Merry-Go-Round of 1938

Fay Helm is killed by a fall from the stage. She has time to conjure her vaudeville pals to look after her infant daughter. Sometime later, the girl is grown into Joy Hodges, who's singing with a band. She has fallen in love with John 'Dusty" King, and he with her. The problem is her aunt, Alice Brady, objects to show people, and she's in charge of his considerable fortune. So Bert Lahr, Jimmy Savo, Mischa Auer, and Billy House all rally along to swindle the old girl into thinking everything's ok with Miss Hodges.

As you might expect with that group of people, they start out loud, get louder, and then Lahr ups the volume and the others have to mug it up even more to not vanish from the picture. Irving Cummings' ability to direct anything seems to vanish under this group, and editors Ted J. Kent and Charles Maynard don't give us a break between Lahr performing his signature "Song of the Woodman" and his getting into a wrestling ring. We also get to see Savo performing his signature piece, "River, Stay 'Way From My Door". Other than that, the audience's exhaustion overwhelms these pleasures.

During Hollywood's golden era, several of the major studios tried to offer a splashy musical comedy that went through annual editions. MGM had 'Broadway Melody of (insert year)'. Paramount had 'The Big Broadcast of (insert year)'. Warners had 'Gold Diggers of (insert year)'. Typically, the date in the title was the year AFTER the film was released, so that the movie could remain in distribution for an entire year and still seem up-to-date.

'Merry-Go-Round of 1938' looks and sounds suspiciously like Universal Studios' attempt to get in on this franchise ... except that there was no sequel for 1939 nor any subsequent year.

The most notable thing about this movie is its two top-billed actors. Bert Lahr plays a rare starring role here, as a vaudevillain clearly based on himself. Second-billed is Jimmy Savo, a wistful little comedian (subclass Norman Wisdom) who was briefly a star on Broadway but made very few films. This is probably Savo's best screen performance, yet the director seems to be deliberately cheating him. Savo had a pleasant singing voice: here, when he warbles a lullaby to an orphaned baby, his face is turned away from the camera to create the (false) impression that Savo's singing voice is dubbed. In a later sequence, Savo does a spirited eccentric dance ... but the camera is so far away from him that the effect is diluted.

Get this plot, now. Lahr, Savo, Mischa Auer and Billy House are the Grand Street Comedy Four, a vaude act who (in 1918) play the same bill as aerialist Dainty Doris. Conveniently, Doris has just fallen off her trapeze: she survives just long enough to make the four comedians promise to raise her baby daughter Sally.

A few years later, the Comedy Four have got themselves booked in the Palace ... but, before they can play the date, their big break is lost when little Sally gives them all the mumps.

Fade to 1938, and some half-hearted attempts to make the four lead actors look older with makeup. 20-year-old Sally is now a vivacious young vocalist, who has got herself engaged to handsome society scion Tony Townsend. This is one of those annoying films in which there aren't any real problems, so the scriptwriter has got to throw phony obstacles in the characters' paths. Tony and Sally want to get married, but she hasn't the heart to leave her four 'fathers', who are skint and will presumably starve without her. Fair enough, except that wealthy Tony offers to take care of them. Fair enough, except that the Comedy Four have their 'pride' and won't accept 'charity'. Why not consider it as compensation for taking care of an orphan who wasn't their responsibility?

Then we need an obstacle to the romance, so Sally visits Tony unexpectedly and finds some over-sized and unfashionable female clothes that look like they belong to Margaret Dumont ... so, without giving him a chance to explain, she assumes that Tony's seeing another woman and she storms out. Oh, and Tony's aunt Hortense won't approve of the marriage if she finds out that Sally is a (gasp!) entertainer. So what?

Those female clothes are part of the drag act of Billy House, a man of huge girth and microscopic acting talent. For implausible reasons, he masquerades as an aristocratic Englishwoman to call on Aunt Hortense. Their scenes together are excruciating: actress Alice Brady (as Hortense) borrows Billie Burke's twee mannerisms, and she actually comes off here as an even phonier female impersonator than House does. American actor Billy House's phony British accent is half-acceptable, which makes me wonder why he didn't attempt an English accent in the movie 'Bedlam', in which he played a genuine Englishman. After House finishes impersonating an Englishwoman, he utters some of that de-rigueur dialogue about how it 'sure feels good' to get back into male clothing (so we won't get any -- ahem! -- ideas about him). House is the least talented of the four lead actors in this movie, yet he plays the leader of their vaude act.

Mischa Auer is his usual sourpuss self here, but bereft of his moustache and looking handsomer than usual. He spends the final third of the film in Gunga Din drag and body paint as a fake fakir, with Savo as his 'swami-ette'. Oddly, Auer's character has the *genuine* ability to levitate Lahr: a bizarre intrusion of the paranormal into a script which is otherwise all too earthbound.

