John W. Harkrider and Millard Webb | Glorifying the American Girl / 1929

straight to broadway

by Douglas Messerli

 

Millard Webb (screenplay, based on a story by J. P. McEvoy), John W. Harkrider and Millard Webb (directors) Glorifying the American Girl / 1929

 

A friend of mine recently asked whether I wasn’t now very tired of seeing films representing the difficulties of sexually “coming out.” Certainly, I have seen several hundreds of variations of the LGBTQ popular genre, although I still find the subject interesting and the variation in the individuals’ confusion and suffering seemingly inexhaustible. I answered, “yes, the genre was beginning to wear thin, but throughout my life time I have seen far more films in the genre of a small town or even “big town” girls with dreams of becoming successful in New York’s Broadway theater. There were so many hundreds—among the apotheosis of this genre are works such as A Star Is Born, Gypsy, and Funny Girl—that I’ve seen over the years that I can hardly bear to watch yet another, particularly those filmed in the early days of talkies from 1927 through the 1930s.

      Yet yesterday, I sat before the screen witnessing what I think might be one of the very worst of the genre, Glorifying the American Girl, with a plot so predictable that it didn’t even need to be written. And when there were weak links in the action, the writers didn’t even bother to fill them in, knowing that their audiences could easily do so from having seen the same story played out so many times on the screen.

      In this version of the tale, whose only variation may be that the “hometown” girl lives and works in New York City, Gloria Hughes (Mary Eaton) serving as the sheet music counter singer alongside the piano player would-be lover Buddy Moore (Edward Crandall), is determined to be a Ziegfeld Follies star, while Buddy hopes to compose music for stage productions. Like most such dreamers, Gloria is possessed of a dreadful soon-to-be stage mother, who at this point simply spends any money her daughter makes selling sheet music, but soon takes over the role as a true monster who seeks to keep her daughter hoofing only to allow herself to live the life she deliriously “slaved” for. Gloria seems forever convinced of her mother’s endless tears and monstrations instead of getting wise to the fact that she’s eating up the girl’s share of the 50% she makes as one of the dancing duo, Miller and Mooney.

     I only wish that Gloria had met up with her sleazy partner, Miller, before I had to slog through the bad numbers and endless volcano of supposedly satirically clichéd speeches pouring from her employer’s mouth. But I guess they needed the picnic and its terrible stage acts so that the writers could more fully reveal that poor Buddy, desperately in love with Gloria, was fast becoming the stooge which most career-oriented beauties make of their moon-calf lovers; it’s clear that he should find happiness instead with the plainer looking but happily untalented and loyal friend, Barbara (Gloria Shea). But part of the genre’s pleasure derives from his slow awakening to the fact that as beautiful and talented as Glorified American Girl might be, she’s a dead end when it comes to love, just as it makes clear that as long as a boyfriend like Buddy remains googly-eyed over the blonde bamboo, it’s better for women like Barbara to stay clear of them. Barbara only discovers what’s been obvious since scene one by getting hit by a car and being sent by ambulance over to Bellevue.

      Of course, Danny is equally “no good,” taking his 50% from her career while offering up none of his has-been talent. Oh but, who cares? Gloria gets a job, becomes the Ziegfeld Follies stage star for doing a kitschy ballet skit that she’s always wanted to make famous. It’s clear if you want to make on the Broadway stage you have to abandon your heterosexual wishes at the stage door.

      How the writer and directors ever convinced Florenz Ziegfeld to produce this film, let alone tack it onto several skits and numbers from the actual Ziegfeld show, “Glorifying the American Girl,” is someone inexplicable. I guess Ziegfeld was of the mind that any publicity is better than none. And certainly he did everything he could to make the last few scenes as interesting as possible, beginning with a roster of radio broadcast cameo walk-ons that even director Robert Altman might have envied. Noah Beery, Irving Berlin, Charles B. Dillingham, Texas Guinan, Otto Kahn, Ring Lardner, Mayor Jimmy Walker and his wife, and dozens of others including Ziegfeld and Billie Burke themselves trot into the Ziegfeld theater just before the curtain rises.

     Unfortunately, the skits Ziegfeld chose to be filmed only reveals why his Follies and other such high-toned burlesque-vaudeville shows would not survive the Depression. Rudy Vallée and his Connecticut Yankees’ performance of his “I’m Just a Vagabond Lover,” is so weak-voiced and boringly interpreted that you realize why he needed a megaphone; Helen Morgan’s rendition of “What Wouldn’t I Do for That Man” only telegraphs the difficulties she would soon have with alcoholism; and Eddie Cantor’s seemingly endless vaudeville shtick about two Jewish suit salesmen makes it clear why the very next year he would escape into the movies.

    Gloria’s en pointe butterfly ballet sequence looks more like a skit starring Gypsy’s Tessie Tura than anything you might see in the Bolshoi. But you do get a strong sense throughout of the sexualization of the American Girl in scenes in which the chorines are covered only in beads and feathers surrounded by plenty of half-nude chorus boys.

      This film somehow turned up on my encyclopedic LGBTQ list, and while watching it I had become certain that like a few dozen others on that list that had absolutely no such content, works that some busy gay queen or dyke had simply listed because of wishful thinking. But suddenly in the midst of the technicolor last few scenes pasted to the black-and-white bleakness of this silly stardom story, a glorious Ziegfeld tableaux vivant of a just-captured mermaid surrounded by burly bare-chested sailors that, with its foretelling of the photos of French photographers Pierre et Gilles and a snapshot of Bette Midler as Dolores Del Rio, made it worth the trip. The three boys in this picture are just a few of several who punctuate a space that represents, along with Adrian Brunel’s film Battling Bruisers: Some Boxing Buffoonery (1925), one of the first clear cinematic instances of camp humor. Here, it is the men who are clearly sexualized, presented as gay boys to droll over as the mermaid simply lays they in wait to be eviscerated.

      Check out this film just for this scene and the later glimpse of the half-naked Johnny Weissmuller beside the half-naked Ziegfeld queen at the end, but you might want to scroll ahead.

Los Angeles, July 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).