Manhattan Parade

A great example of the liberated woman is found in Manhattan Parade with Winnie Lightner who is the real brains behind the John Roberts Costume Company. Husband Walter Miller just takes advantages of the perks of the business, one of them being to run away for a little romp with a chorus girl while Lightner is both mother and breadwinner for their kid Dickie Moore. In the end Miller with his dalliances should have been more discreet, he had it made and didn't appreciate it.

But the real strength of Manhattan Parade is in the outrageous and zany overacting of Luis Alberni as an eccentric Russian producer and the great vaudeville team of Smith and Dale as a pair cheese manufacturers who want to become theatrical angels. What a merry chase Alberni leads Smith and Dale on.

Also in the cast are Charles Butterworth who works for Lightner in his droll kind of slapstick and Bobby Watson who later played Adolph Hitler in a dozen or so films. He plays an outrageous gay stereotype also working for Lightner.

I'm torn as far as Watson's character is concerned. It's offensive yes, but under the Code gays became practically invisible. You can see why Stonewall was needed watching him.

Manhattan Parade is a nice pre-Code comedy, very outrageous in many spots.

I saw this film on TCM as part of their month-long "Screened Out" series. It's not a great film, but it wasn't bad either. It has to do with a company founded by a married couple that designs and supplies costumes for Broadway shows. The husband issues an ultimatum to the wife (Lightner) that her place is at home taking care of their son, not at the office. He makes this ultimatum not out of concern for his son, but so that he can make his wife's secretary his own since she is already his mistress. When Winnie's character agrees to resign and stay home, her husband proceeds to run the business into the ground and then takes off to parts unknown with the company's remaining funds and his secretary/mistress. Now it's up to Lightner's character to repair the damage to the company and repay the creditors before the business has to be dissolved.

The husband does reappear at one point, and the odd thing is, Winnie has him behind a legal eight ball not because he is a man in his thirties carrying on with an under aged (17 year old) girl (the secretary), but because he has promised to marry the girl and has gone back on that promise - or as they once called it - breach of promise. Oh how conventions have changed in eighty years.

I've heard much about Winnie Lightner over the years, primarily about her role in the lost film "Gold Diggers of Broadway", and I was surprised as how she actually came across on screen. Lightner actually seemed more matronly than a flapper in this one. Charles Butterworth, who I usually find unbearably unfunny, actually did a good job in this one as company researcher - he makes sure that historical costumes are accurate for the times. Then there is the reason this film was in the festival in the first place - Bobby Watson as Paisley, the apparently gay costume designer in a delightful over-the-top performance. Watson certainly had a wide acting range. In 1929 he is a whiny vaudevillian in one of the first talkies, "Syncopation". Then he went on to playing gay men during the precode era, but you probably best remember him as the diction instructor in "Singing in the Rain".

This film will probably never be on DVD, but it's fun viewing and a good example of a pre-code era film.

Could Mel Brooks have seen this before he wrote his screenplay for "The Producers"? The two films sure have a lot in common. Unfortunately, "Manhattan Parade" is a shout-fest -- apparently, the movie director didn't trust the microphones to pick up normal conversations, and when the movie was converted from its live stage form, nobody told the actors to stop playing to the balcony. So much is screamed it becomes tiresome quickly. If only the lines were memorable enough to be screamed.

But I liked the moxieness of the wife, the elegant solutions of the research director, and, yeah, the limp-wristed gayness of the artistic director, a walking dictionary of practically every gay cliché there is. All of this stuff became impossible once the Code kicked in, so the movie does have its interests, if perhaps mainly for film and cultural historians.

After her husband runs off with his sexy 17-year-old secretary, matronly Winnie Lightner (as Doris Roberts) works to save his faltering business, a Broadway costume designing company. "Manhattan Parade" is one of those "revue" type pictures very popular in the early 1930s. This one was presented, minus songs from the original play, for your 1931 Christmas from Warner Bros. The original Technicolor is missing, but the ostrich remains as colorful as ever. A frantic energy is present, but doesn't quite add up or compliment the plot. The ensemble's main attraction was vaudeville comedy team Smith & Dale (as Lou and Jake Delman), who are better appreciated in short films and television appearances. Today, you'll either howl or recoil upon seeing Bobby Watson play a character named "Paisley" who screams sissy at the top of his lungs.

*** Manhattan Parade (12/24/31) Lloyd Bacon ~ Winnie Lightner, Joe Smith, Charles Dale, Bobby Watson

"Manhattan Parade" unspools like the libretto of one of those silly musical comedies of the 1920s except without the songs. Imagine something like "No, No Nanette" without the Youmans-Caesar score or any of the Busby Berkeley musicals without the songs and dance numbers. Plot elements abound but few are developed. The one consistent thread involves the blunders of a pair of bickering, ridiculously naïve Broadway producers played by the exhaustingly verbose vaudeville team of Smith & Dale who get mixed up with a floundering Broadway costume company run by a married couple (Walter Miller and Winnie Lightner) whose staff includes Charles Butterworth (a perfect blend of Stan Laurel and George Arliss) as a bookish researcher and Bobby Watson as an extremely effeminate costume designer (a character type he would repeat a couple of years later in "Moonlight and Pretzels"). Dickie Moore has some excellent moments as Miller and Lightner's neglected but self-reliant little son and Luis Alberni gobbles scenery as a mad Russian director. There are a couple of interesting shots of Times Square in 1931 (including a partially visible marquee for the Capra feature "Ladies of Leisure" which starred Barbara Stanwyck).