Movies

Broadway Babies | Applause | Black and Tan

Broadway Babies

5/419 on the NYC list. A chorus girl is seeing a stage manager (they live in the same boarding house and work for the same show), till the stage manager’s old flame shows up, she gets jealous and goes off with a new guy.

The new guy’s plot was the most entertaining here. He plays grinning lovesick fool from Michigan who does not realize that these New York poker players are fleecing him, except it turns out he’s a gangster himself who turns the whole plot on them.

When he gets shot in his car, I thought the driver had driven up with his dead body to the boarding house instead of the authorities and I laughed out loud at that. But no, he is just very injured while being the Noble Other Man who encourages the OG couple to pursue happiness, turning over his own profit to make our heroine a star.

....Maybe he did die? It was rather ambiguous.

Other notes:

• The stage manager’s BFF has a stutter that doesn’t seem to be played for comical effect. Maybe it was meant to. He does also tell the stage manager to kiss him and I endorse that
• “Even Josephine couldn’t keep Napoleon” is a line said and I did not expect that as a reference for romantic relationships
• People really loved saying “lonesome” in this era

Applause

6/419 on the NYC list. A much grimier look into showbusiness. An aging burlesque star brings her convent-educated 17-year-old daughter, April, back to New York at the behest of her boyfriend. The daughter is shocked by her first show, the camera alternating back and forth between dancing women and leering men.

She’s stuck working the chorus in the show, at the behest of mom and boyfriend, till she runs into a navy sailor boy, Tony, whose gee golly attitude does win me over by the time he proposes, despite every other man’s grossness in this film.

All the lines I noted are sailor boy related

• Tony says “your eyes are blue” and I get distracted wondering how different eye colors look in black-and-white, not that I ever notice eye color anyway
• “I know just the place, it’s nice and cool too” / “Where?” / “Brooklyn Bridge” cracked me up, even though sailor boy is correct, the bridge is nice and cool
• He suggests they go eat chop suey and I learn that chop suey is older than I thought
• When April reluctantly breaks up with Tony and sobs at his leaving subway train, a random guy goes “Don’t cry about it kid, there’ll be another on any minute.”. Perfect NYC stranger interaction, he’s like yeah of course the girl is crying about missing her train.

Tony switches back and forth between going back to his ship depending on whether April accepts his proposal and I ponder that it must’ve been way easier to go AWOL before technology tracked everyone everywhere.

We have a bittersweet ending, where April and Tony reunite and plan to marry after all, bringing April’s mother back with them to Wisconsin. Of course, April’s mother has passed away in her dressing room with no one noticing even as they stood around her, but her past self in poster form looms over the happy couple.

Black and Tan

7/419 on the NYC list. A short film where Duke Ellington plays a fictional version of himself. I understand any semblance of plot here is an excuse for jazz music and doubled, quadrupled, n-tupled images of jazz dancing, but was still thrown by us starting with lighthearted prohibition-era alcohol bribery and ending with a deathbed dirge.

Fredi Washington plays a fictional version of herself in this film too, which is how I've first learned of her.