Be Yourself!

Fanny Brice is a nightclub entertainer who has a couple of prize fighters tangle over her. She sides with Robert Armstrong and becomes his manager. Things go along swimmingly, unti he starts to have some success, whereupon very blonde Gertrude Astor moves in on him.

It's enough plot to hang the movie on. The real purpose is to have Miss Brice sing five songs by Billy Rose and do her ballerina shtick. Producers John Considine and Joseph Schenck must have figured that as long as Broadway was going Hollywood, the perennial Ziegfeld Follies star was a natural. While she's good and believable, especially with Harry Green to do the raw comedy, the movie career didn't materialize. I expect it was the destruction of the musical movie in 1930 and Miss Brice's pleasant but ordinary appearance that closed that door, and her needing an audience. She remained an occasional guest star, particularly when someone was doing a movie about Ziegfeld, but she retreated to the stage, and let radio stardom come her way.

"Be Yourself" was a hastily thrown together film that had to include a few musical numbers just to satisfy a 65 minute runtime. It starred Fanny Brice, Robert Armstrong, Harry Green, G. Pat Collins, and Gertrude Astor.

Robert Armstrong played Jerry Moore, a wannabe boxer who spent more time on his back than on his feet. After he slugged the reigning champion, McCloskey aka Mac (G. Pat Collins), in a nightclub, some palooka put the idea in Fannie's head that Jerry could fight professionally.

Fannie (Fanny Brice), who worked at the nightclub of topic, got her brother Harry (Harry Green) to be Jerry's manager and the three were off and running. Fannie just had to figure out how to keep Jerry from going to the canvas with every landed blow.

The movie was so-so at best. They filled too much time with singing and stage acts, and the gold digger routine by Gertrude Astor was unimaginative. I can tell that a lot of Hollywood writers were victims, or afraid to become victims, of gold diggers because they wrote about them so much.

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I was curious about Fanny Brice in her younger years, and this is the only commercially available film that stars her of which I am aware. The plot is thin and preposterous, but that's not the point. The point is viewing Fanny's comedy and musical talents and some unusual production numbers as well as the great art deco style of the nightclub in which she works.

Fanny plays a nightclub performer who has financed her younger brother's law school and also set him up in business for himself. He has quite the memory for individual laws, but is a little too ambitious at chasing ambulances only about ten years after ambulances have been around. Enter down-on-his-luck boxer Jerry Moore (Robert Armstrong), who frequents the club where Fanny works. He gets mad one night at a fellow patron, boxing champ Mac, who has been mouthing off to him, and Jerry knocks him out after only a few punches. This gives Fanny and her brother the idea that maybe all that Jerry needs is a good manager to organize his career, and they decide to take on the job. After Fanny invests in a bunch of training equipment for Jerry she learns that he's only fought four times and he's only won once, and that was a technical decision. She doesn't quite have on her hands the diamond in the rough that she thought she had. Will Fanny get Jerry to stop lying down every time after he is punched the first time? Is a lasting romance in the cards for the two? Can Fanny get her brother to stop suing people? Watch and find out.

As for the songs - "Cookin Breakfast for the One I Love" is very cute and is probably the only time you'll ever see Robert Armstrong in a duet with anybody, the production number "Kicking a Hole in the Sky" has Fanny and chorus dueling with the devil, and "When a Woman Loves a Man" has a torch song quality to it. The five numbers included here really showed Brice's musical range.

There's also some cute comedy bits involving the other girls that work in the club. One mentions that she told her boyfriend that if he didn't marry her she'd kill herself. While she's getting ready for the next act a package arrives from him. Expecting an engagement ring she instead receives a gun.

I would recommend it to anybody who likes the early talkies.

Fanny Brice was a great Broadway star, one of the ones whose abilities did not translate to film that all well. It is worth it to watch her here, and extrapolate backwards to see the stage talent that made her famous. Blessed with perfect comic timing, she belts the blues, torches a ballad and parodies operatic singing in a way that would make Jerry Lewis jealous. It would all work better live and none of it burns into immortal memory, but still it's all interesting.

William Cameron Menzies' designs are delirious. The nightclub that hosts most of the action is decidedly surreal, and only he could make a boxing arena look like the Arabian Nights.

