Comet Over Broadway

There have been countless movies advertising the terrible life of show business, but for some reason, they never prevent young idiots from flocking to Hollywood or Broadway. Comet Over Broadway is another advertisement to stay very far away from the theater, unless it's your goal to have a difficult, upsetting life and wreck the lives of those around you.

Kay Francis wants to be a star more than anything in the world, and as everyone knows, you have to be willing to do anything to make it. Every cliché in the book is in this movie about what a young hopeful has to sacrifice to become a starlet. You've heard of it, Kay Francis does it. This is a pretty melodramatic movie, typical of the early 1930s, so if you don't usually like drama drizzled on top of drama for no reason, you probably won't like this one. I didn't really like it, because everything could have been avoided if Kay Francis decided to settle down for a normal life. A good therapist could have helped her, and saved me an hour.

2 stars for Kay Francis -- she's wonderful! And she didn't deserve this horrible tripe that Warner Bros. threw her way!

The two-pronged premise that this movie is based on is ridiculous and unbelievable in the extreme. Kay is a small-town wife and mother who yearns for something bigger: she wants to be an actress. When a big-shot actor comes to town and invites Kay to his hotel to talk about possibilities, Kay tells her husband she's going to the movies. The hubby's biddy of a mother puts a bug in hubby's ear that Kay's not being truthful, and he sets out looking for her. He finds her w/ the actor in the hotel (they are only talking!) and he slugs the guy, who falls over a railing, lands face-first in a pond (lake?), and dies. Now here's the two unbelievable premises upon which the rest of the movie is based:

1) the judge tells the jury that if it's determined that the man died *before* his head went into the water, that they must find the hubby guilty of first degree murder. (Whaaaaa?????? I think slugging a guy in a fit of rage would count for manslaughter or murder 2 at the most, not FIRST DEGREE murder. Give me a break! But the plot required him being found guilty of murder 1 so that he could be sent to prison for life. Whatever.)

2) the hubby's lawyer, after the conviction and sentencing, tells Kay that it's all HER fault. His reasoning is that if she hadn't gone over to the actor's room, then her husband wouldn't have had to go after her and slug the guy and kill him. He tells her that she's the guilty one, not her husband, and she nods and agrees. What. The. Hell?!?!?! The rest of the movie is all about Kay trying to achieve fame and money in order to get her husband released from prison and right the wrong she committed by causing him to kill the actor dude in the first place.

I can't even go on with this review. The movie was just all too painful. Four years earlier, in the pre-code days, you'd never have caught Kay playing such a wimp! In true Kay Francis fashion, though, she did do her best to make us believe that this woman was a believable character. I give her much credit for trying to breathe some life and credibility to this thankless role. This character was a far cry from pre-code Kay roles and real-life spitfire Kay Francis.

Steer way clear of this one! There are much better Kay Francis vehicles out there! (From personal experience, I can highly recommend Mary Stevens, MD and Jewel Robbery; also good are Dr. Monica and One Way Passage. I'm sure there's other great Kay flicks as well, but I'm only mentioning the ones I've seen and can recommend.)

Kay Francis is a "Comet Over Broadway" in this 1938 sudser also starring Ian Hunter, Minna Gombell, John Litel, Donald Crisp, Sybil Jason.

These melodramas Warners threw at Kay to try to force her and her $200,000+ salary out of there always seem like they were made 7 or 8 years earlier. In this one, Kay is Eve Appleton, an aspiring actress in a small town, looked on disapprovingly by her mother-in-law but loved by her bumpkin husband Bill (Litel).

When a Barrymore-like (read washed up drunk) actor from New York hits town, he takes an interest in Kay's "talent." When he's through auditioning her, he's dead, Bill has life imprisonment for murder and she and her baby are on their way to New York so she can make money to free him.

Yeah, it gets better. Eve does the burlesque and vaudeville route, along the way meeting Tim (Gombell) who offers to take daughter Jackie until Eve gets established. Once in New York, she meets and falls in love with a producer, Bert Balin (Keith), and he with her. He casts her in a play, but his girlfriend, the star, orders her fired.

So Eve goes to London in order to get away from the temptation of Bert. There she becomes a huge star and reunites with Jackie, who calls Tim 'Mommy.' She also reconnects with Bert, who offers her a play in New York.

