A tedious musical comedy embedded in a routine story like a fly in celluloid.
Comment
02/17/09
The Broadway Melody (1928)
40 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 15
Fresh: 6
Rotten:9
Average Rating: 5.5/10
Consensus: The Broadway Melody is interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise, it's essentially bereft of appeal for modern audiences.
Runtime: 1 hr 51 mins
Genre: Musical & Performing Arts
Synopsis: Two sisters come to the big city to try their luck on Broadway. The elder sibling has a fiance waiting for her there, but when he sees the younger one, whom he remembers only as a little girl, he... [More]
Starring: Bessie Love, Anita Page, Charles King, Jed Prouty
Director: Harry Beaumont
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Reviews for The Broadway Melody
1 - 15 (sorted by date)
Top CriticThe first musical and sound film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture creaks from old age.
03/11/08
Excellent bits of sound workmanship are that of camera and mike following Page and the heavy along the dance floor to pick up their conversation as they glide.
03/01/07
Top CriticFirst musical to win Academy Award reeks of mothballs, but is undeniably the basis of perhaps a hundred others.
12/12/06
Top CriticMediocre performances and poorly-constructed musical numbers are the low points in this modestly interesting all-talking, all-singing production.
10/05/06
...cinematic evolution long ago froze The Broadway Melody in Precambrian amber. But while the movie is hopelessly dated now, it was the bee's knees in its day.
04/07/06
The first musical to win the Oscar, Broadway Melody is a weak song-and-dance picture, but at the time the movie was so popular that it launched a whole series
06/26/05
It is abundantly clear that they had not yet figured out how to stage or shoot musical numbers for the screen.
06/14/05
Its function as genre blueprint makes for quite the curiosity. More importantly, it also stands up quite well as a solid evening’s entertainment.
02/27/05
mainly a curiosity for film buffs who want to see how musicals erupted in the early days of the talkie
02/19/05
The Broadway Melody won the Academy Award for the best picture of 1929, but I am at a total loss to explain how or why.
02/07/05
Interesting only as an early sound curio.
02/12/04
It’s dated, sexist (get a load of the ending!!!), and technically quite inept.
07/02/03
The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film's integration of song, dance, and story was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released by Warner Brothers and Fox.
01/01/00
Top CriticThe Broadway Melody's snarky, wiseacre humor and effervescent charm save it from being completely dated, though the dance production numbers -- pure padding, all -- may try your patience.
01/01/00
1 - 15 (sorted by date)
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