kidboots This joyous musical has it all - catchy, tuneful music (many of the songs are now standards), beautiful chorus girls (some who would become famous on their own -Betty Grable, Claire Dodd) and the vividness of the two strip technicolor - so that you can marvel at the gorgeous costumes."Whoopee" was one of Ziegfeld's most popular shows, so when it was to be filmed Ziegfeld wanted the original cast - most definitely Eddie Cantor. He in turn held out for the original Broadway dance choreographer - Busby Berkeley. Cantor said he wouldn't do the film unless Berkeley came too. The only person to miss out was Ruth Etting. I don't know where she would have fitted into the movie but her song was the show stopper "Love Me or Leave Me".The film starts out with the rousing "Cowboy" number led by an extraordinarily young and tiny Betty Grable. She had loads of personality to spare and gives the song everything she's got. The dancers are filmed at (for 1930) dizzying angles and the kalediscopic formations are wonderful.Eddie Cantor plays Henry Williams, a hypochondriac ("you can get 20 years for kidnapping" "ha,ha the jokes on them - I've only got 6 months to live!!!") who, for the past year has been staying at a ranch out West. His nurse (Ethel Shutta) has her heart set on Henry - but he prefers cows!!!PC is non existent in this film (may be like drednm that's why I like the movie as well). The romance of the story concerns Eleanor Hunt as Sally Morgan and Paul Gregory as Wanenis - childhood sweethearts who can't marry because of Wanenis' Indian blood. She is due to marry Sheriff Bob Wales (John Rutherford) that day but gets Henry to drive her away on a rendezvous to meet Wanenis. The misleading note she leaves behind causes people to think she has eloped with Henry. Just before that happens Eddie Cantor sings "Makin' Whoopee" to a line up of beautiful chorus girls in lovely, floaty dresses. After running out of petrol and Cantor singing the plaintive "She's a Girlfriend of a Boyfriend of Mine" they encounter another car. After an altercation (Henry robs them of petrol at gunpoint), Henry and Sally take refuge at a nearby ranch, not knowing that the owner, Jerome Underwood, is the same man they met on the road.There are a couple of hilarious sequences. Henry and Underwood (who is a bigger "nervous wreck" than Henry) compare operations and end up rolling around the floor together. Chester Underwood (Albert Hackett) tries out some new fangled psychology "lie detector test" complete with plates - Henry comes out tops by making the others drop their plates.The incredibly catchy "My Baby Just Cares For Me" is sung with such spirit by Cantor (in blackface but I don't care.) He has to prove that he is a singing cook.There is also a glorious "tableau" number "The Song of the Setting Sun" where the Goldwyn Girls walk around in these extraordinary Indian head-dresses and costumes. The colour makes it breathtaking to watch."I'll Still Belong to You" is the romantic ballad that Wanensis sings in what looks like a location shoot in the Arizona desert."Stetson" is a rousing song with Ethel Shutta dancing a very, very, hot shimmy with cowboys using their stetsons to fan the flames. The Goldwyn Girls then take centre stage - in beautiful satin jumpsuits with embroided red roses. The fact that you can see their beautiful faces and the colour makes them glow.The ending bows to convention by having Black Eagle (Chief Caupolican) admit that Wanensis was a foundling - therefore not being an Indian he is free to marry Sally.The film finishes with a rousing rendition of "My Baby Just Cares For Me". I Love this movie so much - I give it 10 out of 10.

Spondonman This has always been a favourite of mine, nice and primitive, jolly and inconsequential, a window on a vanished world - and race. It's been screened in the UK without warnings up till now, that world might have gone by now too. Un-masochistic people today who are offended by Jewish Cantor's jokes and temporary black-face are presumably intelligent enough to realise that they're forcing themselves to watch a rather old film and should either make the necessary allowances or switch it off.The whole film is based on the racial premise that oil and water don't mix - the main love interest is between a white woman and a (pardon me - it's the 2-strip Technicolour!) Red Indian (who by the way appeared uncannily similar to Woody out of Hellzapoppin, and both actors died young). A fallacious hypothesis and nonsense too of course, but a concept always upheld in Hollywood's Golden Age - nowadays we're at the other extreme and are constantly instructed that oil and water are identical. Apart from all that it's a breezy authentic view of a 1920's Ziegfeld show, complete with bouncy cherubic cowboys in chaps and huge stetsons, pretty rosy faced chorus girls and some lovely witty songs by Donaldson & Kahn, especially Whoopee and My baby just cares for me. Busby Berkeley came up trumps with some of his best dance routines including a perfectly performed Mexican Wave and some magical from the ceiling shots. Eddie as usual never shuts up, he must have brought the House down with his vivacious performance in this.With all its moral faults Whoopee is still a treasure and deserves preservation with a billion dollar remaster, even if complete with a Government Health Warning before the credits.

