(2 of 3)
The Big Broadcast of 1936 (Paramount), a collection of specialty acts by radio entertainers, might have been much more satisfactory if its producers had not insisted on incorporating them into a story. Any narrative framework designed to include Amos 'n' Andy, Ray Noble, Ethel Merman, Henry Wadsworth, Lyda Roberti, Burns & Allen, Sir Guy Standing, Mary Boland, Charles Ruggles, Jack Oakie, Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears, Wendy Barrie, Bing Crosby, the Vienna Choir Boys and Bill Robinson could scarcely be distinguished for its spontaneity. The device which shackles them together in The Big Broadcast is a "tele-radio" set in which Oakie and Wadsworth, as two radio performers marooned in the castle of a crazy countess (Lyda Roberti), are able to see a series of broadcasts in which the other members of the cast do their turns. As self-conscious as it sounds, it is an artifice of which the only redeeming feature is that it may suit the baser tastes of the case-hardened radio addicts for whom the picture was patently designed.
Of the moments when The Big Broadcast offers its audience some respite from the story the most enjoyable are those in which Bill Robinson demonstrates that he is still the ablest tap-dancer in the world, Bing Crosby sings I Wished on the Moon and Ethel Merman cavorts with a chorus of elephants to a tune called It's the Animal in Me.
Storm over the Andes (Universal) tells an improbable story about an implausible group of wildcat aviators who help Bolivia win a fictitious war-in-the-air over the Gran Chaco. It inevitably portrays a cocky, ready-fisted individual (Jack Holt) whose general unpleasantness includes the fact that he can fly better than his comrades. When Holt falls in love with an unknown, charming lady (Mona Barrie) at a fiesta, she turns out to be the wife of his commanding officer (Antonio Moreno). Holt saves Moreno from perishing in the jungle after a crash, steals an enemy plane, bombs an ammunition dump, captures the Paraguayan ace, El Zorro, "the fox who flies like an eagle."
Equipped with appallingly threadbare dialog, Storm over the Andes gives a curious impression (except for the airplanes) of having been made 20 years ago when Cinemactor Moreno was matching wits with the Hooded Terror and other hobgoblins of the old serials.
Broadway Melody of 1936 (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). That capacity for taking the cinema conscientiously, which has kept Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from making a really good musical revue since the original Broadway Melody (1929), is forgotten, with happy results, in the present version. The proceedings evidently must have cost a lot of money and some pains but the result is pleasant entertainment. The people who sing and dance are not film stars who have learned some routines to appear in a musical but troupers who have made themselves famed as singers and dancers.