Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1928-1929

The Contenders:

Betty Compson: The Barker
Bessie Love: The Broadway Melody
Mary Pickford: Coquette (winner)
Corrine Griffith: The Divine Lady
Jeanne Eagels: The Letter
Ruth Chatterton: Madame X

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1928-1929

The Contenders:

Harry Beaumont: The Broadway Melody
Frank Lloyd: The Divine Lady (winner)
Frank Lloyd: Drag
Irving Cummings: In Old Arizona
Lionel Barrymore: Madame X
Ernst Lubitsch: The Patriot
Frank Lloyd: Weary River

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1928-1929

The Contenders:

Alibi
The Broadway Melody (winner)
The Hollywood Revue of 1929
In Old Arizona
The Patriot

The Broadway Melody

Film: The Broadway Melody
Format: DVD from Galena Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

So I was warned about The Broadway Melody. It was going to take a complete stinker to take the place of Gigi on the bottom of my personal rankings of Best Picture winners. And yet here I am in a quandary. This is objectively a worse film than Gigi, but I’m not sure I liked it less. It’s a worse film, but Gigi is morally objectionable, but it’s really well made. The Broadway Melody is silly, stupid, maudlin, melodramatic, and annoying. The film runs 100 minutes. It feels like 1,000.

This is a pretty typical “behind the scenes” style of musical, the sort that seemed to be popular as all hell through the ‘40s and crop up now and again. Everyone we see is connected to show business in one respect or another. We start with Eddie Kearns (Charles King) who has just penned a new song called “The Broadway Melody,” which would be a snappy name for a new picture. Anyway, he’s giving it to a sister act called the Mahoney Sisters. These are Harriet “Hank” Mahoney (Bessie Love), the older and smarter sister, and Queenie Mahoney (Anita Page), the younger and prettier one. As it happens, Eddie is engaged to Hank, and has promised them big things if they come to New York. He’s sold his new song to Francis Zanfield (Eddie Kane) for one of his new stage shows, and he wants the girls to sing it with him.