Happy Days

Pleasant enough early musical from 1930. Catchy but unfamiliar songs and well staged musical numbers. As is usual with these revues, many of the studio's contract players appear, mostly playing themselves. However, their two top stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, have a number of their own. There is a storyline of sorts but this is only at the beginning, and, from about a third of the way through, the film is "All Dancing, All Singing and All Pretty Dreadful Jokes!!". There is no cast list but stars like Warner Baxter and Will Rogers are easily recognisable. Best part of the film is the closing number in which most stars and most of the film's songs are seen and heard again. Best performance is by Marjorie White - although she has about the only acting part in it. No Technicolour sequences but I believe the film was originally shot in some wide screen process. If you like early musicals, this one is, for the most part, fair. But see it if you can as it has it's moments.

Correction. A cast list does appear just before the start of the musical numbers. I obviously missed this during the first viewing!

This film, which was just another musical in that crowded time of 1929-30, is truly dreadful to experience today. ANY of the musicals done by the other studios during this time would have been better. Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor do a horrible number guaranteed to rot your teeth from all the sugar. Why Fox insisted on putting Frank Richardson in a musical is anybody's guess. A hideous shrieking screeching singer who could give a deaf person a headache. A few of the chorus numbers are okay, but pale next to the work in films like King of Jazz or Show of Shows. This was originally filmed in the early wide-screen process "Grandeur", but now is seen in an old dupe like the vastly superior Just Imagine from the same studio. I like Charles Farrell as Gale Storm's father in My Little Margie, and Janet Gaynor in the terrific A Star Is Born from 1937, but together, they may have been part of the reason for the big backlash against musicals in 1930. They are.......Icky!

Fanatics will have to see this. People who just like early show business more or less will find much to enjoy with their finger hovering over the fast forward button.

The black face minstrelsy is probably 100% authentic given how many people involved with it in the 19th century were probably associated with this production. The ad-libbing by the Broadway crowd when the plot is being laid out is kind of dull, but may be an authentic replica of how those guys talked. George Jessel is making it up as he goes along and is not at his wittiest. But you get to see how the guys who seemed to be having all the fun dressed, walked, spoke, emoted, and loved each other.

The familiar now obsolete acts are here: burlesque of "high-class" dancers, heavy-accented "Yiddish" monologist, meek man with much taller over bearing wife, and so on. Come to think of it, this stuff never goes away entirely.

Correction to an earlier reviewer: the sets do make sense because if you listen to the set-up the show is in a theater, not on the show boat (remember, Jessel asks the theater owner if his theater is "dark", meaning is it unoccupied so this fund raiser can be presented in it).

It thankfully ends with the entire company taking a bow, and you silently applaud them up in Show Business Heaven.

Lavish story-revue from 1929, originally filmed in a widescreen process called Grandeur, puts most of Fox's roster in a minstrel show format; there's a plot surrounding it, but it's forgotten after the first half hour or so. You have to endure some badly dated acts, including the insufferable El Brendel and the sappy Janet Gaynor (she doesn't sing, she coos) and Charles Farrell (body of Adonis, voice of a fifth grader), but along the way you do get some good stuff, and an entertaining look at what was considered top-notch diversion around the time the stock market was crashing. Marjorie White does some hot scat singing and steps lightly; Ann Pennington and Dixie Lee dance up a storm; Victor McGlaglen and Edmund Lowe do a buddy number (McLaglen can actually sing, Lowe can't); the boxing champ James J. Corbett is a personable interlocutor; Will Rogers, Warner Baxter, and George Jessel do cameos; and poor old Charles Evans' show boat gets saved. The chorus girls are beefy and klutzy (Betty Grable's in there somewhere), the production design's clever, and there's an odd lighting effect that turns actors from blackface to white with the flick of a light switch. Heaven knows you couldn't get away with this stuff today, but the songs are catchy, there's some fine dancing, and among the large roster of early talkie musicals, this one's fairly diverting.

I refer to one of the cast in the chorus (as far as I know), Harry Lauder. You have flagged him up as the famous Scottish Variety Theatre singer, but that is incorrect. It was not Sir Harry Lauder, who was 60 in 1930.

The Harry Lauder (10 Nov 1902, Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland, - 5 Dec 1951, Sydney, Australia, youngest surviving son of Matthew Currie Lauder) who appeared in "Happy Days" was Sir Harry's nephew, and also named Harry.

Harry II, as he liked to be known, was a child musical prodigy with a rich tenor's voice. Following The Great War his famous uncle, Sir Harry Lauder, sent him to Europe for a musical education, including Milan and Paris, where he had vocal training, and he subsequently sang in minor roles in Paris and Britain in Puccini and light opera. He then went to Chicago, U.S.A., where he appeared with the opera company, also undertaking training as a conductor. He then joined the U.S. Gilbert & Sullivan Rep.Co., and toured widely (notably in Richmond, Virginia.), both singing and conducting.

He subsequently conducted Fox Movietone News for 18 months before William Fox suggested he come to Hollywood to work for him there. He then moved to Los Angeles and set up a teaching studio in Glendale. It is unclear what he did for Fox in Hollywood, although he took minor roles in "Happy Days" (1930) (chorus) and several other Fox films, which seem to have gone largely unnoticed.