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| Talking! What a novelty! |
Movies have come a long way in the past 84 years, but at
least some things have stayed the same. If you look at the list of Best Picture
winners, you’ll see that almost all of them fall into some combination of three
categories: War Film, Rich People Problems, or Historical Epic.[1]
Wings took care of the first, so it’s
only fitting that the second winner, The
Broadway Melody, would take care of the second. In this case the rich people are two sisters with the completely normal names Hank and Queenie. Their
“problems,” such as they are, are that they’ve just moved to New York to try
and star on Broadway, and god forbid, they aren’t given top billing in their
first show. Oh, and somebody mispronounces their last name.
Granted, the real conflict in the story centers around the
love lives of the protagonists. The problem was that the film tried to set up
Hank as the heroine (in the loosest sense of the word), but she came across as
shrewish and intensely unlikeable. Hank and Eddie, a performer in the show,
were “together,” I guess, I don’t know, we’re just supposed to accept it, and
meanwhile, a wealthy socialite named Jock (or Jacques, depending on the scene)
began courting Queenie. Both Hank and Eddie are opposed to this blossoming
relationship, for reasons that are clear in Eddie’s case and utterly baffling
in Hank’s. It turns out that Eddie is secretly in love with Queenie, while Hank
just badgers her and tells her not to see him, ad nauseum, without ever explaining why. And they sang songs every
now and then.
