Matte shot before
Composite matte shot afterwards
FOLLOW THRU B-
USA (92 mi) 1930
d: Lloyd Corrigan and Laurence Schwab
Only the second all-talking, all-color feature produced by
Paramount Studios, the first being the Jeanette MacDonald operetta THE VAGABOND
KING (1930), a film that uses the early two-color Technicolor process, one of over
700 Paramount productions filmed between 1929 and 1949 that were sold to
MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and
controlled by Universal ever since. However,
because of legal complications, apparently with rights issues associated with
Laurence Schwab, this particular title was not included in the original television
package and has never been televised. In
fact, most have only seen it on poor quality VHS copies. It was a contractual stipulation that all
Technicolor negatives would be housed on the company’s premises. In the mid 1950’s, with the two-color process
completely obsolete, the company began systematically to destroy its negatives
from the twenties and early thirties, yet for some reason this film was spared
and eventually preserved in 1989 by the UCLA Film & Television Archive,
where it can be seen exclusively in rare theater screenings, like the recent resurrection
of the Northwest
Chicago Film Society after nearly a year-long absence, finding a new home
in the newly upgraded auditorium of Northeastern University, bringing in a new
screen, sound system, and lugging their old projection equipment to this new
venue that seats 400 people with stadium seating. Specializing in presenting rare and classic
films in their original format, 16 mm or 35 mm prints, always opening with a
comic short, the screenings spotlight the restoration efforts of archives,
studios, and private collectors. By the
mid 1920’s, thousands of musical shorts hit the screens, but sound was only
available for the musical numbers, while the actors portrayed their characters
just as they did in silent films, with no audible dialogue. While several earlier sound films did have
dialogue, they all were all short films until Warner Brothers released the
first feature-length part-talkie starring Al Jolson in The
Jazz Singer (1927), with the star performing six songs. The high production cost was a major gamble,
as Harry Warner stopped taking a salary, pawned jewelry belonging to his wife,
and moved his family into a smaller apartment.
But the gamble paid off, developing into a major hit, demonstrating the
profit potential for talking pictures. But
immediately afterwards, only isolated sequences featured sound, usually the
musical production numbers. It wasn’t
until the second Jolson hit was released, The
Singing Fool (1928), that theater owners scrambled to install sound
equipment into their theaters, hiring Broadway composers to write musicals for
the screen. The first all-talking
feature, Lights of New York (1928), included
a musical sequence in a night club, where the enthusiasm of audiences was so
great that in less than a year all the major studios were making sound pictures
exclusively. One of them was the most
popular film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), which
broke all box office records and remained the highest grossing film ever
produced until 1939 when GONE WITH THE WIND broke attendance records everywhere. Suddenly the market became flooded with
musicals, revues and operettas, where Hollywood released more than 100 musical
films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931, as audiences had been oversaturated with
musicals and studios were forced to cut the music from films that were then
being released. It wasn’t until 1933
that Busby Berkeley revived an interest in musicals with his ingeniously
choreographed routines, involving human bodies forming patterns like a
kaleidoscope, literally transcending the reach of the actual stage in 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), radically
transforming the look of musical films forever.
