The Great American Broadcast

Remember Hollywood Cavalcade, the film that showed a tumultuous relationship between Alice Faye and Don Ameche during the transition from silent to talking pictures? If you liked that movie, you'll want to give The Great American Broadcast a chance. It stars Alice Faye and John Payne, so you know there'll be some songs sung by beautiful voices, and it shows their tumultuous relationship during the advent of the radio.

This isn't the best movie in the world, but it is certainly entertaining. There are two good-looking, talented people in the lead roles, and even though Alice gets to sing much more than John does, you still get to hear his singing voice, something he didn't get to show off in his movies very often. Oftentimes, either the romance or the actual plot overshadows the other, but in this movie, both are equally interesting. John is torn between his love for Alice and his desire to explore the power of radio broadcasting, and his pal Jack Oakie provides plenty of support. There are by far more movies made about early Hollywood than early radio, so if you're interested in that part of our history and culture, you can watch this extremely sugar-coated version while basking in a melodramatic romance and listening to lots of songs. And as a bonus, you'll get to see the Nicholas Brothers dance!

While it is almost impossible to bypass the beauty of Alice Faye, I wish to mention that the plot of this cute fluff pic contains an interesting idea: hook up radio stations in a coast-to-coast network via the telephone. One hears so many arguments (political and otherwise) about "Who Invented the Internet?" It's easy to forget our honorable ancestors in the early days of Radio (when that name drew enough awe to have SciFi and even strange Westerns use it as a buzzword). The idea of telephone hookups apparently gave audiences a thrill.

The Great American Broadcast marks the first of four films that Alice Faye teamed with John Payne at 20th Century Fox. It has long been a contention of mine that Payne was signed by Darryl Zanuck because he looked a whole lot like Tyrone Power and could sing and thus carry his end of musical films with Alice, Betty Grable, June Haver, etc. Funny thing is when he left Fox, Payne abruptly stopped doing musicals and concentrated on all kinds of other films. He never sang a note on screen after 1946.

Putting it mildly this is not the history of the origin of commercial broadcast radio. Still it's a pleasant 90 minutes or so of musical entertainment with Alice Faye, John Payne, Jack Oakie, the Ink Spots, the Wiere Brothers, and the tap dancing Nicholas Brothers. I won't even quibble about how one enjoyed the Nicholas Brothers tap dance on radio.

In 1919 flier John Payne, radio electrician Jack Oakie, saloon singer Alice Faye, and millionaire Cesar Romero essentially all team up to launch commercial radio. If you're wondering what Payne's specialty and what he brought to the table, he was the promoter of the bunch, a role he would repeat in Tin Pan Alley and Hello Frisco Hello also with Faye and Oakie. Alice has all three of these guys panting for her, but her heart belongs to Payne even though he's a bit of fathead and doesn't appreciate what he has.

Harry Warren and Mack Gordon wrote the songs for The Great American Broadcast, the best of which is I Take To You which should have done a whole lot better in record sales. Oakie has a very funny bit trying to fake an operatic tenor during an early broadcast.

The event which launches the quartet in the broadcasting business was the famous Jess Willard-Jack Dempsey heavyweight championship fight and director Archie Mayo did a very good job integrating newsreel footage of the fight with the cast. In the opening montage you'll also see a whole lot of radio personalities who were big in 1940.

As Alice Faye is one of my real favorites I'm prejudiced, but The Great American Broadcast holds up very well after over 70 years even if it isn't the history of radio.

Alice Faye, John Payne, Jack Oakie, and Cesar Romero are part of "The Great American Broadcast," a 1941 20th Century Fox musical about the beginning of radio broadcasting. It's complete fiction, of course, but peppered with some wonderful singing by Faye and the Ink Spots, magnificent dancing by the Nicholas Brothers, and some good comedy bits by the Wiere Brothers.

Payne and Oakie play partners in a radio venture, financed by Romero. They're both in love with the pretty Faye. You've seen this plot a million times.

This is worth seeing for the cast. Romero is very elegant as the money man, Chuck, Payne is handsome and sings well, and Oakie is extremely likable. Besides the specialty numbers, there is footage of the Dempsey-Willard fight in 1919.

The older folks will especially love this one.

Even back in the early 1940s when MGM was dazzling the world with their spectacular Technicolor musicals, Twentieth Century Fox under Daryl Zanuck's direction was still turning out modest B&W musicals like this one about the early days of radio. No breath-taking dance numbers but lots of pretty if ultimately forgettable songs by Mack Gordon and Harry Warren, enjoyable specialty numbers by the Ink Spots and the incomparable Nicholas Brothers (as railroad porters!); and even a parody radio commercial sung with German accents by those madcap expatriates from the Berlin cabarets, the Wiere Brothers (the poor man's Ritz Bros.) The fast-moving plot is expertly directed by the usually lethargic Archie Mayo with lots of gags and even a bit of pathos from Jack Oakie, and enough romance between handsome John Payne and adorable Alice Faye to keep the girls in the audience happy. Fans of big studio high-style glamor cinematography will enjoy the gorgeous close-ups of Alice Faye lit by J.P. Marley and Leon Shamroy. Mike Frankovitch, who was one day to become president of Columbia Pictures, can be seen briefly as a radio announcer.