Giorni felici

Pleasant enough early musical from 1930. Catchy but unfamiliar songs and well staged musical numbers. As is usual with these revues, many of the studio's contract players appear, mostly playing themselves. However, their two top stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, have a number of their own. There is a storyline of sorts but this is only at the beginning, and, from about a third of the way through, the film is "All Dancing, All Singing and All Pretty Dreadful Jokes!!". There is no cast list but stars like Warner Baxter and Will Rogers are easily recognisable. Best part of the film is the closing number in which most stars and most of the film's songs are seen and heard again. Best performance is by Marjorie White - although she has about the only acting part in it. No Technicolour sequences but I believe the film was originally shot in some wide screen process. If you like early musicals, this one is, for the most part, fair. But see it if you can as it has it's moments.

Correction. A cast list does appear just before the start of the musical numbers. I obviously missed this during the first viewing!

I refer to one of the cast in the chorus (as far as I know), Harry Lauder. You have flagged him up as the famous Scottish Variety Theatre singer, but that is incorrect. It was not Sir Harry Lauder, who was 60 in 1930.

The Harry Lauder (10 Nov 1902, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, - 5 Dec 1951, Sydney, Australia, youngest surviving son of Matthew Currie Lauder) who appeared in "Happy Days" was Sir Harry's nephew, and also named Harry.

Harry II, as he liked to be known, was a child musical prodigy with a rich tenor's voice. Following The Great War his famous uncle, Sir Harry Lauder, sent him to Europe for a musical education, including Milan and Paris, where he had vocal training, and he subsequently sang in minor roles in Paris and Britain in Puccini and light opera. He then went to Chicago, U.S.A., where he appeared with the opera company, also undertaking training as a conductor. He then joined the U.S. Gilbert & Sullivan Rep.Co., and toured widely (notably in Richmond, Virginia.), both singing and conducting.

He subsequently conducted Fox Movietone News for 18 months before William Fox suggested he come to Hollywood to work for him there. He then moved to Los Angeles and set up a teaching studio in Glendale. It is unclear what he did for Fox in Hollywood, although he took minor roles in "Happy Days" (1930) (chorus) and several other Fox films, which seem to have gone largely unnoticed.

When the showboat she performs on is threatened with repossession, Marjorie heads to New York where she persuades all the stars there -- which seems to be the list of Fox contract players -- to perform in a minstrel show to lift the mortgage.

Yes, much of it is in blackface. Performers in solo and specialty numbers have the make-up removed, and the last twenty minutes or so is performed without the hated shoe polish. This is a good one, not for the number in which Edmund Lowe and Victor Mclaglen sing about how they really like each other, or for Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor singing the forgettable "We'll Build A World Of Our Own." But Broadway star Charles MacFarlane has a fine singing voice; Tom Patricola does a dynamite eccentric dance; and to watch Ann Pennington and Sharon Lynne dance "Snake Hips" in very revealing costumes is a treat.

This was the second movie shot in Fox's Grandeur Process, an early 70mm format. Unhappily, the copies at are available are in standard format and rather blurry. But there are some surprising techniques, like a Busby Berkeley shot and extended sequence of single dancers in full body length, well before these techniques became standard.

It's one of those movies that the major studios made in this brief period, showing off their stars in song and dance, whether they could sing, dance or not. Given the inherently mixed bag nature of the genre, this is a pretty good example of the revue format.

This film, which was just another musical in that crowded time of 1929-30, is truly dreadful to experience today. ANY of the musicals done by the other studios during this time would have been better. Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor do a horrible number guaranteed to rot your teeth from all the sugar. Why Fox insisted on putting Frank Richardson in a musical is anybody's guess. A hideous shrieking screeching singer who could give a deaf person a headache. A few of the chorus numbers are okay, but pale next to the work in films like King of Jazz or Show of Shows. This was originally filmed in the early wide-screen process "Grandeur", but now is seen in an old dupe like the vastly superior Just Imagine from the same studio. I like Charles Farrell as Gale Storm's father in My Little Margie, and Janet Gaynor in the terrific A Star Is Born from 1937, but together, they may have been part of the reason for the big backlash against musicals in 1930. They are.......Icky!

Just about every major studio did at least one revue film in 1929 and 1930. MGM started the trend with the successful "Hollywood Revue of 1929" which still remains intact today. Since other studios were groping for successful formulas during the transition to sound, they naturally jumped on the bandwagon. However, none of them except maybe "Paramount on Parade" came off as well as Hollywood Revue.

Fox did a revue before this film, the now lost "Fox Movietone Revue". This was their second effort, and it actually has a plot so that there is a reason for the show. Colonel Billy Batcher has a show boat that plods along the Mississippi. However, with the coming of talking pictures he can no longer compete and his showboat is attached by a sheriff for back payment of debts. Margie, raised by the colonel, decides to go to New York to ask the big stars that got their start in the colonel's show to give him a hand.

Strangely enough, all of the stars belong to one New York club, also strange is that all of the alumni of the colonel's show seem to be signed with Fox, and even stranger yet they are all men since this is a "men only" club. How Margie gets into the club is one of the most humorous parts of the film. The scene inside the club is quite interesting as we get to see all of the male stars of Fox at the time, including those that don't have very big parts in the revue itself including Warner Baxter and Will Rogers.

The solution to the colonel's problems, of course, lie in the big Fox movie stars doing a revue for his benefit. The revue portion is only the second part of the film. Again, the revue largely segregates the men from the women in the performances given. The first part of the revue is a minstrel show with all of the stars in black face. As each is addressed by the interlocutor, the star's face turns from black to white - an odd photographic trick to make the star recognizable to the audience perhaps. Featured performers in this part are Frank Richardson singing "Mona" and Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe singing a buddy song. Lost as a fact to today's audiences, McLaglen and Lowe did several buddy pictures for Fox in the early sound era.

The minstrel section closes and several individual acts come up, including two great jazz numbers - "Crazy Feet" performed by Dixie Lee and chorus and "Snake Hips" performed by Sharon Lynn, Anne Pennington, and chorus. Look for Betty Grable in the chorus - she's in there. Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor perform a romantic duet singing "We'll Build a Little World of Our Own". The whole thing closes with Whispering Jack Smith singing the title song of "Happy Days" to battling lovers Margie and Dick.

What is wrong with this film? Like all of the revues done at the time, Fox forgot that revues were about displaying your biggest assets - the studio stars, not necessarily the numbers and skits in the revue themselves. Nobody in the show provides any context or in some cases, even names for the stars as they are introduced to perform. Given how film history turned out, the choice of focus just seems odd. Great attention is paid to Victor McLaglen, Edmund Lowe, and El Brendel. Unless you are a classic movie fanatic you won't have any idea who these people are today, with the exception of McLaglen, and that is because of films he did long after he left Fox behind. Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor are not even introduced, and maybe in 1929 no introduction was deemed necessary, but today most people would be wondering who on earth these people were. That particularly holds true for Farrell. Finally, the biggest stars Fox had on contract at the time - George Jessel, Warner Baxter, and Will Rogers are invisible after the short comic scene in the men-only club in New York. This is what MGM got right about its revue - it introduced each star as he/she performed and talked a little about what they had been doing at the studio.

The best thing this picture has going for it is Marjorie White as Margie, and she wasn't even a contract Fox player. She's funny and bursting with energy, and probably best known as playing the female lead in the first Three Stooges short a year before she died in a car accident in 1935.

I'd still recommend this film for fans of the early talkies and of film history, but everybody else will probably be lost.