Nelson Eddy is a singing, football-playing West Point cadet, who falls in love with Eleanor Powell and she with him. Her father, King and ventriloquist Frank Morgan, orders her back home to marry Prince Tom Rutherford. She goes, but tells Eddy, who is now a flier, that if he shows up at the spring festival, she will dance with him. He does, and so forth and so forth and so forth.
If that sounds like 1920s musical nonsense, that's because it was: a Marilyn Miller vehicle produced by Ziegfeld. MGM bought it and over the next decade, it evolved from a Marion Davies vehicle to the finished product. They threw out a score by George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg -- mostly unmemorable, but including "How Long Has This Been Going On?" -- for a mostly mediocre set of songs by Cole Porter, whom Mayer badgered into writing, on the fifth try, "In The Still Of The Night." Then he had to badger Eddy into singing it.
It's one of those movies that halts so Billy Gilbert can do his sneezing routine, or Ray Bolger a lightning eccentric tap routine. The flimsiness of the plot encourages it with a style of musical that had not yet fully differentiated the book musical from the revue. Ten years later, MGM hadn't gotten the word, so Miss Powell's big dance number is a farrago that relates to nothing but the immense and varied set she dances through. The revue bits are good, and director Woody Van Dyke and DP Oliver Marsh make sure everything gets on screen, but if they had cut the plot and left the revue, it would have been better.
Oh well. "How Long Has This Been Going On?" was a trunk song anyway.
If that sounds like 1920s musical nonsense, that's because it was: a Marilyn Miller vehicle produced by Ziegfeld. MGM bought it and over the next decade, it evolved from a Marion Davies vehicle to the finished product. They threw out a score by George Gershwin and Sigmund Romberg -- mostly unmemorable, but including "How Long Has This Been Going On?" -- for a mostly mediocre set of songs by Cole Porter, whom Mayer badgered into writing, on the fifth try, "In The Still Of The Night." Then he had to badger Eddy into singing it.
It's one of those movies that halts so Billy Gilbert can do his sneezing routine, or Ray Bolger a lightning eccentric tap routine. The flimsiness of the plot encourages it with a style of musical that had not yet fully differentiated the book musical from the revue. Ten years later, MGM hadn't gotten the word, so Miss Powell's big dance number is a farrago that relates to nothing but the immense and varied set she dances through. The revue bits are good, and director Woody Van Dyke and DP Oliver Marsh make sure everything gets on screen, but if they had cut the plot and left the revue, it would have been better.
Oh well. "How Long Has This Been Going On?" was a trunk song anyway.