Evan D. As a project for 2025, we at Spinning the Reel are taking a trip through time to revisit all of the Best Picture winners in history, Wings to Wicked??? (hopefully not Wicked.) The Broadway Melody is the second film in that series, to see all the other Best Picture reviews, click here. After Wings hauled in the big prize in 1928, the Academy streamlined the awards into a watered down version of what we know now with The Broadway Melody taking home the big prize. The film, directed by Harry Beaumont, is the story of a Broadway production and a love triangle between songwriter Eddie (Charles King) and vaudeville actress sisters Hank (Bessi Love) and Queenie (Anita Page.) Eddie has written a popular song for a new Broadway revue — the titular Broadway Melody — and cajoles the director into casting his fiancé and her sister in the new show. When the girls arrive Eddie falls for the beautiful younger sister Queenie despite his engagement to the more business minded and pragmatic Hank.
Under a modern lens, The Broadway Melody is a weak and clichéd narrative. Each character is entirely one dimensional. The girls fall for Eddie, not for any particular amount of charm, talent or chemistry but rather because he is the leading man in the picture. Queenie’s only asset in the eyes of the film is her beauty and that alone is supposed to have us root for her relationship with Eddie over the more intelligent Hank (although neither romantic entanglement is all that compelling.) It is an especially outdated look at romance and, being the only real plot of this film, makes for a tough viewing experience. There are some brief redeeming qualities but they are painfully few and far between. Oddly the film was light on music and dance for a big Hollywood musical, but some of the songs did still standout. The titular Broadway melody is admittedly a catchy little tune, Truthful Parson Brown was a fun sequence and the song You Were Meant for Me found second life in the much better musical, Singin’ in the Rain. Even so, as a fan of old Hollywood musicals, this one fails pretty completely to capture the magic of song and dance that comes through in some of the later iterations of the form. Even the aforementioned songs are too frequently accompanied by lacking tap or dance numbers. Some context is needed to tell the full story of The Broadway Melody as something more than a bad movie that won cinema’s biggest prize long ago. At the time, it was the first fully talking musical and even featured a technicolor dance sequence that has now been lost, the color version at least. It is not hard to imagine audiences and film insiders being blown away by the film as a technical marvel. Best Picture, in an ideal world probably should be some balance of great achievements in storytelling alongside films that truly advance the medium. There is an argument to be made that The Broadway Melody did the latter despite its ineffectiveness as a narrative film. Having seen many versions of this type of story certainly makes the contrast unflattering for The Broadway Melody. Its social mores and depictions of women are quite outdated. Even if it did set the template for a lot of what came later, the film still leaves much to be desired. Along with the noble distinction of Hollywood’s first fully talking musical, The Broadway Melody was also the first in a fairly long list of mediocre films to Best Picture. 3/10
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