The Broadway Melody

MGM’s first all-talking picture won the Academy’s top prize and set the backstage musical’s plot for a decade: the rehearsal, the break, the girl who gives up the boy. What dates is the staging; what lasts is Bessie Love. As Hank, the older and plainer sister, she carries the act, the money and the heartbreak, and she plays all three at a vaudevillian’s speed. Watch her last scene at the dressing-room mirror, wiping off greasepaint and crying, then pulling herself together for a telephone call and a train. Charles King sings the title song as if it were already a standard; within a year it was.