A handful of films from 1929/1930 are great. The rest are either a) ok and still entertaining today or b) like something made by people who didn't know how to make movies: the reason for which is pretty obvious. This falls into that latter category.
As the talkies took hold, stage actors often said that movie actors l, trained for the silent cinema weren't proper actors - they had probably seen this! Stage actors however were often atrocious screen performers so they couldn't really talk ... but maybe they could regarding this.
It's not just the acting that's awful, the whole thing shouts out that nobody had a clue what they were doing - very surprising that this is a a Paramount production. That very same studio, Paramount, made THE DEVIL'S HOLIDAY about the same time and that, unlike this is a pretty decent film; beautifully shot and with actors acting.....made, just to disprove the theory of the theatre folk, by established silent director Edmund Goulding and starring established silent star Nancy Carroll. Being old therefore is no excuse for being bad. If you look at it in the context of what else Paramount released a this same time you half wonder whether it was something experimental that had been left on the shelf since 1927 that had been forgotten about.
What (little) appeal this has it that it's SO 1920s - the story, the songs, the dresses, the attitudes, the cars are so wonderfully different from what you find in 1930s films when the Depression has taken hold. When this was made, the Depression was just something for 'other people' to worry about. Life was rosy and this gives us a glimpse into another world on the very verge of extinction.
The acting style isn't what you'd call acting: several people carefully reading their lines in turn would describe it more accurately. The story is just padding for the songs....and the songs are not your jaunty 30s standards but forgettable 20s faux-jazz nonsense. For those of us used to 1930s musicals, the casting of this 'previous generation' picture also seems odd. I'm not referring to super clean-cut, "nice young man" Buddy Rogers but to the three cardboard gold-diggers. Don't think "1933" - although there's the inevitable negligee scenes, these three aren't remotely like actual characters so there's no sexual chemistry between them and the watcher, which the later pictures so perfectly achieved. That's another huge problem - there's absolutely no attempt whatsoever to make any of the characters believable at all.
Compared with say THE BROADWAY MELODY, which had a proper story, real characters and actual acting, this is inexplicably awful.
