Dangerous Nan McGrew

Singer Helen Kane is best remembered today as the flesh-and-blood prototype for Betty Boop: she was cute, petite, and plump, a brunette with short curly hair and a stray spit-curl bang or two dangling over her eyes. She sang in a nasal, girlish falsetto, punctuated with her familiar Boop-Boop-a-Doops, and spoke with a pronounced New Yawk accent. Kane first attracted attention when she appeared in a 1927 Broadway show called "A Night in Spain," and soon became a popular recording artist. She captured the spirit of her era, the giddy pinnacle of the Roaring Twenties, and in her songs embodied the good-hearted, semi-innocent flapper. Kane's rise to prominence happened to coincide with the birth of the talkies, and she was quickly signed to appear before the cameras in musical shorts and featured roles in such early musicals as Sweetie and Pointed Heels.

I enjoy Kane's recordings, including her signature song "I Wanna Be Loved by You," the risqué "He's So Unusual," and the amusing specialty number "Dangerous Nan McGrew." This last-named tune provided the title for the feature film that proved to be Helen's one-and-only feature length starring vehicle, made for Paramount and produced in 1930 at their Astoria Studio in Queens, NY. Although I've long been aware that this film is generally held in low esteem by buffs (which is putting it mildly), I was curious about it, and approached it with an open mind and low expectations, hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Sad to say, Dangerous Nan McGrew's reputation is well earned. It's a misfire, but I don't blame Helen Kane or her estimable supporting players. The film's problems include a weak script, uninspired direction, and the miscasting of a key role.

Helen plays Nan McGrew, who is teamed with "Doc" Foster (Victor Moore) in a two-person medicine show. They've got a horse-drawn wagon, and they're traveling through the snowy regions of Canada. Doc peddles elixir, while Nan sings and performs an Annie Oakley-style shooting routine. Business is poor. When Nan learns that a dangerous killer is on the loose, with a $10,000 bounty on his head, she decides to capture the scoundrel, collect the reward, and upgrade the ragtag medicine show she shares with Foster by trading in their horse for an automobile. That's the gist of the plot, and it's a perfectly serviceable premise. A central problem, however, is that the fugitive is played by -- get this -- Frank Morgan, ridiculously miscast as a tough-talking roughneck. I've always admired Morgan, and have seen him in many varied roles, and know that he was more versatile than people tend to assume, but casting him as a ruthless killer, even in a lightweight musical comedy, is just silly. His performance suggests that he was aware of this incongruity, so he settled on a gruff, over-the-top delivery suitable to the villain in a children's pageant. When Morgan barks lines such as "Listen you, shut up, before I rip ya limb from limb!" you just have to wonder how the other actors kept from cracking up on camera. Sure is a long way from the Emerald City.

There's nothing wrong with Helen Kane's performance, except that her phrasing is hard to understand at times. Admittedly, a little of her act goes a long way. While I know that her style is not for all tastes, I do like her rendition of "I Owe You," her character's love theme. The script defeats everyone else. Victor Moore does what he can with his material, but the laughs are sparse. I've never been a fan of Stu Erwin, and his performance as Helen's dim-witted love interest did nothing to change my mind about him. Director Malcolm St. Clair, whose work was often impressive in the silent era, seemed to be no more excited by this project than the actors; his staging is perfunctory throughout, and the pace is woefully slow much of the time, even by early talkie standards. Still, there's one good reason to see this film: at a Christmas party sequence about two-thirds of the way in, Helen performs the title tune with her characteristic verve, and for a few minutes the movie comes to life. If you were to encounter that sequence excerpted alone, you might think this a movie worth tracking down. But unfortunately, once you've seen that number, you've seen the best that Dangerous Nan McGrew has to offer.

Helen Kane is a person very, very, very few people would remember today. However, as soon as she begins talking in "Dangerous Nan McGrew", you'll likely recognize her as the inspiration for Betty Boop. She looks a lot like Betty but more than that, she sounds EXACTLY like Betty and sings exactly like the cartoon character as well. It's very obvious that the Fleischer Brothers intended their character to be like Ms. Kane--very, very obvious. As a result of this and the silly plot, watching the movie is a lot like watching a full-length Betty Boop cartoon! Kane plays the title character--a combination of Betty Boop and Gracie Allen (since Nan is VERY dumb...but sweet). She and her partner (Victor Moore) are traveling the country selling patent medicine. Her job is to sing and put on shooting demonstrations to bring in the customers.

