootlegger, not really telling naïve Dee what he really is. But the two fall in love, with Perc getting Dee a starring role in a nightclub show which really causes a lot of friction between her and Billy.

Perc, meanwhile, has been spending his spare time playing high-stakes poker with some locals. Of course those locals are out to fleece Perc, which they do with a rigged game, except that Perc, being no dummy himself, figures it out and turns the tables, which leads to gunplay and a really ridiculous chance of character from Perc.

I'm not certain exactly how original Broadway Babies is. While there's a lot that seems old hat and trite to somebody watching 90 years on from when the movie was made, I wonder how much it was unoriginal even by the standards of 1929. The story is engaging enough and the camera and sound aren't as primitive as some 1929 movies, although of course movie sound and camerawork would advance greatly over the next few years.

Alice White is an appealing star, and it's a shame her career petered out. Everybody else is adequate at best, with stuttering Tom Dugan being obnoxiously cast as Billy's friend. The musical numbers are very much of the pre-Busby Berkeley era, although one with African shields is moderately interesting.

Broadway Babies has been released as a standalone DVD by the Warner Archive collection, but it's really the sort of movie that needs to be in a cheap box set. Worth a watch, but I wouldn't pay standalone prices for it.