Oh hey, it's a Saturday night on tumblr, nobody's around, which means I can talk about The Broadway Melody / Broadway Melody of 1929 as much as I want and no one can stop me! (Well, no one could stop me if I was doing this during tumblr busy hours either. No one can stop me. It's my blog. Muahaha.)
The Broadway Melody, released in 1929, was the first all-talking Hollywood movie musical (previous movie musicals had had sound for musical sequences and intertitles for dialogue, iirc), and the first 'talkie' to win a Best Picture Academy Award.
It had a Technicolor musical sequence when it was first released ('The Wedding of the Painted Doll'), but the colour version has unfortunately since been lost.
Its songs (which Wikipedia and various online reviewers have called 'not that catchy' and which I generally agreed about in the moment when I first watched it but which STILL keep randomly popping into my head and staying there for hours) were written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, and Arthur Freed later reused several of them ('You Were Meant For Me', 'The Broadway Melody', and 'The Wedding of the Painted Doll') in Singin' In The Rain.
(I like to think the character of Lena Lamont, in Singin' In The Rain, may also have been partly inspired by criticisms of silent film actress Anita Page's performance as Queenie: Wikipedia quotes critic Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times, in a contemporary review, as saying, "Her acting, especially her voice, does not enhance her personality.")
It was followed up by three more movies with similar titles, which is why it sometimes gets called Broadway Melody of 1929. However, none of them include the same characters or follow on from the same story.
It entered public domain on January 1, 2025, and you can watch it in full on the Internet Archive! (Please do. Join me.)
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