Karl Freund | Moonlight and Pretzels / 1933

nervous hangnails and dusty shoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Monte Brice and Sig Herzig (screenplay based on a story by Monte Brice and Arthur L. Jarrett), Karl Freund (director) Moonlight and Pretzels / 1933

 

Moonlight and Pretzels (1933) is a rather mediocre musical directed by then Hollywood newcomer Karl Freund*—later the very highly respected director of I Love Lucy show—and whose central actors, Mary Brian as small-town music store owner Sally Upton and Roger Pryor** as George Dwight her song-writing piano player, display talents that might have been better kept secret away in Walkerville, the town from which they escape to the Great White Way. In the narrative of the story, however, George does gain immediate fame as a composer/director in the manner of George M. Cohan and a hundred other musical composers who required a little bit of talent, a lot of grit, and a vast amount of luck.

      Fortunately Freund, writers Monte Brice and Sig Herzig, and the great lyricist E. Y. Harburg (famous for The Wizard of Oz, Finian’s Rainbow and so many great songs, including in the year just prior to this film, “Brother Can You Spare Me a Dime?” and “April in Paris” and in the same year, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”) surround the lead couple with enough interesting plot twists, clever lyrics, and the supporting acting and singing talents of William Frawley (most famous for his role as Fred Mertz in the Lucy series), Lillian Miles as the singer Elsie Warren (best known for dancing “The Continental” with Rogers and Astaire and her cult status role in 1936’s Reefer Madness), Leo Carillo (the tongue-twisting Charro of his day) and Bobby Watson as Bertie (everyone’s favorite sissy choreographer, who here appears in all major scenes instead of the few minutes that became the norm of these early 1930s films), all so busily running in and out of rooms and rehearsals that you hardly notice the couple, whose major purpose is to inspire the songs, pretend to write them, and fall in love—all of which they do very nicely.

     As with most of the films in this musical genre, what our hero wants to create is a constant on, off, and on again affair, with a series of producers who are willing to gamble on his talents and several others—including his small town love who has come to Broadway to bring him back home —forced to gamble with cards, dice, and trick coins in order to keep the plot moving and the chorine’s dancing to Bobby Connolly’s Busby Berkeley-inspired numbers, several of which consist of elaborately staged narratives, nearly all of them about money, and one performed in a massive circle of beds centered around a clock.

      In and out of the constantly threatened scenery and songs Elsie weaves a crazy affair with a Nick Pappacropolis, a supposedly Greek cardsharp who is willing to gamble his last dollar to see her sing; a wealthy womanizer, Sport Powell (Herbert Rawlinson), who bets on anything and everything and attempts to put Sally into his bed by buying the show, and projecting her name across the theater marquee and her modest voice over the spot lights; and the loyal Sally who whips up an escape that saves both her chastity and the show, making her available, finally, as the producer for the now utterly frenzied composer/director George to marry.

       Betwixt and between Bertie stands in complete disdain of the whole affair, busily chewing gum, lining up his chorus girls, scolding anyone who steps out of line, on occasion self-consciously giggling, and slightly lisping out lines such as “If it’s about a job, see me,” “Oh gosh, am I nervous today,” “That Upton girl, she gives me the hangnails.”

      Several of the numbers, most notably the title song “Moonlight and Pretzels,” sung in a German beer garden, replete with stein-toasting overweight yodelers and a chorus of cutesy fräuleins singing at a party for the cast and crew hosted by Pappacropolis, are truly embarrassing, and make as much sense as his malapropist accent. A moment of potential lovemaking in front of what George describes as only a “paper cutout,” an obvious reference to Harburg’s “paper moon,” is interrupted by the announcement of yet another new producer of the musical.

      But the final number, “Dusty Shoes,” with the kind of lyrics only Yip Harburg could have written, is a truly spectacular tribute to the woes and dreams of a Depression era population, a stage piece almost operatically sung by noted operetta and radio singer Alexander Gray, along with a cinematic montage of headline news from 1928-1933, including an inserted homage to then President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

   The curtain closes to enthusiastic applause that proves the show is a hit as the newest producer, Sally, descends from the balcony to make it up with George as Bertie, with a somewhat bemused, almost saddened look announces, “There’s romance in the air tonight.”

   The movie could have enjoyed for more of his campy plotline commentary.

 

*As cinematographer of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the 1931 version of Dracula, and the now classic films The Last Laugh and Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, in Europe he was legendary.

**Pryor appeared in only one A level picture, Belle of the Nineties with Mae West. Brian had a more interesting career, appearing in The Virginian (1929), Cukor’s The Royal Family of Broadway (1930), Milestone’s The Front Page (1931), and Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), where she played W. C. Field’s daughter.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).