One day, a dangerous murderer (Frank Morgan--playing against type) insinuates himself into their show--vowing to kill the two if they tell anyone. At the same town, a rich but dim-witted nice guy (Stu Erwin) falls head over heels for Nan and invites her to his home to entertain his family's guests on Christmas eve. What's next? See the film.

While I'll admit that "Dangerous Nan McGrew" often seemed to have little plot or direction, Kane was very likable in the lead. She wasn't the sort of actress you'd want to watch again and again, but here she is very likable and sweet. Not a brilliant film but quite enjoyable.

'Dangerous Nan McGrew' stars Helen Kane and Victor Moore, who also teamed at about this time in 'Heads Up' for the same studio. I can't see any real advantage in teaming these two performers; they have no on-screen chemistry with each other, and (due to the age difference) they couldn't even be teamed as a romantic couple. I've already commented about Kane and Moore in my IMDb review of 'Heads Up', to which I'll add just one detail here. In 'Heads Up', Helen Kane played a character named Betty. Anyone who has seen Helen Kane on screen (or heard her recordings) will see straight away that she was the inspiration for the cartoon character Betty Boop; after seeing 'Heads Up', I now believe that Max Fleischer got the name for his cartoon character from Helen Kane's character's name in that film, plus her habit of scat-singing 'boop-oop-a-doop' syllables into her songs.

In her very few films, Helen Kane usually played supporting roles. 'Dangerous Nan McGrew' is, to my knowledge, her only starring vehicle ... and she proves here that she can't carry a feature-length film. Just a few minutes of her 'boop' routine -- and her incredibly annoying speaking voice -- become very wearying. Here, she's a singer (oh, dear!) in a travelling medicine show run by Victor Moore. She also does an Annie Oakley turn. The medicine act ends up in the Yukon, having dodged sheriffs and process-servers in all the more civilised climes. (The film's title is, of course, a parody of Robert W Service's Yukon epic 'Dangerous DAN McGrew'.) The saxophonist in the medical show is Stu Erwin, giving perhaps the most annoying performance of his career.

Up in the Klondike, Kane and Moore cross paths with bank robber Foster, although it's not clear why a bank robber would be up here in the frozen tundra where the only banks are snowbanks (boom, boom!). With frozen assets (ba-dum-bum!). Those jokes are about as bad as the ones in this movie. The bank robber is played by Frank Morgan, who spent the first half of his career playing mean villains and the second half playing whinnying dimwits. He was more credible as mean villains, as he's cast here.

This movie is largely incoherent. We're told that one of the members of the medicine show is a fugitive, on the run from a murder charge, but we're not told (until nearly the end) which one: this is a cheap ploy to inject some suspense. Handsome James Hall shows up in a Mountie uniform, looking for someone to arrest. All these people stranded in the Klondike decide to have an ice carnival(!), the centrepiece of which is a costume party. Helen Kane shows up at the party dressed as a little girl ... and that's where my blood sugar went out of control. In her normal mode, Helen Kane's boop-a-doop antics had her acting very little-girlish, but she was still clearly an adult woman. Here, kitted out as a four-year-old (but still plainly an adult), Kane's little-girl act just becomes unbearable.

Meanwhile, at the same party, tough-guy villain Frank Morgan shows up dressed as Buster Brown, complete with Dutch-boy wig and short trousers. The sight of this particular grown man disguised as a five-year-old boy is bad enough, but the effect is made even more ludicrous because Morgan has kept his moustache. Why (you ask) would this macho villain humiliate himself like this? Well, erm, the plot of the movie involves a robbery in which the henchmen have been told to hand the swag to a guy disguised as Buster Brown. Maybe he didn't want to look conspicuous...

'Dangerous Nan McGrew' is directed by Mal St Clair, a name well-known to aficionados of old-time film comedy ... but not for favourable reasons. St Clair worked with an impressive list of comedians and comic actors, yet he almost invariably directed their very worst films. Mal St Clair doesn't deserve all the blame for the failure of 'Dangerous Nan McGrew', but he certainly deserves some of it. I'll rate this slush fest 2 points out of 10.