Hollywood Cavalcade

Another of the box sets that I picked up ome time back was a five-film set of the movies of Alice Faye. One of the movies in the set that I hadn't blogged about before is Hollywood Cavalcade, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Faye plays Molly Adair, a stage actress in New York in 1913. She's successful on the stage, while the new medium of moving pictures is moving out west for various reasons. Michael Connors (Don Ameche) is a director who works for a Mack Sennett-like producer (Sennett, in fact, had a cameo in the movie), Sennett being the man who gave us the Keystone Kops and was instrumental in advancing Charlie Chaplin's career. The producer is always on the lookout for new talent, and Connors is sent east to sign Adair to a movie contract with the studio. Instead, Connors signs Adair to a personal contract.

Adair is supposed to star in romantic one- and two-reelers, but during filming of one of these shorts, a blooper happens in which the male lead (Buster Keaton playing himself) accidentally hits Molly in the face with a pie. This of course gets big laughs, and it gives Connors the idea to turn Molly into a comedy star. Now playing comedy, Molly becomes wildly successful, and Connors with her since he's got the rights to her contract.

This gives Connors the idea that perhaps he should start his own studio, bringing Molly with him as the new studio's big star. He needs money for that, but fortunately, a good friend, Dave Spingold (J. Edward Bromberg) has an uncle die and bequeath him the money that could be put to good use starting a new Hollywood studio. Connors has daring new ideas for the direction moving pictures should take, and thanks to having Molly, those ideas mostly work.

Connors wants to make Molly a "serious" actress again, and takes her out of comedy, pairing her with an unknown, Nicky Hayden (Alan Curtis). They form a successful screen team, but this is where things begin to go off the rails. Molly has always like Connors, to the point that she would be happy if he proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately, Connors is more in love with the idea of making movies than he is with Molly. Not that he dislikes Molly; she's more than a good friend. But he's just so busy with his work that he doesn't see the big flashing signs that Molly is in love with him and those two should be together.

Molly and Nicky are definitely good friends too, and since Mike doesn't see what's going on, Molly finally decides she's going to marry Nicky since he asks her. Besides, the fans, seeing the two of them paired on the screen together, think they're romantically involved in real life.

Molly's marriage to Nicky causes Mike to go off the deep end and start acting extremely irrationally. He rips up Molly's contract, and starts making a series of other mistakes that causes his movies to become flops. Eventually, it causes his studio to go bankrupt while Molly continues to be a big star. Eventually, she asks her studio to hire Mike to direct her next picture, even though the studio isn't so sure.

Two nearly simultaneous events cause the movie to face disaster. One is that Molly gets in a car accident that also kills Nicky, while the other is the advent of talking pictures. Will Mike be able to save the picture? Well, this is a light movie, so you can probably guess the answer.

One gets the feeling that Hollywood Cavalcade was originally conceived as a musical, of the sort that Fox liked to make. Not big and bold like MGM did, but more homespun and nostalgic, often looking at the past. It was a style that suited Alice Faye well, but for some reason, Fox wound up making this one not be a musical. Perhaps they didn't want it to be too closely related to Alexander's Ragtime Band, which came out a year earlier and has a lot of plot themes that resemble Hollywood Cavalcade. (There's also The Great American Broadcast, released two years later, and decidedly fitting into the same space. In any case, the material mostly works here, including a simulacrum of the old two-reeler comedies that were big hits two decades before the movie was released. That's because that section uses a lot of people who had been in the silent comedies.

At the same time, however, Hollywood Cavalcade also feels formulaic and a decided step down from Alexander's Ragtime Band. It's a good enough movie, and one that is great to have in a box set, but definitely a lesser Fox musical.