McPhail's version, however, a stalwart blend of showmanship and sincerity, is interesting because of its wartime context: It isn't flashy in the way Berkeley's earlier choreography had been--a la the Gold Diggers pictures, or 42nd Street (1933) and Footlight Parade (1933). There's something somber about it: At one point, a spotlight hits a group of African Americans singing a snippet of the spiritual "Let My People Go." Lines of everyday citizens--performers dressed as nurses, repairmen, policemen and teachers--snake around McPhail as he sings the song of the everyman, an exhortation for Americans to stay strong during tough times. The performance is all the more poignant when you consider that Born to Sing was McPhail's last movie. The singer and actor, despondent over his stalled-out career, committed suicide in 1944.
That finale, complex and strangely moving, is a bit out of step with the rest of Born to Sing, an agreeable-enough picture in which Virginia Weidler plays the daughter of a composer (Henry O'Neill) whose songs have been stolen by a crooked Broadway producer (Lester Matthews). Weidler teams up with a bunch of local kids--played by Ray McDonald, Leo Gorcey and Larry Nunn--to mount a show, anchored by her father's songs, before the duplicitous Broadway honcho can get his show ready. A local gangster (Sheldon Leonard) helps out, "kidnaping" an audience for the young performers, and also lending them the young opera singer (McPhail) he's been grooming for stardom.
The plot is loopy, but the picture--directed by Edward Ludwig, a journeyman director who got his start making shorts in the '20s--has a cheerful vibe along the lines of the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland "Let's put on a show!" vehicles of its era. Weidler was by that point a show-business veteran: the daughter of an architect and an opera singer, she was, at age three, supposed to have made her screen debut in the 1930 Moby Dick with John Barrymore. She was replaced at the last minute, but she would appear in a movie opposite Barrymore a few years later, The Great Man Votes (1939). Reportedly, her confident acting style threatened to upstage Barrymore's more seasoned approach. At one point he bellowed at her, "Who the hell do you think you're acting with, you silly little brute?" It's likely he was only half teasing, though the two got along famously after that.
Weidler made a few films for Paramount in the 1930s, but it was only after she signed with MGM that her career took off: Just two years before Born to Sing, she played what is probably her most memorable role, that of Katharine Hepburn's precocious little sister, Dinah, in The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which she performed a saucy version of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." After Born to Sing, Weidler went on to make four more films, after which she abandoned Hollywood for the stage. By the 1950s, though, she would leave acting altogether for marriage and children. She died in 1968, at age 41.
Weidler could be a charmer, but she was too much for some critics' tastes. The New York Times reviewer wrote of Born to Sing, "Another reminder that child actors are the world's No. 1 problem children arrived yesterday at the Criterion. For 'Born to Sing' is a painful kindergarten caper which serves a useful purpose, no doubt, in breaking the assorted infants to klieg lights and camera, but otherwise results in an exercise which only their mothers can love." That critic, who went by the initials T.S., did have some nice things to say about the "Ballad for Americans" finale, noting that Berkeley "might well be proud" of it. As Jeffrey Spivak notes in his study Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, this particular production number was "easily the most jingoistic of [Berkeley's] output." Spivak also notes, "The number (like his stacked finales at Warner Brothers) is self-contained and non-referential to the film it inhabits." "Ballad for Americans" may not quite fit in with the rest of Born to Sing. But it's nevertheless a reminder that in 1942, no one knew how the war would be resolved. America needed a boost--why not do it with a song?
SOURCES:
IMDb
Allmovie Guide
The New York Times
Jeffrey Spivak, The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, University Press of Kentucky, 2010
Producer: Frederick Stephani
Director: Edward Ludwig
Screenplay: Franz Schulz, Harry Clork; story by Franz Schulz
Cinematography: Sidney Wagner
Music: Lennie Hayton, David Snell; "Ballad for Americans" by John La Touche and Earl Robinson
Film Editing: Robert Kern
Cast: Virginia Weidler (Patsy Eastman), Ray McDonald (Steve), Leo Gorcey ("Snap" Collins), Douglas McPhail (Murray Saunders), Rags Ragland ("Grunt"), Sheldon Leonard (Pete Detroit)
[black-and-white, 82 minutes]
By Stephanie Zacharek
