kijii This 1929 Harry Beaumont-directed movie won an Oscar for Best Picture at the 1928-29 Oscar ceremonies. It features the songs by Nacio Herb Brown (composer) and Arthur Freed (Lyrics) and they both have small parts in the movie. This is a fairly entertaining movie, considering the time in which it was made. I wonder if this was the first MGM sound movie about putting on a Broadway show? (The IMDb cast list is rather skimpy in that it doesn't tell us more about who played which role. For example, I would like to know who played the stuttering uncle. He was sort of entertaining and should have been listed in the cast.) Charles King (Eddie Kearns), Anita Page (Queenie Mahoney), and Bessie Love (Hank Mahoney) steal the show as a boyfriend and two sisters from out of town. The theater owner's name was Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane), and one wonders if this isn't a takeoff on the name, Florenz Ziegfeld. (Well, I probably just answered my own question there!!) The story, itself, is rather thin, but the entertainment is good. One thing it presents, that I had never seen before or since, is a woman tap dancing on her toes in ballet slippers. To me, this was really quite a remarkable feat on some really remarkable feet!!

gavin6942 A pair of sisters from the vaudeville circuit try to make it big time on Broadway, but matters of the heart complicate the attempt.This was the first sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Now, maybe it got that award because sound was new and you have people singing and dancing... but wow, this film has not held up over the last 80 years. The plot is weak, the actors not notable and the songs just not very good at all.Is this the worst Best Picture winner ever? Probably not, but it has to be in the running, probably in the top five (or bottom five). For what it's worth, though, no films in 1929 are all that memorable today... maybe Ernst Lubitsch's "Patriot", but even that's a stretch and far from his best work.

The_Film_Cricket Any movie known solely for its technical achievements will become a victim of the inevitability of time. That seems to have been the fate of many of the early sound films. As the 1920s were coming to a close, the new innovation of sound was putting silent pictures out to pasture. Not exactly refined in how to use the new process, Hollywood studios pushed themselves to add sound technology to anything that moved on the screen whether it merited the new process or not. The most successful early sound films were those made specifically to capitalize on the process. That doesn't mean they were necessarily any good, only that the technicians found the best way to synch sound with the movement on the screen. One example is the second film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, The Broadway Melody, which was not only a full-blooded musical, but had the added feature of one scene in Technicolor. Today, the initial thrill of musicals with sound is long gone, especially in light of what came along in the years after. The Technicolor scene is an irritating two-color red and green sequence called "The Wedding of the Painted Doll" It is suppose to resemble of musical wedding focusing on a bride that is painted up to look like a doll. She does, indeed, arrive but there are no close-ups so we don't know. The choreography is messy and the music is a strange tinkly little tune that is suppose to be reminiscent of the dream – or a dollhouse – but comes off as just plain creepy. It also doesn't seem to have any purpose in being. It drops in and leaves the picture without any apparent purpose. The original color version of this sequence has been lost for years and home video prints only supply the black and white version. In either form, it's awful.So, what we are left with in The Broadway Melody is the story which, in truth, isn't much. It tells an all-too-familiar backstage story about two sisters Hank (Bessie Love) and Queenie Mahoney (Anita Page), a vaudevillian sister act who come to Broadway at the calling of a friend, Eddie Kerns (Charles King), who needs dancers for his musical number in a show put on by big shot (and rather rude) producer Francis Zanfield. Eddie loves Hank until he sets eyes on sister Queenie. She cools on Eddie when she is courted by a high society rat named Jaques Warriner (which is MGM chief Louis B. Mayer's apparent nose-twiddle at Jack Warner). Hank and Eddie know it is a mistake and it leads to all manner of silly melodrama as the three fight, break off relations and then come back together at the last minute. This is not the most original story in the world even by the standards of 1929.The movie is not a total washout however. . Three songs in particular, written by Nachio Herb Brown, George M. Cohan and Willard Robison have stood the test of time; "You Were Meant for Me", "Give My Regards to Broadway" and the title song. Those songs are still remembered today. Also, I like the performance by Bessie Love as Hank. In the early days of sound, when actors were just learning to talk to hidden microphones, many still gave into the temptation to overact as was needed when films were silent. Love was somewhat different. A native of Midland Texas whose given name was Juanita Horton, she had been acting for years, arriving in Hollywood in as a teenager and was introduced into the business by D.W. Griffith. Her acting style here is very natural. Sure, she has bad dialogue but there's something in her spirit that rises above it. She seems relaxed, but gives Hank a fighting spirit that doesn't seem overblown. She received the film's only acting nomination and the only nomination of her career. After The Broadway Melody she would have a long career in films right up until Tony Scott's 1983 vampire thriller The Hunger.The rest of The Broadway Melody is more or less just for the dustbins of history. Watching the film today is just a curiosity, especially if you're curious about the films that The Academy selected as Best Picture. As a musical, you could do worse.** (of four)

mikegordan This is yet another Best Picture winner that would come to define Oscar as being style-over-substance, except the Musical Genre's no longer as popular as it once was (okay, Chicago did win, but that's for another review). This, however, is an interesting piece.For starters, during the eligibility period of the 2nd Academy Awards (late 1928-mid 1929) was a period in time where Hollywood was transitioning from silent to talkies. Thanks to some advancements in technology, we got the speakers, the recorders, and sound stages, many of which due to Broadway. And speaking of Broadway, what better way to show off the talkie trend than to give us a Broadway-like musical? Only Broadway Melody went a step further and even introduced Technicolor for the very first time in cinematic history (though only in a limited number of musical sequences, many of which didn't survive).So where does this film fall? Well, for the time, it certainly had a lot more to brag about for its accomplishments than most talkies did. But like a ton of other films from that time period that made the technological leap, it suffers from several of the faults that Hollywood was just not accustomed to at the time. The acting became uncomfortably awkward, the Technicolor looked really grainy and hideous-looking, the sound quality was very poor, and it simply became a lavish luxury.The story and the characters are completely forgettable as well. I just saw this movie on NetFlix, and I can't remember a thing about anybody or anything that went on. This is a primary example of giving us a half-baked story with cardboard cutouts as a means to showing off its technological advancements.So yeah, while its history is interesting, the movie itself is just an embarrassing bore. A lot of people may defend this film by saying that it simply didn't age well, and to "try viewing it from when it first came out," but this excuse simply isn't going to fly. Maybe if the story and characters were engaging, even with the embarrassing performances and dated technology, I may cut the film some slack. But the intent of the Oscars that year speaks for itself; Best Picture was the only Oscar it won that year, and it won for the spectacle alone. Even if that was because there were only 7 categories, the Oscar ceremony in subsequent years (with only 2 exceptions) will prove that there's no excuse for its lack of quality.It may not be the worst film to win Best Picture, but again, I can only recommend this film to those that are interested in learning of the Academy's humble roots. If you don't care about Oscar, then I'd seriously skip it. I will give it a generous--yet deserving, 4 out of 10.