The Great American Broadcast

Archie Mayo and the writers took a stock project (a show biz musical) and made it special. The plot line about the beginnings of radio doesn't get lost in the welter of specialty numbers nor does the love story intrude too much in the fun. We even get a sense of what it was like when radio was expanding from a hobbyist's pursuit to a a mass market entertainment industry. The cast is nearly top notch all around but the Wiere Brothers are a marvel, providing the best turn in the film despite competition from the Nicholas Brothers, the Ink Spots and the always professional and often underrated John Payne, Alice Faye and Jack Oakie. Payne was usually justified in sleepwalking through the roles Fox saddled him with, but in this outing he shows what he can do with a congenial plot, director and co-stars. The primary reason for watching this film is to see the Wiere Brothers at their antic best. They were a deft and whimsical European comedy trio--comedians, instrumentalists, dancers and jugglers--with a long lineage in Continental circus, ballet and opera, and their style may be baffling to tastes weened on hit-them-over-the-head roughhouse comedy. Nothing wrong with roughhouse, but the Wieres offer something gently different.

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.

For those of us lucky enough to see Turner Classic Movies library of great MGM, Warners and RKO pictures, it comes as a letdown to see comparable 20th Century Fox pictures done with such juvenile plots--and there were many.

The Great American Broadcast is worthwhile to see gorgeous Alice Faye (about the time she married Phil Harris), hear her great songs, see the incomparable Ink Spots, Weire Brothers and Nicholas Brothers! Also performing well in restrained character for a change is Jack Oakie.

The backdrop of early radio is interesting, but the plot was so bad I had to turn away for a while--like broadcasting from a building rooftop from a tent in a thunderstorm(early AM low power radio would never reach far with all that lightning and static), also preposterous that John Payne would leave his beautiful new bride Alice Faye and run away to south america....only to have Jack Oakie beat him up to get him to look at her in the end....ha!!

Thanks to the Fox Classic Movie Channel for providing a beautiful print, enjoy it just the same.

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.

You know those Fox musicals: dreary plots, dragged-out playing times, benumbed direction, uninteresting photography, excruciatingly familiar casts, undistinguished or antiquated old-fave scores. This one, with less production values than usual, actually has a fun if unremarkable plot, pretending to be about the history of radio, but really just an excuse to let its stars do what they do best: Alice Faye to sing in her throaty, comforting contralto, John Payne to look handsome (he also warbles a bit, and not badly), Jack Oakie to clown (less annoyingly than usual). Mack Gordon and Harry Warren wrote many gorgeous ballads; here the keeper is "Long Ago Last Night," and it's a corker. It moves fast--positively at a gallop, by Fox standards--and though there are anachronisms everywhere, in the costumes and the dialog and the sets, this time you don't mind. A very entertaining, unpretentious Fox musical.