Old black & white movies. There are many common aspects of these that I find strongly endearing. There’s other things that seem pretty laughable today. Even back in the days of their original release, the separate beds for married couples had to subject to mockery by the general public.
I have seen hundreds of such movies from the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and even the late 30’s. With that in mind, it can often be a shock to see some of the films made between roughly 1930 and 1935, which was defined as the “pre-code era” long after that age had passed.
These films had the language, violence, substance abuse and sex that became conspicuously absent in cinema until the mid-to-late 60’s.
1934’s Murder At The Vanities snuck in just under the wire before the production code (aka the Hayes code, and eventually the Breen code) went into effect and it is like the wild bacchanal of Mardi Gras before the long penance of Lent.
For example, one of the numbers is named “Sweet Marijuana”. I was so stunned watching that sequence that I think my eyeballs dried out a bit.
And it is sequences like that which left me wondering how much was carried over from the original Broadway production on which this is based. Did the original production have content this startling
This is the film adaptation of a Broadway production, and I wonder how much of what we see in the movie was carried over from the stage. Like, was there content in the original show that couldn’t be ported over? Is there stuff here that wasn’t in the stage show?
What must have made this difficult as a stage show is the there is a stage production within the show, and then murder and intrigue around the scenes of that production. And that central production has some huge set pieces. I can’t say I that impressed with most of the music, but there is some spectacle on display here.
Including boobs! Wow, there’s a lot of breasts in this film. Not actual nudity, mind you, but quite a few sheer blouses without bras underneath, hands barely concealing the choice bits, and a couple of near-wardrobe-failures.
As for that murder plot happening backstage, there isn’t much to say about it. It isn’t very intriguing, but it did make me wonder how somebody managed to have both a stage show and a fake backstage in the same physical space for the original Broadway show. I wonder if people working the actual backstage ever were confused by the fake backstage.
By quite some extent, the best part of the movie is a performance by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The scene is so good that is worth seeing if only for that. Actually, I would have been very happy if the entire movie had been he and his band performing. The editing is even remarkably better in this sequence, so everybody knew this was the highlight.
All in all, Murder At The Vanities doesn’t have much going for it except as a cultural artifact of the last moment of orgiastic revelry before the entire movie industry reverted to reactionary Protestantism for a few decades. In that regard, it is weirdly fascinating.
Dir: Mitchell Leisen
Starring lots of people who have long-since shuffled off their mortal coils
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray