Golden Dawn

...What a grand time they would have sending up this putrid songfest, based on a stage musical that wasn't very successful to begin with. One of the last of the first wave of movie musicals, and surely one of the worst: a preposterous operetta about a light-skinned African princess and the white soldier who loves her. (It turns out she's white, too, so it's okey-doke. I'm not spoiling anything.) Howlingly racist even for its day, what with the united forces of the noble Old World benevolently keeping the peace among the "heathens" of Boer-controlled Africa. (Can this be the same Oscar Hammerstein who wrote "Show Boat" more or less concurrently?) Ineptly shot, paced, and acted, with a number of white actors in blackface, including an unforgivable Noah Beery, his dusky makeup slowly melting under the hot lights.

All that said, it's a rare chance to see the great stage star Vivienne Segal in a lead, and the famous British comic Lupino Lane do a fun eccentric dance. The Kalman score is quite pretty, too, if you can tune out the lyrics. But unless you're a connoisseur of operetta or a lover of grotesquely bad movies, the whole thing is just about unwatchable.