KING OF BURLESQUE
US, 1936, 88 minutes, Black and white.
Warner Baxter, Alice Faye, Jack Oakie, Mona Barrie, Gregory Ratoff.
Directed by Sidney Lanfield.
King of Burlesque is an entertaining 1930s musical. While produced by 20th Century Fox, it is more reminiscent in style of the musicals at Warner Bros. at the time (42nd Street, Footlight Parade etc.). The story was basically used again for the colour musical from Fox in the 1940s, Hello Frisco Hello.
The film has a good cast. Warner Baxter is the King of Burlesque - not always comfortable in the role. He was more at home as the director in 42nd Street. However, he is the man who puts on burlesque shows, has ambitions to go to Broadway, marries a wealthy woman and achieves a great deal of success. She uses him to promote an opera star that she wants to marry. She humiliates Baxter - but the faithful Alice Faye who has always loved him and has become successful secretly supplies the money for a final cabaret restaurant show while it is a great success. The plot resembles all those backstage, the show must go on, decline and fall musical comedies.
The film has a strong cast. Alice Faye is pleasant as the heroine and has the show's song, 'Shooting High' for herself as a climax after everybody has had a sing of it earlier. Jack Oakie is around as a comic, as the supporter of Baxter. Faye and Oakie were to repeat their roles in Hello Frisco Hello.
The supporting cast is interesting, especially, with an appearance by Fats Waller as a lift driver who eventually gets his chance to sing. Which he does vigorously and with humour. There is also some fine tap-dancing by Dixie Dunbar. There are a number of other singing and dancing turns, especially an extraordinarily acrobatic turn by Nick Long Jnr.
The film reflects the theatre stories, the ambition, the exploitation by the wealthy who look down on the lower classes. There are the usual crises, emotional tangles. While it is definitely a film of the '30s, it is quite an entertaining example of the musicals of the times.
