Spring Is Here

SPRING IS HERE is a charming curio that is a bit more fascinating than it is good entertainment but it's that too. This is one of the first movie musicals to have been a film version of a Broadway musical, an early semi-success for Richard Rodgers and Lorenzo Hart. The most interesting thing to me is that while the songs are quite nice (though they are mostly indistinguishable love songs, with the notable exception of the outstanding classic "With a Song in My Heart"), the "book" (story) is the highpoint, thanks to lots of really funny wisecracks and some racy "adult" situations that are quintessential late 1920s/early 1930s Manhattan humor.

Coquette Bernice Claire sneaks back home at 5 am, having abandoned both the party she attended and her longtime dullish boyfriend Alexander Gray after meeting the jazzier Lawrence Gray there. Father Ford Sterling is outraged at this new "beau", a stranger who would keep his daughter out all night and tries to push her bland boyfriend into marrying her. Bernice however will have none of it with a new man to consider. Her "kid" sister Inez Courtney (allegedly 16 and, as has been mentioned, looking quite into adulthood) has sympathy for Alexander and tells him the way to get her back is to become a romantic cad and flirt with other women. That night at the family's party, Alexander reluctantly follows this advice and kisses and flirts with practically every woman at the party (including, most outrageously, Bernice's bird-brained mom Louise Fazenda). He does manages to invoke Bernice's jealousy but then Lawrence shows up and manages to still hold her attention.

This little movie (barely over an hour) is cute little musical but it's certainly imperfect and while an "early" musical, it was not one of the first ones (movie musicals had been around already for a year in 1930) for some of it's flaws to be dismissed. Most annoying is the movie is almost completely filmed as if it were a stage musical, with performers usually facing toward the camera rather than toward each other in love songs!! Lawrence Gray gets top billing here apparently because he had the most film experience of the young leads (including the male lead in lone Duncan Sisters feature musical, IT'S A GREAT LIFE) but his part is decidedly secondary to Alexander Gray and Bernice Claire's and he is rather miscast as a "fascinating" stranger, if anything he's duller than Alexander. Alexander Gray looks a lot like contemporary actor Aidan Quinn with a touch of James Cagney. He's better looking than his rival and gives a good performance as the bashful beau, alas while his singing is good he unfortunately twists his mouth into strange shapes while singing which is quite distracting. Bernice Claire has a lovely voice but her character is kind of a brat which is a mistake for a romantic lead I don't think Rodgers & Hart ever repeated again. Veteran comedienne Louise Fazenda spouts her lines with an affected ring perhaps to suggest simple-mindedness and it does get to be a bit much at time.

The movie is stolen by silent comic sidekick Ford Sterling as the patriarch of this family of femmes, he's hilarious and much more appealing in the type of put-up middle-aged man that Edgar Kennedy would play in scores of movies. Sterling is so terrific in this it should have led to a major career as a supporting character actor in talkies. SPRING IS HERE is no classic but absolutely worth checking out for fans of the art deco era, movie musicals, Rodgers & Hart, and silent-era comedians and holds up as entertainment a little better than most musicals from 1929-1931 despite it's imperfections.

Early musical about fickle Betty of the Long Island "fashionable set", the kind who seem to mostly go around with tennis rackets and ukuleles gripped in their hands. She stays out 'til five in the morning "riding" with a new fellow (leaving her regular beau high and dry at the dance) - so her grump of a dad decides he needs to put a stop to that kind of stuff and "get her a good husband". Well, when the regular fellow, Terry, shows up next morning, dad practically proposes himself - but Betty won't marry Terry. Terry IS in love, so - given the push by Betty's little 16-year-old sister (who looked to me about 35), he decides to spark Betty's jealousy by flirting with other women. And boy does he - including giving a passionate kiss to Betty's mom!

This film is pretty silly, though has moments - such as the dad spouts a number of pretty good one-liners and there is a little bit of pre-code naughtiness too. The whole film comes across as a little stiff and stage play like - it includes characters bursting into song here and there, most of which are fairly mediocre, though I thought a few of the numbers were kind of catchy. The lead actors in this are not very memorable (though, at least, they sing well) - the most interesting characters are actually the girl's parents, quite amusingly portrayed by Ford Sterling and Louise Fazenda - the mom is depicted as very dizzy (reminded me of Gracie Allen). Betty turns into a "yes dear" baby talker kind of gal in the end, oh well. Fun, light entertainment.

SPRING IS HERE is a breezy, yet undistinguished early sound musical. A hit on Broadway, it suffers from the overproduction of musicals at the time (meaning it received no special consideration during its making) and from a director who brings no visual flair to the medium. What we're left with are pleasant performers and pleasant, if not memorable, tunes. The standout performance here is given by Louise Fazenda, a ubiquitous figure in these early sound musicals made at Warners. Her portrayal of a character who is simultaneously embarrassed and titillated at the innuendo surrounding her is delightful and captures the necessarily frivolous tone needed in such a piece. Incidentally, Fazenda was the first in the sound era to portray the dumb blonde, an archetype that still pleases to this day.

