Danseuse étoile

STAGE MOTHER is almost a great film, starring Alice Brady as a so-so Vaudevillian who pushes her daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) into "the business" when it's clear she can't make it on her own. As in Applause (1929), we see the seedy side of the business with lots of backstage scenes. Film starts out with pregnant Kitty (Brady) watching her husband do an aerial act that goes bad. After she has the baby she goes to "his people" in Boston and is grudgingly taken in by the stereotypical Boston family. Eventually she can't stand it and moves out, leaving the kid. Years later she gets the kid back and pushes her into dancing lessons etc. Of course she becomes a star. She's preyed upon by men (Ben Alexander) and has romances with a couple guys (Franchot Tone and Phillips Holmes) before the end credits.

Brady is great as the ferocious mother whose life centers on controlling her daughter while she lives off her. O'Sullivan (looking very busty indeed) is very good until she's supposed to be this dancing and singing mega star. O'Sullivan can't do either, so it's long shots of some other performer while O'Sullivan smiles sweetly in the close-ups. Tone and Holmes are fine as the romancers. Ted Healy plays a ham comic and the second husband. Others include Russell Hardie as Fred, Larry Fine (minus More and Curly) as a store customer, Lillian Harmer as the Boston mother, and C. Henry Gordon as the hood. No IMDb info on who plays the old maid sister or the auditioning kid singer.

Songs include "Beautiful Girl," which also showed up that same year in GOING Hollywood and the infectious "Dancing on a Rainbow," which is a big production number. This MGM production has the look and feel of a Warners backstage musical, which in this case is a good thing.

Kitty Lorraine (Alice Brady) was one of those parents that drives their children to be something they may or may not want to be. Kitty was in the entertainment biz so she wanted her daughter, Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan), to be in the entertainment biz. As a result, she dominated her life. She made every decision for her and had her whole life mapped out. She would live vicariously through her daughter, and she was indicative of millions of other parents out there.

We tend to hear about the sports parents, or the stage parents because their children become famous and let the world know about their upbringing. We don't hear about those sports parents or stage parents whose children never made it big. We also don't hear about the doctor parents, lawyer parents, or other career parents who drive their children just as hard.

Shirley didn't have a normal childhood, and what's worse is that when she became a young adult, she was just as attached to her mother as when she was a child. It's like once the parents get their hooks into their children they never let them go.

I thought "Stage Mother" was spot on. The movie focused on lost love due to mothering which was following with the sentiments of that era. If a (s)mother(er) was going to make her daughter miss out on anything back then it would be love, not another career or simply being happy. Shirley's happiness had to be directly attributable to the man she fell in love with and it would've been sacreligious to think her happiness came from some other source.

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Husband wife high wire act Freddy and Kitty Lorraine split up the team while she tends to having a child. When dad is killed in a fall she and the new baby move in with his staid New England parents. Buzz killers from the outset Kitty decides to take kid Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan) on the road and push her into a stage career. With mom managing her career gets traction and she's soon headlining. Making a nostalgic visit to her old home in Boston she meets Warren (Franchot Tone) a painter and the two fall in love. When mom gets wind of it though she puts a stop to it as well as shake down his family for ten grand. Shirley is devastated and seeks to get out from under the influence of her mother.

Stage Mom is Alice Brady's picture as she cajoles and plays hardball with all comers to advance her daughter's career including pimping her to a prominent politician causing things to get hot enough to blow town and head for Europe. Brady's raspy voice suits her hard bargaining style well as she negotiates with some pretty tough customers along the way. O'Sullivan's Shirley is sharp innocent counterpoint to a point of insipid. She dances poorly and remains naive and childlike most of the picture while her suitors (Franchot Tone and Phillip Holmes) can only wish they had a backbone like Kitty.

The dance scenes are flat and uninspired as director Charles Brabin does his best to mask O'Sullivan's abysmal hoofing abilities with close-ups while at the same time offering some pretty racy pre code enforcement shots of the chorus replete in diaphanous costume.

There are a handful of well played scenes (particularly with C. Henry Gordon) in Stage Mother as Brady brawls her way to the top with tough talk and a touch of extortion void of sentiment but in the end it depends on sentimental tug to bring the curtain down and the limpid denouement forcing Kitty to go meekly simply reinforces the films mediocrity.

If you find yourself humming the songs from Gypsy after seeing this film you can't help it. What Alice Brady does with the title role in Stage Mother makes what Ethel Merman did on stage and Rosalind Russell on the big screen as Mama Rose would make Mama blush.

Left with a baby daughter to raise after her husband is killed during a performance of their high wire act, Brady takes the little girl to her in-laws in Boston where they still frowned on associating with the theatrical profession. She can't provide so for a while she leaves the girl with the in-laws and takes up with fellow performer Ted Healy.

But eventually Brady quits the stage for the business end of show business working for a booking agent. And when she discovers that her daughter who grows up to be Maureen O'Sullivan and has talent, watch out world.

Watching this film all I thought of was how unfortunate Gypsy wasn't written two generations earlier. What Brady could have done with Mama Rose.

Sad to say that the film is spoiled by a really bad ending which I won't reveal. Look for good performances by Franchot Tone and Phillips Holmes as a pair of callow youths O'Sullivan takes up with. Holmes comes with a title as well. Also if you look quick you'll see Larry Fine of the Three Stooges in a small part.

Snappy before the Code dialog and a great performance by Brady are wasted in an unreal climax.

With the rows and rows of dancing girls all in unison, I would have sworn that Busby Berkley or Ziegfeld had to be involved in this, but no sign of them mentioned on IMDb. Alice Brady is Kitty Lorraine, the pushy mom who makes sure her daughter Shirley (Maureen O Sullivan) gets ahead in show biz. As usual, Brady is loud and a little lower-class, but you know exactly where you stand, and she means well. O'Sullivan made a whole bunch of Tarzan movies, and was in the Thin Man. Franchot Tone is Shirley's boyfriend in one of his earliest film roles. O'Sullivan sings (or pretends to sing) several numbers. Story is soooo similar to Gypsy Rose Lee... she would have been about 20 when this film came out. Novel and screenplay of "Stage Mother" written by Bradford Ropes. Viewers will recognize Alice Brady as the silly giggling aunt from Gay Divorcée; she seems to have died young at 47. The cast list shows Larry Fine (one of the Stooges) as a customer in the music store, but I must have missed him. Fun story. Plot starts a little slow and sad, but gets better as it goes along. Director Charles Brabin had been making films for 20 years, and this was one of the last ones he made. Turner Classic shows this now & then, and has it listed as G rated, but that can't be right....