VOGUES OF 1938

US, 1937, 108 minutes, Colour.
Joan Bennett, Walter Baxter, Helen Vinson, Mischa Auer, Alan Mowbray, Jerome Cowan, Alma Kruger, Marjorie Gateson, Penny Singleton, Hedda Hopper.
Directed by Irving Cummings.

Vogues of 1938 is a minor musical - especially in comparison with musicals of the time e.g. the M.G.M. productions like The Great Ziegfeld, Fox productions such as those with Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, In Old Chicago, Rose of Washington Square. The film, with its world of chic affluence in New York in the late '30s is reminiscent of Roberta - though again pales in comparison. The film has a very conventional plot focusing on Warner Baxter as the owner of a fashion shop in New York and penniless heiress jilting a rich husband (Alan Mowbray) and becoming a model. Baxter's wife leaves him at the end, leaving the way for happy romance with heroine Joan Bennett.

The emphasis is on fashion show and the staging of musical comedy. It is very much in the atmosphere of 42nd. Street, where a seemingly penniless Baxter is able to stage a most lavish musical comedy fashion show at a moment's notice in his shop building. Direction by Irving Cummings is fairly basic: Many obvious establishing shots, short sequences with long fade-outs. There seems to be an emphasis on the obvious.

Production was by Walter Wanger for his wife Joan Bennett. Screenplay was by Bella and Samuel Spewak (authors of My Three Angels and other successful plays). The film has one fine song: That Old Feeling.(A comparison with the Australian production, Ken Hall's Dad and Dave Come to Town, with its atmosphere of fashion shops and Hollywood style fashion show, favours the Australian product of 1938.)