Since Bill's attorney needs money to free Bill (apparently by bribing public officials, it's not clear), Eve takes an advance on her salary. With Bill soon to be free, what does she do about her career and Balin?

This absolutely preposterous dreck was directed by Busby Berkeley until he was hospitalized, and then John Farrow took over. All it needed was a big dance number.

Eve doesn't want her husband ever to learn about this enormous career - how is that supposed to be accomplished? Didn't the town know? This film was made in 1938, not 2008, and stage stars like Katherine Cornell and Eve LaGalliene were well known to people even in small towns because they toured with their plays.

And how did this guy end up in jail for murder 1 to begin with? There was a fight and the actor landed in a pond with a fatal head injury. No manslaughter? But the judge gave him a break and didn't impose the death penalty. He thought this guy was coming onto his wife! I won't even go into Tim never bothering to mention that Eve was her mother.

The acting by Kay Francis and one of my favorites, Ian Keith, is excellent, and they do the best they can to raise up the level of this film. Unfortunately they're fighting a losing battle. Minna Gombell is pretty good, if stagy, as Tim, and John Litel is appropriately simpleton.

As for how this film truly ends, I wouldn't DREAM of giving it away, but if you listen carefully, there's a line that promises us that the end we see is not the true end. Not that it matters.

Oh, of mild interest for one line spoken by future star Susan Hayward during the amateur theatrics scene.

Many reviewers treat this film as a major studio production, an All About Eve of its time, and scathingly criticize it's inadequacies, of which there are admittedly many. But there are multiple pleasures to be had in a very short running time, though many of them are guilty ones.

This soapy yarn centers around a hometown newsstand girl who becomes an international actress almost overnight in order to make sure her dull hubby John Litel doesn't stay into the clink where he was tossed when he offed a bad actor by decking him for insulting Our Kay. The film was made during a later period of Kay's career, when Warners was attempting to convince their fading star to break her contract so they wouldn't need to pay her exorbitant contract fee; Gutsy Kay didn't care much at this point, but gamely let herself be cast in B movies like this one, second string films, weepers made specifically for women's matinees—a time long before television. She still made the money.

The Orry-Kelly costumes that Kay styles are ravishing; as she rises from burlesque sweetie to continental darling, the dresses rise to the occasion, often deliciously outrageous. And there are some worthwhile performances from familiar Hollywood character actors, the best likely from Minna Gombel as a "wise old broad" who knows her way around and babysits Kay's souvenir from her small town marriage—and you may want to strangle Sybil Jason, a child star who mugs and grimaces until you want to scream for her to get off the screen! (During an early backstage visit as Kay meets the famous out-of-town thespian, one also gets a glimpse of Susan Hayward, who has a single line in an itty-bitty part).

And since we never, ever, get to see what talents catapulted Kay to world fame on stage-she's always ready to go on or meeting with someone after the show; we don't get to see The Comet In Action! But this is melodrama at its most extreme, and by the end of the film you may never forgive yourself for sticking with it—unless you find the absurd conclusion as much fun as I did. Comet Over Broadway is not a great film, and maybe not even a very good one—but it's never dull and is cunningly crafted so that you can hardly wait to see not only what Kay will wear next, but if her heart will take her where it should.

Soap Opera about a small town married woman (Kay Francis) who works at the local newsstand, performs as leading lady in her local playhouse, but dreams of becoming a star on Broadway. When a famous actor who is a ham, a windbag, and a womanizer to boot, arrives in town she visits him in his room with dreams of him giving her tips to stardom - he pretends his valet is his "manager" tricking her into believing she has all it takes but "experience" to become a big star. Her husband finds out and punches the guy resulting in the actor's unexpected death - which leads to a murder trial and even more unexpected: a life prison sentence for hubby. Next thing you know she's joined a traveling Burlesque show in hopes of one day making it to Broadway and making enough money to get her man's freedom - all the while her baby is sleeping in a trunk!

This film has a pretty interesting plot, well, a bit far-fetched perhaps, but very melodramatic (with tons of melodramatic music to make sure you get it) - all *greatly* enhanced by the strong, emotional performance given by Kay Francis - she just makes this film. Also helping here is the well-done acting by Minna Gombell in her role as a "getting close to forty" older lady who works the burlesque and befriends Kay. Worth seeing, especially for Kay Francis fans.