The high point of this film is when Lahr performs 'The Song of the Woodman'. Lahr had enacted this skit in a Broadway revue; it was one of his most popular set pieces, and this movie happily preserves Lahr's big comedy song on celluloid. Unfortunately, very little else in this movie is worth watching.

I never fault a film for having a low production budget, but I'm always annoyed when film makers who know they're lumbered with a low budget obstinately go ahead with a plot about life among the millionaires ... knowing full well they haven't the dosh to depict it properly. Aunt Hortense and her phony-baloney cronies are meant to be the upper crust, but the depictions of her mansion and other 'wealthy' locales in this movie are laughable.

There are some oddities in the credits. IMDb says that Fay Helm is uncredited for her brief role as the doomed aerialist: in fact, she IS billed. But the credits also list actor Charles Williams as Hollywood producer Dave Clark: that character is mentioned in the dialogue but never seen. Nor does Hattie McDaniel (listed here as a maid) show up, either. I suspect that scenes were written for these characters, but 'Merry-Go-Round of 1938' ran out of money before they were filmed. Maybe it's a good thing there was no 'Merry-Go-Round of 1939'.

The golden moments are supplied by two comic geniuses from Broadway. Bert Lahr bellows and burlesks concert singers in "Song of the Woodman," and elfin clown, Jimmy Savo--whom Charlie Chaplin called the greatest pantomimist of his time--sings as he tries to hold back the flood in one of his signature numbers, "River Stay 'Way from My Door;" In another spot, Savo's engaging crab-like dance is reduced to a few seconds on film to make way for leading lady Joy Hodges who didn't belong in movies (or on the stage or anywhere else in show business). Hodges' deadening performance is not the film's only near-fatal flaw: there is the script blamed on Monte Brice, Henry Myers and A. Dorian Otvos---so hackneyed that one wondered if it were meant to be a spoof. Irving Cummings' direction (if he indeed were on the set) does nothing to cover up a poor script, and cinematography by Joseph A. Valentine undermines most of the comic moments. Other than Joy Hodges, the cast includes some of the best supporting comedians in Hollywood: Alice Brady, Mischa Auer, Louise Fazenda, Richard Carle, Hattie McDaniel, Dave Apollon and James C. Morton. There are three excellent reasons to see this film: Jimmy Savo, Alice Brady and Bert Lahr. Alice Brady, a fine dramatic actor as well as a comedian, turns her dialogue into hilarious operatic arias. Bert Lahr, seldom seen to advantage in films--most notably excepting his Cowardly Lion in the Wizard of Oz, shows his stage style that made him the darling of Broadway critics. Jimmy Savo, a very gentle, unusual comedian, requires several viewings for modern audiences used to bombast and insult comedy. Watching these masters is a must for budding comedians and clowns. But this is a difficult movie to locate. Petition TCM to schedule it. -- Frank Cullen, American Vaudeville Museum and Vaudeville Times quarterly

The script is a hoary show biz tale: a mother dies and leaves her baby in the care of a quartet of fellow performers. Two of them are Jimmy Savo, who provides one of the two top turns in the film, his famous "River Stay 'Way from My Door" routine. Savo's eccentric dancing earlier in the film is reduced to a few seconds to make room for a lucklustre singer. The second highlight is "The Song of the Woodsman", one of Bert Lahr's best routines. The third great comedian in the film is Alice Brady, one of Broadway's and Hollywood's most underrated actors. She dithers like Billie Burke, but in a few other films is a straight actor of considerable power, Stanwyck or Davis. Mischa Auer and Billy House are both in fine form, and they, Savo and Lahr play the four stepfathers. Louise Fazenda, Hattie McDaniel and veteran Richard Carle are underused, but Dave Apollon does his thing for his fans. The director, Irving Cummings was a Grade C hack who rushed through 76 movies in 29 years years, screwing up films starring comedians Groucho Marx, the Wiere Brothers and in this, Lahr and Savo. Cummings even made Spencer Tracy look bad in two of Tracy's worst films. This could have been a '8' out of a '10' movie, but the script, the pacing and the look take it down a few stars to a '5'. It seems (I have a 16mm copy) as though Unversal only allowed the production two cameras and three lights. Yet this film is a must for comedy buffs and students who wish to see two of Broadways great and most unusual comedians, Savo and Lahr, do their specialties and try to be funny when there is little to make amusing. Joy Hodges, the grown-up orphaned baby, is an awkward and lifeless presence in the film. Every minute she is on stage the energy and believability level drops below zero.