When Your Lost In The Rain In…Hollywood And You Don’t Know What To Do-Dick Powell’s “Hollywood Hotel” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

Hollywood Hotel, starring Dick Powell, the Lane sisters (important since this film involves mistaken identities, well-known gossip columnist Luella Parson, Benny Goodman and his Orchestra, classic song Hooray for Hollywood by Johnny Mercer, directed by master dance man Bugby Berkeley, 1937    

In case anybody is following the “dispute” between the old wizened ex-film editor and now in his dotage occasional spot reviewer Sam Lowell I can call a truce here in the film under review Bugby Berkeley’s Hollywood Hotel. Reason: Sam Lowell has been quoted, quoted around the water cooler and I have my mentor Seth Garth as witness that he wouldn’t touch a musical, a song and dance film, with a ten-foot pole and when he was, way back when probably when the films came out in the 1930s and he was dodging them, assigned them to stringers or some female in the office. (To set the record, a couple of records, straight Seth and Sam actually go a long way back to their days as what Seth calls “corner boy” days growing up in working class town North Adamsville but Seth is “pissed” off at Sam these days since he, Sam, had been a leader in getting their mutual old friend and former site administrator Allan Jackson dumped, purged some say, under the theme that the, as Seth put it to me, “torch had to be passed” and he has balked at doing so in his own case. But enough of internal office water cooler politics. More pressing, more pressing because my partner is getting “pissed” at the rumors, there is nothing, nothing romantic, between Seth and I although if he was younger and did not have a wife, all these guys, all these corner boys, seem to have set some record for collectively marrying, I would certainly be interested and let’s leave it at that. Hey, Seth is old enough to be my grandfather for Christ sakes.)              

Sam needed not have worried about getting this assignment since I was more than happy to take it as I had recently been talking to my grandmother and she mentioned, after hearing that I had been taken on at this publication although she mixed it up with American Film Gazette which she used to read to find out what critics thought of films she was interested in seeing, that she wished I would spent some time reviewing earlier films, films from the 1930s and 1940s when they were out in Hollywood producing films to get people through the gloomy Great Depression and what she called fretting  through World War II. She mentioned that she would take my mother during the 1960s to Ann Arbor, to the University Cinema, to watch retrospectives from that period. I mentioned that my mother had not done so, had not taken me to such events maybe having four kids stopped her in her tracks I don’t know. Grandma said that my mother had loved the musicals and that would be a good place for me to start. I actually watched a couple of Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films with fellow reviewer Leslie Dumont who was doing a retrospective on their ten- film series a while back. When Greg put this on the assignment board I went for it.       

Seth mentioned that if things were true to form, if he knew his old pal Sam Lowell he knew the reason why Sam would have passed this film on to some stringer, somebody down in the food chain. (I can’t resist this but there is a persistent rumor going around that after Sam made his big splash with what they still call the definitive book on film noir back in the 1970s he basically “mailed in,” had stringers do his reviews under his by-line or just ripped the press releases from the studios off the board and passed them in as his own but that is part of our dispute, so I will avoid going further here.) Sam would have turned his nose down at the lead performer here Ronnie Bowers, played by Dick Powell who started out as a song and dance man but who later did some serious noir work, especially in the film adaptation of crime novelist Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (on screen Murder, My Sweet). Old school Sam, very old school if you ask me, would have had a field day comparing the ah shucks, starry-eyed Dick Powell of this Bugby Berkeley production (according to Seth and my grandmother too he was the king of exotic spectacular chorus line dance productions although this film is mainly a musical effort) with the tough guy, wind-mill chasing, searching a little rough justice, dame-chasing, take a punch or two, a slug or two for the cause Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe. ((The above courtesy of mentor Seth since I have not watched many earlier such noir films.)      

Frankly I liked the starry-eyed going to Hollywood Dick Powell character, big band Benny Goodman sax player, since I once when I was about ten crazy with an idea that I would grow up to be a movie star, a dream like about ten million others trying to beat the odds against success and a trip to the seamy side of the Hollywood experience. Ronnie winds up in Hollywood in the hotel of the title to wait upon stardom, or go back to Peoria, Butte, Boise, Toledo, Portland or wherever he or any star-struck kid came from. Fate takes a hand early since not only can Ronnie play sax, although we never see that being used by our man but can sing which will be his “hook.” This is where the classic Hollywood hook, who knows maybe all of Western literary convention, boy meets girl that has saved many a B-film comes in. (This nugget according to Seth who can sniff out this trope in half the films ever produced according to Leslie Dumont).          

A famous star, Mona Marshall, a drama queen if there ever was one, played by one of the Lane sisters, was to attend a world premier with all the glitter Hollywood can muster and is supposed to attend that event with her co-star, her leading man. But she blows town in a snit. Problem, problem for the studio who is on the hook. Enter waitress Rosemary, played by the other Lane sister, who bears a striking resemblance to Mona. Bingo do the switch and bait. Problem, co-star would know the difference. Enter Ronnie. And the start of the boy meets girl romance (and singing duos too). When Mona gets wind of what happened she went storming creating holy hell. Meanwhile waitress goes back to work and Ronnie waits upon the fates until the next move. Next move turns on the ability to sing on key which co-star cannot as the next film premier demonstrated. Enter Ronnie to save the day for a price. Bingo.  But what about waitress budding romance (the good and steady Lane as opposed to the drama queen Lane). No problem as they do the old switch again and now both Ronnie and Rosemary can sing up a storm on the silver screen while legendary Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons and Benny Goodman and his Orchestra look on. According to my grandmother this type film got her and her family through a few days of the Depression thinking golden thoughts of Hollywood dreams. And she is probably right in her recollections.