Golden Dawn

I recently saw a book on bizarre movies featuring cheap space monsters, Bad Biker Boys, and Bad Babes in Bikinis. That's not bizarre, that's boring! Now Golden Dawn, here's a bizarre movie for you! Prisoners of war in the middle of the African jungle with the natives wanting to do a human sacrifice...and in the middle of it all we have Lupino Lane (bless his soul) doing a happy go-lucky jig. Unlike most cult films, this had a budget, and was expected to be taken as serious film making when it came out.

Believe me, I can see why people would give this a low rating. But if you're into saying "Huh?" and wondering what people were thinking when they were creating something...this is for you.

and one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.

Not intentionally, though.

It's an operetta set at a camp for English prisoners being held by the Germans somewhere in the African jungle. There are dozens of native extras, all of them black actors, whose main function in the story is to prostrate themselves toward whichever white lead happens to be singing in the vicinity.

And yes, all of the lead actors are white, a little awkward since many of them are playing natives of the same tribe as the actually black extras. Their skin tones range from burnt cork (Noah Beery) to snow white (the golden Dawn herself). The plot revolves around whether the obviously white Dawn is really black. I can't tell you how it comes out -- that would be a spoiler.

Dawn's mother, a slightly darker shade of makeup, wears earrings and pearls and sort of resembles Margaret Dumont.

Speaking of whom, the male lead is played by Walter Woolf, who, as Walter Woolf King, plays the villain tenor Rodolfo Lassparri in "A Night At The Opera." When this, uh, dawned on me, I actually shouted out, just like Groucho as Otis B. Driftwood, "Lassparri?!?!?!"

This is racism too ridiculous to be objectionable. Instead, like the (intentional) loony racial stereotypes in "Blazing Saddles," it's hysterical.

Noah Beery (brother of Wallace, father of Jr.) plays Shep Keyes, who speaks and sings in an exaggerated stereotypical southern black dialect, full of "gwines" and so on. Is he supposed to be American? African? No idea. Then there's the native second female lead character, apparently (made up to be) African, but doing the same shufflin' accent as Beery. Is it just me, or does she bear a startling resemblance to Andrea Martin?

There are so many little delights, other absurd characters and "comic" subplots, moments to cherish. The Whip song! My Bwana! A Tigah! The final, shocking, revelations! Why are you reading this? Go forth, do whatever it takes to find a copy of this movie, and watch it!

...What a grand time they would have sending up this putrid songfest, based on a stage musical that wasn't very successful to begin with. One of the last of the first wave of movie musicals, and surely one of the worst: a preposterous operetta about a light-skinned African princess and the white soldier who loves her. (It turns out she's white, too, so it's okey-doke. I'm not spoiling anything.) Howlingly racist even for its day, what with the united forces of the noble Old World benevolently keeping the peace among the "heathens" of Boer-controlled Africa. (Can this be the same Oscar Hammerstein who wrote "Show Boat" more or less concurrently?) Ineptly shot, paced, and acted, with a number of white actors in blackface, including an unforgivable Noah Beery, his dusky makeup slowly melting under the hot lights.

All that said, it's a rare chance to see the great stage star Vivienne Segal in a lead, and the famous British comic Lupino Lane do a fun eccentric dance. The Kalman score is quite pretty, too, if you can tune out the lyrics. But unless you're a connoisseur of operetta or a lover of grotesquely bad movies, the whole thing is just about unwatchable.

This wacky operetta, bursting with flagrant racism, takes colonialist kitsch to levels perhaps never surpassed. It is, as they say, a hoot and a howl and a real eye-popper. The story, little more than melodramatic scaffolding for a generous heap of songs, some pertinent and others stuffed in to jazz up the otherwise standard operetta-style score, involves the attempt to rescue a white girl (Vivienne Segal) from the East African tribal community that raised her before she can be "married" to Mulungu, the local god, who favors her above her black- skinned tribe members because, of course, she is white. All of this occurs against the backdrop of a German occupational force in British East Africa during World War One. Heavy-handed melodramatic plot developments are interspersed with "comic" interludes involving slapstick, novelty songs and joke routines right off the vaudeville stage.

Inconsistencies and absurdities abound, the most flagrant being the portrayal of a native go- between by Noah Beery in blackface and a ridiculously inappropriate Stepin Fetchit accent; among the most straight-out entertaining sequences are songs added for the film version: "We Two" sung winningly by ace music hall veteran Dick Henderson with Marion Byron. Byron also delights with "A Tiger" – another jazzy number which she milks to the last drop of her pint-sized self. The other, slower songs which came from the stage original ("My Bwana," "Dawn," and "Mooda's Song") fare less well and are harder to understand, despite the fine voices of Segal, leading man Walter Woolf and Alice Gentle as Segal's "mother." Lupino Lane does some astounding acrobatics for "In a Jungle Bungalow." This is not the only bad musical film he enlivened.

The campiest moments occur during the climax when the white girl is about to be married to Mulungu by a bug-eyed, blacked-up witch doctor (Nigel de Brulier) who delivers his lines like a 19th century Shakespearean ham. The rock-bottom melodramatics are so over the top by the time you get to the atrociously dubbed finale, nothing matters any more. You can either goof on it or shrug, be grateful that those days are over, and move on to something more edifying. All in all, a fun fest for parties of musical theatre/musical film aficionados. This movie is to musicals what "Plan Nine from Outer Space" is to science fiction.

I guess the novelty of sound was what got this quickie musical produced. It had a rather unsuccessful run on stage and here we see why. Noah Beery in awful blackface that stains his clothes singing a song about his whip and how it makes him the Boss man. His accent, while supposedly an African native is pure Black Southern "You-all" and "we'all". The "natives" are painted in random patterns, looking like skeleton men extras from the "Danger Island" series that used to play along with the "Banana Splits" on Saturday mornings. The music is okay, the lyrics atrocious. Lovely and talented Vivienne Segal sings a love song about "My Bwana", Alice Gentle sings the opening solo, which is basically telling the Africans how great the White men are and to obey them. Lupino Lane the comedian will remind many of Stan Laurel in his speech. I made it through the whole thing, call me a masochist. It does show that just because it is old and Black & White, doesn't always mean it is a "classic".