SWEETHEARTS

US, 1938, 114 minutes, Colour.
Jeanette Mac Donald, Nelson Eddy, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Florence Rice, Mischa Auer, Herman Bing, Reginald Gardiner, Fay Holden, Allyn Joslyn, Lucile Watson, Gene Lockhart, Kathleen Lockhart.
Directed by W.S. Van Dyke.

Sweethearts is one of many MGM musicals starring Jeanette Mac Donald and Nelson Eddy. They had already made Naughty Marietta, Rose Marie and The Girl of the Golden West. They were to go on to such films as New Moon, Bitter Sweet, I Married an Angel.

The film is very much of its period, with the popularity of operatic musicals at MGM. Jeanette Mac Donald excelled at these and was very popular during the 1930s and 1940s. She worked well with Nelson Eddy, though he was often criticised for being too stolid.

The film is adapted from a 1913 operetta by Victor Herbert (The Vagabond King, The Student Prince). It is brought into the present time – with a couple in their sixth year of performing Sweethearts on Broadway. Their manager is played by Frank Morgan – anticipating The Wizard of Oz (and Ray Bolger is a singer-dancer, with his own turn at the beginning of the film, soon to be the Scarecrow).

The film is about Hollywood and its enticing performers away from Broadway – a strange phenomenon in the 1930s where so many of the films were deprecating the call to Hollywood (even though they were Hollywood films) and glorifying Broadway. As in this film, many presented the musical sequences as if they were staged in the Broadway theatres, lavish, costumes, colour, an enormous cast and sets.

The film is fairly conventional in the sense that Reginald Gardiner plays a Hollywood agent, coming to New York to meet his rival, Frank Morgan, and entice the couple away to Hollywood. With all the pressures of engagements, the pressures of their eccentric acting family, they decide that it would be more peaceful to go to California. However, there are various plots to undermine their moving away, especially with playwright, Mischa Auer, concocting a play whereby the wife becomes suspicious of her husband and separates and goes on tour. When the play flops, the two realise that they were set up – and a happy reconciliation.

Of interest, one of the co-writers of the film was the acerbic writer, Dorothy Parker.

Direction was by Woody Van Dyke, a veteran of so many genre films at MGM with a larger cast than usual of character actors from MGM.