Bright Lights

A Broadway star is giving up the stage to marry a millionaire, but she might be happier with the man who brought her up through the showbiz ranks.

BRIGHT LIGHTS (1930) is ultimately a movie about a show business family and how everyone supports each other. The action takes place on the night of Louanne's (Dorothy Mackaill) last performance in a successful musical revue before settling down with a rich society type. Louanne's co-star Wally (Frank Fay) has been with her through the ups and downs, and in fact groomed Louanne to be the star she's become. Wally loves Louanne and wants nothing but the best for her, even if that means letting her marry another man.

Director Michael Curtiz uses flashback sequences to contrast Louanne's press-friendly account of her "innocent" past with the more vulgar realities of her life (dancing the hula in African saloons and cheap carnivals). When her past threatens to ruin her impending marriage, Wally steps in to protect her.

I'd recently seen Dorothy Mackaill in another talkie and was disappointed with her performance, but she's much better here. Much more "alive", joking around with Fay in an early scene in her dressing room and doing her fair share of singing and dancing in the musical numbers. Frank Fay plays his role like an old pro. He made relatively few movies in his career but I still find ones I haven't seen before.

Joining them in the cast is Inez Courtney, who pops up in lots of early-'30s films as the female lead's funny friend. She's awfully cute here as another performer whose boyfriend (THE CROWD's James Murray) makes a business deal with a ghost from Louanne's past. That ghost (and the villain of the piece) is Noah Beery Sr., playing a Portuguese (?!) diamond smuggler from Louanne's African days. Frank McHugh is the inebriated reporter who hangs around backstage and Tom Dugan and frequent Laurel & Hardy co-star Daphne Pollard play a battling married couple in the company.

The cast of the show-within-the-show, along with their romantic partners, the stage manager, the security guard, and the usual crowd buzzing around backstage make up a sort of close-knit family, and it's touching to see how they cover for each other when the theater becomes the scene of a murder investigation.

There are several musical routines featured within the context of the story. The songs are nothing special and the choreography isn't very elaborate (we're not talking about Busby Berkeley here), but it might've been the bee's knees back in the very early days of film musicals. The opening number is an ode to New York City (including a bizarre Wall Street set piece), and there's a "rah rah" college-themed number and an exotic "cannibal" number.

Some of the jokes fall flat, but the cast is engaging and the film balances music, romance, comedy, and suspense all in a comfortable sixty-nine minutes.

TCM aired BRIGHT LIGHTS under its rather misleading re-release name ADVENTURES IN_AFRICA.

This backstage musical and murder mystery was originally filmed in 2-strip Technicolor but only a B&W version exists.

Dorothy Mackaill stars as a stage star on the night of her final performance. She's leaving show biz and marrying into a wealthy family. As the tributes pour in about the great star, we are shown via flashbacks her true past. It's an interesting narrative structure and keeps the plots moving.

Despite her cleaned-up image, Mackaill is shown to have started out in a dive in South Africa, doing a sleazy hula number and cavorting with several men. Frank Fay plays her devoted (and ignored) pal, and Noah Beery is a lecherous suitor. When the men get into a fight, Mackaill hurls a lit oil lamp at Beery and burns his face. Of course Beery shows up on Mackaill's final night and gets involved in murder.

Mackaill gets to sing and dance to outrageous numbers like "Cannibal Love" and "Song of the Congo." She also gets to dress in a tuxedo and sing and dance to "I'm Just a Man About Town." Frank Fay sings several songs as well, and the spirited Inez Courtney sings a terrific "Hey, Hey, He's Not So Dumb."

Also along for the ride are James Murray as Courtney's suitor, Frank McHugh as a drunken reporter, Tom Dugan and Daphne Pollard as the comic relief, Edward Nugent as a chorus boy, and Jean Laverty as a chorus girl.

Mackaill had been a Ziegfeld showgirl before hitting movies in 1920. She was a big star by the mid-20s and made 65 films, easily making the transition to talkies. But when Warners bought out First National in 1928, Mackaill was on of several stars (Colleen Moore, Alice White, Betty Compson) whose contracts were not renewed. She freelanced for a while and finally quit films in 1937.

"Bright Lights" is a good example of early cinema after the advent of sound. It includes some popular actors from the silent era who transitioned well enough in sound, but whose careers lasted less than a dozen more years. Dorothy Mackaill, Frank Fay, Inez Courtney, Edward Nugent, Daphne Pollard, and Philip Strange had short careers in sound.

