Broadway

Broadway exists (barely) in several formats:  it is a film made during the transition between silent and sound pictures, released in 1929.  Paul Fejos directed the extravagant production for Universal, making the musical as a silent film (apparently with some kind of synchronized soundtrack) as well as a talkie.  The last five minutes of the movie are in technicolor. Fejos seems to have been a great experimenter with form and technology.  Ultimately, both Hollywood and the European film system were too confining for him. He spent the last half of his life as an anthropologist making documentary films.  Broadway is an awful picture, almost unwatchable, but it is, nonetheless, fascinating, particularly for what it reveals about the movie industry in Hollywood during the period when the movies learned to talk.

Fejos made the movie (the first "million dollar musical") to celebrate a machine.  The film is designed as a demonstration vehicle for an elaborate crane camera-mount with a fifty-foot boom.  The crane was so large and heavy that a special soundstage had to be built for it -- the picture was shot in a cavernous interior with sixty-foot high ceilings (to accommodate the huge crane) and a specially reinforced concrete floor.  Universal apparently used this machine for twenty years as a camera mount -- the device was equipped with mechanisms that kept the camera platform (that could accommodate five people) perfectly level; while swooping up and down, the crane could simultaneously rotate in a complete circle.  The crane was still on-site through the fifties and sixties, although used as a lift for heavy objects and not for camera-work.  As late as the early seventies, the huge machine could be glimpsed on a backlot, dismantled and rusting.  Still pictures taken in 1929 show Fejos with camera personnel standing next to the crane.  There is even a handsome-looking Dalmatian hound  in the picture.  Broadway uses grandiose crane shots about every eight or nine minutes.  There is a particularly impressive shot that serves as an intermission, as it were, between the two halves of the 107 minute film -- the camera shows us an African-American charwoman washing a floor in the vast nightclub where the action in the film occurs; the camera rises to an enormous height above the floor, showing us the huge set and a number of other women, small as ants mopping the floor; then, the camera turns and shows us the other side of the set which has been built for this production in the round, dropping down again toward the floor where other janitorial workers are laboring.  It's a pointlessly spectacular image, devised to show what the crane can do as well the sheer enormity of the set and the sequence remains viscerally exciting even today.  

The film's plot is too thin to support its almost two hour running length and, so, the story is fragmented by various song-and-dance numbers.  The entire film takes place in a gargantuan night club called "The Paradise."  The cabaret is run by a curmudgeonly Greek who struts around in a tuxedo chomping on a big stogey.  A gangster named Steve confronts the leader of an opposing mob and guns him down backstage at the night club.  (There's a startling scene that seems almost neo-realist in which the mobsters drag the dead man out of the club and down the city streets -- these four or five shots are the only scenes within the story proper that take place outside of the Paradise, a welcome break from the ultra-designed and hyper-artificial night club set.)  A detective appears at the club and hangs around sullenly watching for Steve to betray himself.  A desultory romantic triangle arises between the suave and wealthy Steve, an ambitious hoofer named Roy and a comely chorus girl, Billy.  During the first half of the film, there's a subplot in which Billy is tempted by Steve to entertain a bunch of drunken mobsters at a banquet backstage at the Club.  In the second half of the movie, the detective continues to probe the gangland murder committed on the premises but to no real effect -- the conflict is resolved when the dead gangster's moll, also a chorine, guns down Steve.  Billy and Roy dance up a storm in the penultimate number and an agent, recognizing their genius as a song-and-dance team, books them for "Pottsville and Chambersburg", whatever this is supposed to mean.  There's a flashy final dance sequence involving the crane going up and down and whirling around a few times with lots of superimpositions and whip-pans -- this is shot in color, but mostly reveals only that the huge set has lots of red highlights in it:  the general impression is of a pink and red blur.  

The movie is noteworthy for the eye-popping sets.  The night-club is a canyon between two huge fluted towers that support a roof that simulates a sky lanced with searchlight beams.  There are two immense curtains with vaguely futuristic decorations and, backstage, some art deco chambers, one of them with an elaborate staircase snaking down along a sleek white wall.  Duchamp showed a nude coming down a staircase a dozen years earlier and Fejos uses this vaguely cubist set in many scenes with chorus-girls decorously suspended at various heights above the floor; apparently, the idea is that the staircase enhances the visual appeal of the sequences in which it is used.  None of the interior spaces have any ceilings, they just have flats that go up and up and up vanishing out of the top of the frame.  The cabaret's performance floor is a hundred-yard long glistening surface poised between various Babylonian ziggurats and towers.  The sets are all spectacular but so huge that they dwarf the performers and leach the drama out of events occurring between these cyclopean towers -- with the crane camera zooming up and down, the dance sequences, in particular, seem similar to the completely misbegotten dance scenes on the Babylonian wall set in Griffith's Intolerance:  tiny figures vamp and hop up and down under enormous ramparts.  The dialogue sequences are truly awful.  The characters speak in stilted phrases and everyone seems anesthetized and half asleep.  The detective in particular talks in a weird singsong chant that makes every insinuating remark seem like a question.  People say things like "I'm no prude.  I'm for light wines and beer" or this bizarre encouragement to the chorus-girls:  "Hey, hey kids! Cut 'em deep and let it bleed."  The editing makes no sense and there's no overlap in sound -- when there's a cut from a musical number to dialogue, the sound of the music suddenly clicks off and the speeches begin muffled and dead as if broadcast from inside some subterranean chamber.  The musical interludes are filmed from way too far away to make any sense and they are grotesque in any event:  the hero dresses like a little boy in short pants and carries a massive sucker; in some scenes, the chorus girls wear towering helmets shaped like skyscrapers and strange stiff skirts also decorated with miniature city skylines.  People walk stiffly as if with ramrods up their asses.  Backstage where the girls dress and undress, the curtain is decorated with a huge staring eye.  The imagery makes no sense on any level at all.  There are curiously modern touches -- in one scene a woman badgers a telephone switchboard operator, her words superimposed in the manner of Robert Altman's sound design, over other unrelated dialogue.  The sequences that rely on dialogue are very long, static, and tedious.  

The film exhibits a remarkable characteristic of very early talking pictures.  Fejos was a very accomplished director with an eloquent camera style.  But the talking picture form seems to have completely demolished his self-confidence.  The need to make the picture tell a story with a dialogue seems to have utterly destabilized the film's mise-en-scene.  Not only do the dialogue sequences fail, even the visual flourishes seem oddly haphazard and lackluster.  It's as if Fejos has, more or less, forgotten how to make a movie -- even the purely pictorial scenes are edited poorly and ruined by the grandiosity of the sets.  This is unfortunate because there are some bravura sequences before the opening credits:  the camera is poised over Times Square, a million neon lights are flashing and blinking.  Then, we see a strange model of the area, a miniature complete with streetcars and tiny brightly liet marquees.  A giant strides through this miniature city a little like Godzilla on a rampage -- in a superimposed close-up, we see the giant cackling obscenely.  Who knows what this means?  But it's an impressive way to begin a movie.