lugonian WHOOPEE (United Artists, 1930), directed by Thornton Freeland, subtitled "A musical comedy of the great wide west," produced in collaboration with Florenz Ziegfeld and Samuel Goldwyn, is another one of those reworking Broadway shows to come out of Hollywood during the early days of talkies. Headed by Broadway's own Eddie Cantor, with co-stars, many of whom recreating their stage roles, WHOOPEE ranks one of the better stage-to-screen musicals released during the 1929-30 season. It's also the film responsible in elevating Cantor into major box office attraction. Not only was this his first for Samuel Goldwyn, but the introduction of choreographer Busby Berkeley to the motion picture screen. While Berkeley's now famous dance direction trademarks are evident here, they're far from the best to what he later created at the Warner Brothers studios in the 1930s.Set in an Arizona dude ranch, Sally Morgan (Eleanor Hunt) is about to marry Sheriff Bob Wells (John Rutherford), though she really loves Wanenis (Paul Gregory), a young Indian living on an Indian reservation near her father's ranch. Because Wanenis is of Indian blood, it is not permissible for a white girl to marry a "red skin." Also staying on the ranch is Henry Williams (played by Eddie Cantor with horn rim glasses), a hypochrondiac pill popper from the east, there for a rest cure, accompanied by his nurse, Mary Custer (Ethel Shutta), who not only feeds him medicine, but happens to be in love with him. Unable to go on with the wedding, Sally arranges for Henry to drive her away in his ran-shackle Ford, leaving Wells and guests at the altar. Since Wells refuses to take "No" for an answer, he goes in hot pursuit of them, as does Miss Custer, leading them all to another ranch, leading to complications, songs and dance numbers.The musical program includes: "The Cowboy Number" (sung by Betty Grable); "I'll Still Belong to You" (sung by Paul Gregory); "Makin' Whoopee" (sung by Eddie Cantor); "The Mission Number" (sung by chorus); "A Girl Friend of a Boy Friend of Mine" and "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (both sung by Cantor); "Stetson" (sung by Ethel Shutta); "I'll Still Belong to You" (reprise by Paul Gregory); "The Song of the Setting Sun" (sung by Chief Caupolian) and "My Baby Just Cares for Me" (reprise by Cantor).Of the song tunes, only three show off the Berkeley style: First "The Cowboy Number," featuring two overhead camera shots of dancing cowboys and girls doing circular formations shots climaxed by snake-like effects; "Stetson" having cowgirls dancing while passing their hats to one another, followed by individual close-ups and camera panning through a leg tunnel; and "The Setting Sun," highlighted with one overhead camera shot of Indian doing formations with their feather hats. Among those in the supporting cast are Albert Hackett as Chester Underwood; Marian Marsh as Harriet Underwood; the George Olson Band, and the 1930 Goldwyn Girls (the most famous one here being Betty Grable).WHOOPEE, the only Cantor musical reproduced from stage to screen, is a prestigious production. Done in early two-strip Technicolor, considering how many early Technicolor musicals are lost, it's fortunate this one has survived. Unlike the subsequent Cantor/Goldwyn musicals, WHOOPEE never played on commercial television in the 1960s and '70s. It was by 1980 did it finally turn up on cable television before turning up on home video in 1986. While the video transfer to this film is excellent, the color on the TV prints are not as good. It's reflection of the times by ways of making reference to popular hit names as Lawrence Tibbett and Amos and Andy are definitely names that would be of a loss today. Cantor's nervous wreck characterization would be carbon copies by future film comedians, especially Danny Kaye, who's Samuel Goldwyn debut, UP IN ARMS (1944), was a partial reworking to WHOOPEE, though not its remake.As with other Cantor comedies of the day, some gags are humorous (such as Cantor and character actor Spencer Charters comparing their operations, a gimmick they briefly reprized in Cantor's second Goldwyn musical, PALMY DAYS in 1931), others don't come off as well. One low point occurs when Henry (Cantor), disguised in black-face, calls out to Sally Morgan,. Failing to recognize him, she responds very bluntly, "How dare YOU speak to me!" Quite an uneasy feeling for its viewers that could have been handled differently, with her politely replying, "Do we know each other?" Ethel Shutta, repeating her Miss Custer role from the stage version, is a fine comedienne reminiscent to Warner Brothers' own Winnie Lightner. Unlike Lightner, who appeared in numerous films of the early 1930s, Shutta made this her only screen role during the "golden age of Hollywood."When WHOOPEE became one of a handful of Eddie Cantor musicals to play on cable channel's American Movie Classics in the 1990s, at one point, host Bob Dorian, before the presentation of the film, asked his viewers to watch the film as it was originally intended and not be offended by some racial slurs, jokes, and Cantor disguised in black-face to keep from being arrested. In spite of how viewers might have felt towards this film then and now, WHOOPEE, played longer and more frequently on AMC (1992 to 1998) than any other Cantor musical. WHOOPEE is one of those Broadway transfers to give contemporary audiences a basic idea of the kind of entertainment endured many generations ago. WHOOPEE, as it stands, remains an interesting antique. (***)

Glenn Andreiev "Whooppee!" was made at a perfect time, 1930. It has experimentation with the new two-strip Technicolor process (which gives an unreal, pleasing pastel quality). The Hays Office (the censorship arm of movies from 1934 to 1956) hadn't come in, allowing for some funny off-color jokes, and some wild costuming of shapely dancing girls. The star, Eddie Cantor was in his prime. Eddie plays a hypochondriac on a cross country auto trip. He winds up at an Indian reservation, wrongfully hunted by the Sheriff. The film moves from being a comic gift from long ago, to a scary reminder of poor race relations only 70 years ago. Eddie hides in coal stove that explodes, and he emerges in black face, allowing him to walk past his pursuers in disquise. He approaches the leading lady of the film. She sees him and yells "How dare YOU speak to ME?!" Looking past the social-incorrectness of the film, the dance numbers have some amazing choreography by Busby Berkeley, who was just beginning to discover new and exciting ways to film dancers.