Sweet Kitty Bellairs

In the very early 1930s, operettas were quite popular. Films like "The Rogue Song" and "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" were just a couple such movies and less than a decade later the style was resurrected with the Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy films. However, by the mid-1940s the genre was just about dead due to changing tastes and when seen today the pictures come off as very strange and old fashioned. Based on what I've seen, I can understand why they are no longer popular.

When "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" begins, a group of rich 18th century folks are heading to the spa town of Bath for a holiday. However, their carriage is waylaid by bandits and the cheeky masked leader decides that instead of stealing all their valuables that he'd just take a kiss from Kitty. While she protests, it's pretty obvious to tell that she is quite taken by this stranger. And, what's also obvious is that the nice man she later meets at the spa is actually the bandit dressed in the fine clothes of a gentleman. What will come of this? See the film (or, better yet, don't).

This film was creaky with age and left me very, very bored. Much of the music just put me to sleep but the bad acting made it even worse. Particularly bad was Ernest Torrence who just didn't seem to know how to deliver his lines...though he would improve in later films. Perhaps he just wasn't used to sound films. All I know is that the movie left me very cold and this sort of silly fluff just didn't appeal to me. Far less well made and interesting than a MacDonald/Eddy film.

Altogether lavish, silly, trite and dull...this is the sort of thing that is handled best by Sheridan, Congreve and later by Oscar Wilde. The script lacks the charm and wit of those masters to put it over. Without that it's only very dull trifle, looking good but tasting terrible. The opening chorus is overladen, cumbersome and sluggish like most of the music and acting. Labored and graceless.

On the plus side, the sets and costumes are lavish and great fun can be had in seeing a very young Walter Pidgeon in knee britches and periwig warbling his love song, Claudia Dell warbling hers, and then the two of them intertwining their separate songs in a resulting duet. For me, that was the high and sole enjoyable point of this unfortunate enterprise.

A musical mix-up of identities, duels, and love, SWEET KITTY BELLAIRS takes place in the English city of Bath in 1793. The plot involves jealous lovers, intrigues, a highwayman, and masks as Kitty (Claudia Dell) tries to unscramble a few mysteries and win a shy lord (Walter Pidgeon). Amazingly this fluff comes from hard-boiled Warner Brothers.

Not a bad film at all, this one simply got lost in the glut of musicals in the early talkie period. Originally shot in Technicolor, this film survives only in B&W and was one of many "operettas" to get released after the success of RIO RITA.

Dell is very pretty but has only a so-so singing voice. Pidgeon seems oddly cast but handles the songs well. Ernest Torrence is a surprise as the blustering husband. June Collyer plays Julia. Flora Finch plays the old gossip. Lionel Belmore, Tom Ricketts, and Arthur Edmund Carewe also co-star.

A highlight is the ribald song "Peggy's Leg."

I want to thank Richard Barrios for praising this little gem in his definitive book "A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film." Otherwise I'd never have known about "Sweet Kitty Bellairs." Even if I had I might not have bothered. A 1930 screen operetta based on a 1903 play set in 18th century England--doesn't sound very enticing, does it? But "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" is genuinely sweet: an exquisitely stylized confection made by people well aware of the material's absurdity and delighted by its artificiality. Far from being a stuffy, sexless period piece, this is a saucy and buoyant pre-code escapade, free of cloying sentiment and reveling in the absurdities of powdered-wig codes of honor and sexual propriety.

It's short and sweet too. Director Alfred E. Green keeps the story galloping for 63 minutes (with tracking shots of highwaymen singing on horseback). Considering the date, this is fluid and lively film-making, not at all stagy. The witty songs move the story along and don't try to be showstoppers. The lead actors (Claudia Dell, Walter Pidgeon, and baritone Perry Askam) sparkle with irony, but Ernest Torrence walks away with the film. Playing a cloddish jealous husband, he's delighted by the role's buffoonery, sputtering into falsetto at the ends of his lines. And as a former member of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, he knows how to sing! Alas, by the time "Sweet Kitty Bellairs" was released the public had been so glutted with bad musicals that it neglected the good ones. Hence the obscurity of this Bonbon of a movie.

This film is an interesting curio of the progress of early sound films and the musical glut that killed off the genre for several years. The original film (in Technicolor--no longer) is lavish and is very much an operetta with sung dialogue, connecting musical sequences, and musical underscoring. It's all way-overplayed and the morals on display are rather questionable. What is interesting is the continuity of music and scenes, outdoor recording and camera work, camera movement, and tracking shots which required pre-or post recording after the film had been finished. The whole picture is edited and recorded very professionally probably by the most advanced studio in these techniques at the time. The film is technically impressive and if you're into old movies its worth 63 minutes of your time.