So when was the last time you saw a golf musical? When this movie was released in September,
1930, music was commonly being stripped out of films, as audiences were staying
away, so Paramount released the film with little fanfare, where it received
so-so reviews and was quickly forgotten, surviving in a somewhat battered print
and negative retained in the storage
facilities of the Technicolor Corporation, only to emerge sixty years later in
a restored and pristine condition, serving as an example of one of Hollywood’s
earliest color films (List of early color feature films),
and one of the breeziest and most lighthearted of the early musicals. Following the standard procedures of the
times, Paramount bought the rights of a successful Broadway musical, using the
same cast, but replacing the leads with their own studio stars, in this case
matinee idol Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who starred opposite Clara Bow in the
first Academy Award winning picture WINGS in 1927, and the beautiful and
talented Nancy Carroll, almost forgotten today, a redhead who received the most
fan mail of any star in the early 30’s, but was eventually released from the
studio after earning a Diva reputation for recalcitrance and being
uncooperative. You’d never know it here,
playing one of America’s sweethearts, with that rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed smile
conveniently shot in close up that’s liable to generate oohs and aahs for just how
sweet she looks. Lacking the pace of the
Broadway success, much of the uneven tempo can be attributed to an
inexperienced first-time director, Lloyd Corrigan, who began his Hollywood
career as a writer, including the first talking Fu Manchu movies starring
Warner Oland as Charlie Chan. FOLLOW
THRU was his first directing assignment, where Paramount added Laurence Schwab,
the original writer of the Broadway show, as a co-director. Opening with an odd and rather dated sequence
where Mac Moore (Claude King), a Scottish golf pro at a swank Southern
California country club grows excited at the idea of teaching the game of golf
to his newborn, but he’s disappointed to learn it’s a girl. Nonetheless, groomed to be a champion golfer
from birth, with a golf ball dangled above her eyes in a baby carriage to teach
her to keep her eyes on the ball, Lora Moore (Nancy Carroll) grows up to be an
adorable and charming young golf protégée, seen early on in a tournament with
Mrs. Van Horn (Thelma Todd), a snooty and domineering, wealthy widow from a
rival country club who’s used to things going her way, heard coughing
throughout the match just as Lora was about to putt, an underhanded tactic that
irks Lora’s caddie, Angie Howard (Zelma O’Neal), more than it seems to bother
Lora, whose eyes meet across the green with Jerry (Buddy Rogers), a former golf
instructor of Mrs. Van Horn, who reminds him throughout the picture of how “closely”
they worked together, always inviting him back to her private residence on
Pebble Beach, where the golfing vernacular is put through the ringer in sexual innuendos. In no time, Lora, Angie, and Mrs. Van Horn
are all vying for the young man’s attention, but Lora hires him on the spot for
a few special putting tips that lead to several songs and early signs of
romance.
In what is easily the strangest twist, and one of the
weirdest things you’ll ever see, the film also introduces newcomer Jack Haley,
the iconic Tin Man in THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), as Jack Martin, the million
dollar heir to his father’s department store chain, whose pathological shyness
in front of women is revealed in a nervous eye and face twitch that shows him
“getting excited.” While he’s
embarrassed whenever this happens in public, always trying to hide it from
girls, his stunning naiveté and portrayal of a millionaire weakling is equally bizarre,
making him one of the more singularly peculiar characters in the history of
cinema. However, his openness in talking
about his “condition” is what you might call locker room conversation, as he
speaks freely about it with Jerry, who he’s hired as his personal golfing
instructor. Added to the mix is Eugene
Pallette as J.C. Effingham, another wealthy country club member who made his
millions selling women’s girdles, immediately recognizable with his broad humor
and girth, as he has a Jackie Gleason quality about him. In one of the racier scenes of the film,
Martin and Effingham disguise themselves (with gigantic moustaches) as plumbers
in order to sneak into the women’s locker room where black hostesses in nurse
attire walk around with trays serving cocktails, their purpose presumably to
retrieve a family heirloom Jack gave away (to Angie) during one drunken outing,
where the couple is seen together singing Button Up Your Overcoat. All the songs are staged as they were in the
Broadway show, except one, sung by Angie as evening entertainment at a masquerade
ball somewhere “out of the country,” turning into the wildest scene in the
film, I WANT TO BE BAD
(from FOLLOW THRU - 1930) - YouTube (5:46).
After a devilish opening song and dance, complete with little child
devils dressed in red, the film features dazzling visual effects where a group
of winged chorus girls dressed in white arrive superimposed at the top of the
screen, as if descending through the clouds from heaven, creating a Busby Berkeley
choreographed style that turns into a hallucination, as after a thunder bolt,
the costumes all turn red, with the wings replaced by little devil horns, where
they work themselves into such a frenzied state, with the trumpets “breathing
fire,” that they literally burst into flames, which doesn’t stop the dancers,
who keep performing even while engulfed in a blazing inferno. Not to be deterred, heaven presses a fire
alarm, sending down an angelic fire truck to extinguish the flames, restoring
order in the universe once again. It’s
easily the wackiest moment of a film that features fairly mediocre singing and
plenty of hammed overacting.
Nonetheless, it’s all in good fun, where in the innocence of the
Hollywood universe, romantic attractions happen instantly, where everyone falls
head over heels in love just at the sight of someone. It’s only a matter of time before they’re
linked to wedding bells and everyone lives happily ever after. The film is silly fun and something of a weird
delight, where anything resembling divorce or discontent is saved for another
movie, as this one is all peaches and cream, where the romantic theme song written
especially for the movie is reprised at the finale, “A Peach of a Pair.”
