Broadway Thru a Keyhole

"Broadway Through a Keyhole" is an infrequently rewarding B musical, made for Fox before it became known as 20th Century Fox. I never heard of it before but since it is a Fox musical it aroused my interest and I had to see it.

It is directed by Lowell Sherman ("Morning Glory", "She Done Him Wrong") and written by the famous radio announcer and gossip columnist Walter Winchell.

Constance Cummings is the center of the picture as Joan Whelan, the gifted dancer at Texas Guinan's famous Broadway night club. Ms. Cummings displays a certain depth and innocence to her character and really makes fall in love with her. Joan is being promoted by the pompous gangster Frank Rocci in order to woo her, but things get really interesting when Joan becomes infatuated with one of the nightclub's band leader Clark (Russ Columbo).

Not a classic but "Broadway" is very enjoyable for its cast and musical numbers. Look for a young Ann Southern as one of the burlesque dancers.

An interesting musical curio featuring some legendary names like Texas Guinan and the late Russ Columbo. Columbo shows promise as a cowardly crooner but he's only in the last half of the film. The stars are Paul Kelly and the lovely Constance Cummings who showed great unfulfilled promise as a musical comedy star. The Film is infamous as the reason for Al Jolson punching co-writer Walter Winchell. Jolson thought the story was too closely based on the real life adventures of his wife Ruby Keeler and her gangster pals.

"Broadway Thru a Keyhole" is a strange movie with one very inconsistent character. Paul Kelly plays Frank Rocci, a mobster who works the protection racket. His Poultry Protection Association offers to prevent 'accidents' in order for a piece of the profits. Yet, oddly, you are expected to believe he's fallen in love with Joan (Constance Cummings) and is so smitten and honest that he really only wants what's in her best interest! So, when she falls for another man, Clark (Ross Columbo), Frank isn't all that upset! What's next? Watch the film...or not.

While I found this film reasonably diverting, I must admit that the script was a bit hard to believe from time to time. Not a terrible film but one that should have been better...and less schmaltzy.

Al Jolson punched and knocked out the writer of this picture apparently because he thought the story was based on his wife, Ruby Keeler whereas in reality surely he did this simply because Jolson was so annoyed that he'd written such an awful film?

This must have been embarrassing for Darryl Zanuck. After overseeing most of the early thirties' greatest films at Warner Brothers then flouncing off to create Twentieth Century Pictures (Fox would join soon) he seemed to have expected that just he, himself was all that was needed to make fantastic films. But he made this! He may have taken his impressive talent, his progressive and campaigning attitude with him but not, by the look of this, any actors who could act (acting in this is uniformly atrocious by everyone), directors who could direct and writers who could write.

Compared with similar musicals from this time: his own classic Busby Berkeleys at Warners or what Victor Saville was doing at Gaumont-British (with Jessie Matthews), this seems like it was made either years earlier or using obsolete ancient equipment that Zanuck managed to stash in the back of his car on his last day at Warners; it looks so cheap.

Watching this gives the impression that the setting up of Twentieth Century hadn't quite been completed by the time they made this. It was just their second ever film and it really shows. Since Zanuck had made the greatest musicals and gangster pictures up to that date, he thought he could combine both his speciality genres and make millions with this. The result however is awful: the blending of a hard-hitting crime drama with an upbeat, cheerful musical doesn't work. We just end up with the worst of both worlds.

In his all too short career, this turned out to be the first of only two feature films that starred crooner Russ Columbo. Until his accidental death in 1934, Columbo was the main singing rival of Bing Crosby. But where as Crosby was singing far more than ballads even that early in his career, Columbo's small output of recordings were strictly syrupy love songs which he certainly did very well.

The plot of Broadway Through a Keyhole is nothing original, your typical backstage show business story so popular in the 1930s. But it's good to see talents like Eddie Foy, Jr., Constance Cummings, Blossom Seeley and Texas Guinan doing their thing. Paul Kelly is his usual competent self as the gangster rival of Russ's for Constance Cummings. But if you can see the film, the main reason to see it and why it ought to be preserved is as a showcase for Russ Columbo.

Columbo's commercial records, done mostly for RCA Victor, are love songs. He has two numbers in Broadway Through a Keyhole, You're My Past, Present, and Future which is a nice Harry Revel-Mack Gordon ballad which he never commercially recorded. He also sings a duet with Constance Cummings titled I Love You Pizzicato which displays a nice comic touch.

Russ Columbo only recorded about 30 sides commercially from 1930 to 1932. A contractual dispute kept him out of the recording studio until August 31, 1934 where he recorded four sides under a new contract for Brunswick records. On September 2, 1934 he was shot to death in a freak accident involving an antique cap and ball dueling pistol.

Columbo was no great actor in this film, but that's not to say that he might not have become one as Crosby did or Crosby's main rival Frank Sinatra. The Sinatra you see in Higher and Higher, his first feature film part, was no great actor either, not like he later became.

See the film if you can and speculate for yourself about the unfinished talent that was Russ Columbo.