Follow Your Heart

A dull, lifeless operetta type of film starring the charisma free Marion Talley. Concerns a musical family and just goes nowhere. Nigel Bruce is 3rd billed as Henri Forrester but even he can't save matters and as the pater familias of the family he unfortunately gives one of his less interesting performances.

On a plantation outside Louisville resides a family straight out of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU: singers, dancers, a boy who plays the English horn, played by some fine B-ranked movie comics like Nigel Bruce, Luis Alberni and Walter Catlett. They're also improvident except for Marion Talley, who wants to get them settled so she can go off and get married. Eventually they decide the way out of their financial hole is to put on a show.

Marion Tally was a star at the Metropolitan Opera and this was her first and only feature; she had appeared in a couple of Vitagraph shorts at the dawn of sound, and Nat Levine decided that MGM was doing well with operetta, so why not take a crack at it for Republic? The music is good. After singing arias and duets from actual operas, they had Victor Schertzinger write some tunes for the show within a show, had Hugo Riesenfeld supervise the music and hired Larry Ceballos to choreograph; nothing particularly novel, but well done.

Miss Tally turns out to be a good actress, besides being a great singer. The jokes are lively and amusing, until the last twenty minutes, when they switch to the show, which is big and florid, and no one but MGM seemed to be able to put over an operetta in this period. Still, there's real talent involved at every level -- except for Ben Blue -- so what starts out as a very good movie declines towards the end.... to satisfactory. Unless you're a fan of operetta. If you are, I expect you'll enjoy it all the way through.

Marion Talley was a star of the NY Metropolitan Opera. In this, her only film, she plays the sort of role which would soon become associated with Deanna Durbin, 15 years her junior. The leading man is Michael Bartlett, an operatic tenor not dissimilar to Allan Jones in voice, appearance, and style. Like Durbin and Jones, they present serious vocal music in a pleasantly popular format.

A light-hearted mood is sustained by a supporting cast of reliable comic actors including Nigel Bruce as a bumbling voice coach, Josephine Whittell as his tone deaf pupil, Luis Alberni as an excitable composer/conductor, and Walter Catlett as an over enthusiastic impresario. Ben Blue provides the physical comedy.

For the first 45 minutes the film romps along at a merry pace, in a style reminiscent of "Love Me Tonight" (even down to a hunting scene in which the hero saves the quarry from the hounds). Then the family decides to "put the show on right here." They demolish the barn to furnish seating for the audience, planning to stage the show on the porch, and one begins to hope that this might be an intentional parody of the sub-genre that Mickey and Judy would later make their own. Alas, all originality ends there, and the last half hour of the film drags as we are regaled with large parts of the performance. There are romantic duets by the two leads, a crinoline-clad corps de ballet led by an undistinguished prima ballerina, a comical pas de deux by Ben Blue with an uncredited partner, and the Hal Johnson Choir led by Clarence Muse accompanying an incongruous tap-dance by Eunice Healy in a costume surely intended for Daisy Mae in Li'l Abner. (In the 1930 Broadway production of "Girl Crazy" Miss Healy had been billed 6th in a cast which listed Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers in 13th and 17th positions. After appearing in three Hollywood movies she returned to the musical stage, as a performer and later as a producer.) The unbelievably lavish production is greatly aided by the fact that the lawn between the old barn and the porch transforms itself effortlessly into a rotating stage with a mirror surface. No explanation is offered for this miracle, but when the company proposes to go on the road despite having no theatres to play in, their manager explains that "there's a house like this outside every city from Richmond to Memphis."

In 1936 Hollywood was still experimenting with formulae for musical films. Warner Brothers favoured backstage plots, RKO provided escapist musical comedies for Astaire and Rogers, while Paramount and MGM presented regular musical revues in their "Big Broadcast" and "Broadway Melody" series. It would have been better if Republic had stuck to a single style for this film, preferably the one they started with. Instead they hedged their bets by trying a bit of everything, with unfortunate results. Still, the first hour of the film is worth the viewing.

The life of Marian Talley is an odd one...and hard to understand. She was, for four years, a star with the Metropolitan Opera. And, unexpectedly, she quit to make movies. She made "Follow Your Heart" and then disappeared from the public! While I have no idea why she quit the opera, I can easily understand why she gave up on movies after seeing her in this film! Yes...she was that bad...with no charisma and about as appealing when she's not singing as a tomato....and an untalented tomato at that.

The story finds Marion (Marion Talley) living with her ne'er-do-well family. All but Marion are musicians of some sort and apart from her sister who has achieved success (though she spends more than she makes), the rest are barely scraping by and are anything but successes. One day, her uncle brings his out of work opera company to stay at their empty mansion....and the lead tenor (Michael Bartlett) discovers that Marion has an amazing voice. He wants her to become a professional but Marion has seen how her family has lived....and she wants a normal life...as does her boring fiance. But you know according to movie formula that by the end of the film she'll be in love with Michael AND she'll be a singing success.

I have been to seven operas and while I am far from being an expert, I do know that much of the singing in the film was painful to hear. Oddly, Michael Bartlett as best I can tell was not a professional opera singer...and he seemed to have a very pleasant and capable voice. Talley was okay...but often sang in such a high voice I can only assume dogs were her intended audience. As for the rest of the singers...they were pretty painful...as was Talley's acting. Overall, a film that is VERY hard to take...and I cannot imagine opera fans liking much of the singing and non-opera fans wouldn't enjoy any of this. Overall, not an enjoyable film and ample proof that Talley was no actress. Perhaps over time she could have evolved into one, but here she just isn't enough to carry the film.

What on earth got into Hollywood? To bring opera to small town America during the Depression seems more generous than producers generally are. This tongue in cheek melodrama had moments of transcendence that must have had 1936 moviegoers in awe. Talley's voice was lovely even filtered as it was by primitive recording equipment and the music selection truly beautiful.