James Murray and Edmund Breese died in the mid-1930s and Noah Beery died in 1946. Only Tom Dugan had a film career that lasted into the 1950s and ended with his death in 1955. I mention this as one reason that few of these names may be known today – other than by serious movie buffs.

Mackaill was a moderately talented singer and actor who played glamor roles in a variety of film genres. But, as film technology advances leapfrogged within a few short years of sound, the competition increased. The glamor age of Hollywood was just beginning. Many new beautiful and talented actresses came on the scene. That included several multi-talented women who could also sing and/or dance. Alice Faye, Jeanette MacDonald, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Eleanor Powell and Ginger Rogers had talents that dwarfed Mackaill. Mackaill made her last theatrical movie in 1937. She was just 34, and she would live to be 87.

Frank Fay started in movies with sound. Although a talented actor and singer, he faced the same competition Mackaill had. But, added to his declining career was his huge ego, a drinking problem, and difficulty in working with others. His film career all but ended with three early films in the 1940s.

Some viewers and the DVD sales company like to promote this as a "pre- code" movie. I think that's done for a lot of films that would not have much of a problem when the motion picture industry began to enforce its code in 1934. But, Mackaill was one of the stars who played roles that had provocative scenes or scantily dressed women. This film has a silhouette scene of the actress undressing behind a screen. Other than that, the chorus costumes and performances were no more revealing or suggestive than any of the many musical films from the mid-1930s onward.

"Bright Lights" is what might be called a formulaic film of early musicals. The musicals most of us remember and enjoy from the past are those that have considerable plots. They tell the stories with musical and/or dance numbers at intervals. But, the earliest of the sound era musicals were mostly revues. They had scripts with very thin plots, if any, and were mostly staged music and dance numbers, sometimes with comedy stuck in, as in the vaudeville days.

Besides this example, the technical and production aspects of "Bright Lights" are examples of the early transitions in film. For instance, the heavy use of makeup in this film is most obvious with Frank Fay. The acting at times seems stuck in place – probably because this was filmed with fixed microphone locations. And, the acting itself still has some twinges of melodrama – a carryover from the silent film days.

There are no memorable songs from this film, and the choreography of the big numbers is rudimentary compared to later accomplished musicals. The film has a thin plot, but there are no exceptional performances. It has some historical value for a look at a handful of early actors who bowed out of films within a few short years. And, it has some value in showing the state of the film craft in its early years of transition to sound and other major advances.

Michael Curtiz directed this frantic soaper concerning a musical star on Broadway who's on the verge of leaving show business behind for married life; however, during her current stage-extravaganza, police investigate a murder/suicide backstage. Hackneyed early talkie is too ambitious for its own good (and attempts to pack too much plot into 70 minutes of running time). Dorothy Mackaill doesn't fire off many zingers in this one but, as always, she's hypnotically fascinating. Mackaill may have become another Bette Davis had she hit Hollywood just a few years later. The supporting cast (including Frank Fay, Noah Beery and Frank McHugh) and surrounding chaos don't do Dot justice. *1/2 from ****

The First National Musicals that have been turning up on TCM are interestingly elephantine antiques for fans of old movies. In many ways they are as interesting for what the film makers got wrong as what they got right. No Broadway theater ever had such immense stages as are seen in this one, not even the new ones, miked when they were built. The chorus lines are dwarfed on the stage.

Likewise, director Michael Curtiz and cinematographers Lee Garmes and Charles Edgar Schoenbaum can't seem to figure out how to stage people for camera and microphone. Frank Fay seems stagy and ill at ease in close-ups and two-shots, but when he is performing on stage and shot in medium long range from about the sixth row, (although there are no seats) he is fine. Contrariwise, star Dorothy MacKaill is at her best in Dutch angle close-ups. She may have started as a chorine, but she had become a star in silent pictures.

The other performers offer interesting contrasts. Who knew that Daphne Pollard could sing? Can you spot John Carradine in his first film performance? Could Frank McHugh be more annoying as a drunk reporter? These are the things that make this movie interesting more than eighty years later.

They don't make it good. The movie musical went into eclipse for three years from ill-managed things like this. It's certainly not hard to understand why.