Harry Green acts a Jewish stereotype with such guilelessness and energy that he doesn't offend. He's safely in the past, and only non-Jews will be made confused and uncomfortable. The dates in his filmography suggest that he moved to England as a result of blacklisting rather than artistic irrelevancy, as is suggested in another review. England was a good choice for exile; they've always welcomed with open arms actors willing to play reductive ethnic clichés.

There is a peculiar fascination in the film with the shape of Robert Armstrong's nose. Fanny Brice had already had one of the earliest of the celebrity nose jobs, inspiring Dorothy Parker to observe that she had "cut off her nose to spite her race."

At any rate, Armstrong and the rest of the cast know exactly what to do and do it well. As with many early talkies, the pacing and continuity are uncertain. More artifact than musical comedy, we can watch the Jews and the Irish warily circling each other from the safe distance of the 21st Century.

Fanny Brice is one of those old-time performers who remains well-known only indirectly, through an impersonator: nowadays, most people who think they're familiar with Fanny Brice's style as a performer are actually recalling Barbra Streisand in 'Funny Girl' and 'Funny Lady'. (A similar problem exists with George M. Cohan, whom most people know only through James Cagney.) Personally, I've never understood the appeal of Fanny Brice, and I suspect that most of the people who claim to be Brice fans are really thinking of Streisand's two movies, which do NOT depict Brice's life or her personality with any accuracy. If you want to see a movie which tells the true story of Fanny Brice's life, watch Alice Faye in 'Rose of Washington Square' ... a movie which is so accurate in its depiction of Brice's romance with Nick Arnstein, the characters' names had to be changed to prevent Brice from suing.

Fanny Brice made very few films; late in her career, she starred in a popular radio sitcom as Baby Snooks, a bratty little girl. When performing this role, Brice would actually dress up in costume as a small girl, thus creating the misperception (which I still encounter) that radio actors often dressed up as the characters they played, for the benefit of the studio audiences. Brice was the only radio actor who did this. (Although a few other radio actors occasionally wore costumes for publicity photos.)

'Be Yourself!' is a poor film, although the underrated director Thornton Freeland does his job well with weak material. Part of the problem is that this movie is almost but not quite a musical: Fanny sings a couple of numbers, but they're spaced very thinly through the movie, so the transitions are jarring. And the movie isn't really a comedy either; Fanny makes a few wisecracks, but this film is basically a character study (of the male lead, not Fanny Brice's role). Although Brice gets top billing, the plot of the movie is really about the washed-up boxer played by Robert Armstrong. The make-up man has equipped Armstrong with a severely flattened nose, which looks quite realistic and is appropriate for his character ... but it also looks very distressing. Every time Fanny Brice looked at Armstrong, I expected her to sing "Second-Hand Nose".

This movie suffers from the presence of Harry Green, an actor who portrayed Jewish stereotypes in much the same way that Stepin Fetchit played Negro stereotypes. Harry Green's "Yiddisher" schtick grew so annoying that he eventually became unemployable in Hollywood, and he landed up in England ... giving exaggerated portrayals of pushy American Jews for British audiences who had no frame of reference for these characterisations.

Some parts of 'Be Yourself!' are so weird, I can't even guess if they're intentionally strange or merely inept. When Robert Armstrong's Irish-American boxer first becomes attracted to Fanny Brice's character (named Fanny Field, but clearly meant to be Jewish), he moves in with her. A few minutes later, Fanny Brice is screeching her way through a ditty: "My baby wants bacon, so that's what I'm makin', and I'm cookin' breakfast for the one I love." Nobody connected with this movie, including Brice herself, seems to find any irony whatever in the idea of a Jewish woman cooking bacon (which she just happens to have handy). I can't even tell if the irony is intentional: maybe the lyricist just needed a rhyme for "makin'".

At one point in this movie, Armstrong calls Fanny Brice 'a funny girl', which in post-Streisand hindsight looks like a deeply significant line, but wasn't meant to be.

I'll rate "Be Yourself!" precisely one point out of 10. Fanny Brice really didn't have the right sort of talent for movies.