SPRING IS HERE (First National Pictures, 1930), produced and directed by John Francis Dillon, is a surprisingly entertaining early sound musical comedy taken from the story by Owen Davis Jr., and stage musical by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, who also composed the songs. Though headed by two Gray actors, Lawrence and Alexander (no relation), the plot very well belongs to the third billed Bernice Claire, a talented young singer in her day with few film credits to her name. Most noted for her screen pairing with Alexander Gray, a baritone singer, in both feature-length (1929-30) and later 20-minute musical short subjects (1934), SPRING IS HERE, their second collaboration, is believed to be their only surviving musical feature film.

Opening title: "The Peter Bealey Home on Long Island's fashionable North Shore - a morning in June." The domestic comedy set to song interludes revolves around Betty Bealey (Bernice Claire), a free-spirited young lady whose father, Peter (Ford Sterling), disapproves of her being out all night and sleeping in all day. After returning home at 5 a.m., Peter draws the line of his daughter's carefree activities. Aside from coping with his younger daughter, Mary Jane (Inez Courtney), and her courtship with Stacey Hayden (Frank Albertson), along with his ditsy but squeaky speaking wife, Emily (Louise Fazenda), Peter disapproves of Betty's latest beau, Steve Alden (Lawrence Gray), whom she's only known a short time. Hoping she'd settle down and get married, Peter tries his best to encourage Betty into marrying Terry Clayton (Alexander Gray), a clumsy but shy young man with some sense, unaware that Steve who comes from a wealthy family.

Through its brief 68 minutes, SPRING IS HERE contains enough songs for a 90 minute feature, including that of: "Spring is Here" (sung by Frank Albertson and Inez Courtney); "Yours Sincerely" (sung by Alexander Gray and Bernice Claire); "Bad Baby" (sung by Inez Courtney); "Crying for the Carolines" (sung by The Brox Sisters during party sequence); "With a Song in My Heart" (sung by Lawrence Gray and Bernice Claire); "Having a Little Faith in Me" (sung by Alexander Gray); "How Shall I Tell?" (sung by Bernice Claire/ written by Sam Lewis, Joe Young and Harry Warren); "What's the Big Idea?" (sung by Inez Courtney and Frank Albertson); and "With a Song in My Heart" (sung by Gray and Claire). Of the selection of songs, many which are quite good if not everlasting to memory. Only "With a Song in My Heart" is the most familiar, considering how it's been immortalized in the musical biography, WITH A SONG IN MY HEART (20th Century-Fox, 1952) starring Susan Hayward as famed singer, Jane Froman.

While the other Gray-Claire screen collaborations of NO, NO NANETTE (1929) and SONG OF THE FLAME (1930) have been lost to revivals, SPRING IS HERE, survived intact, giving film buffs some basic idea of their work and on-screen chemistry. Other than noting how Claire wears two different hairstyles at once (hair covering the left side of her face and hair combed back on her right side, exposing both face and ear), it's also easy for anyone who missed seeing Claire's name in the opening credits, to somehow mistake her for a youthful, dark-haired Penny Singleton (then performing under her real name of Dorothy McNulty), the same Singleton years before her acclaim in the long-running "Blondie" movie series (1938-1950) for Columbia. Claire also quotes one interesting line worth noting, "A woman is as strong as her weakest moment." As for Alexander Gray, it's worth mentioning how his talking manner and singing differ, from mildly speaking to rich baritone voice. It's a wonder how much further the careers of Gray and Claire might have gone had musicals not fallen out of favor for public acceptance by the end of 1930.

Aside from some surprisingly risqué dialog and funny nifty comebacks during moments of comedy, there's also some very amusing scenes provided by the frustrated Ford Sterling and scatterbrained Louise Fazenda, former comics of silent comedy shorts whose characters here seem to precede that of Archie and Edith Bunker from the classic "All in the Family" TV series of the seventies. There's also Inez Courtney giving a sassy performance for comedy relief so reminiscent to the then notable Warner Brothers comedienne of Winnie Lightner. Other members of the cast include Natalie Moorehead as Rita Conway, and Gretchen Thomas as Maude, among others.

SPRING IS HERE, while no masterpiece, gets by on both comedy and sometimes corny musical interludes. Let's not overlook the legendary "With a Song in My Heart" (which is scored during the opening credits) which highlights the film. Regardless of its age, this musical antique is a worthy rediscovery and something to consider whenever it turns up on the Turner Classic Movies cable channel. Spring is here. (**1/2)

This is seems to me to be a very true adaptation of a Broadway musical of the late 20s, filmed in quite a static way with the characters lined across the screen playing it exactly as if they were also across the stage bellowing lines into each other's faces so the back row could hear it. Given this performance is for a film it seems nobody thought to re direct it for a cinema audience who could hear every word courtesy of fantastic chunky Vitaphone gramophone sound. There is no doubt the dippy parents and flapper daughters play it well to the audience who even might have been expecting a play on film. SPRING IS HERE is quite funny, very stage bound and completely what we expect 80 years later: stodgy comedy, vaudeville mugging wonderful Rogers and Hart music all flattened into the technical aspects of the time. This film is a curiosity piece really, and would irritate your friends who do not understand that it is the restrictions of the medium of the time that makes a film like this attractive to those who love 1920s sound films. Beautiful clothes and sets add to the fun; but do not inflict this film on anyone not familiar with the time tone and tinniness. Maybe play the scenes of just the songs, as they are terrific. No wonder the talkies took off, but you can also see why depression audiences soon tired of songs being yelled at them.