The best I can say about The Broadway Melody is it's a bad movie. Otherwise I'd be overstepping my bounds as critic to sound more like an anti-early screen musical zealot than the refined movie reviewer I'm trying to be.

Tagged with the description, "ALL TALKING ALL SINGING ALL DANCING," this Harry Beaumont-directed picture is as dated and nearly unwatchable as anything produced for moviegoers before or since the film's release in 1929. Characters are as thick as wet cardboard. The plot is as contrived as a bad episode from one of today's lowest rated TV sitcoms. Musical numbers are designed to a standard long since eclipsed by later, and far superior, musicals. Altogether the movie is flat and ineffective from its opening frames, through its silent cinemaesque titles and on into concluding moments that wash over the picture like a wave of long sought relief.

The Broadway Melody holds up only as a curio from earlier times. It isn't a very satisfying picture and its entertainment standard is the kind early twentieth century naysayers of moving pictures would have pointed to as a reason for ignoring movies in favor of live theater.

What mystifies me upon further reflection is exactly how this film could ever have been the Academy Award winning picture in light of my wholly negative feelings about it. My sense of wonder arises not simply because of my reaction or because the movie's outdated quality relates to its release during the transition from silent movies into sound. Instead I'm trying to realize if the kind of entertainment showcased in this film was state of the art in 1929 or if the movie's Academy Award was for Academy founder, and MGM head, Louis B. Mayer as his just rewards for devotion to the film industry.

When realizing MGM's influence over the first 12 years of the Academy Awards with five picture of the year wins for The Broadway Melody in 1928-1929, Grand Hotel in 1931-1932, Mutiny on the Bounty in 1935, The Great Ziegfeld in 1936 and Gone with the Wind in 1939, the award was likely more for its studio boss than for any individual merits. This kind of influence cannot be overstated. Nor can the fact that what one era's industry elite regards as great will be upheld in future generations who lack the personal and political ties of a particular circumstance.

The one component of The Broadway Melody still capable of holding our interest today is the way its story displays a set of stock situations and now-cliché ridden characters that have since been beloved in movies for years. Opening with Queenie and Hank Mahoney, (Anita Page and Bessie Love), the Mahoney Sisters, a two-woman song and dance team fresh from a string of regional musical theater successes, the pair arrives in Manhattan to make it big on the Great White Way. Their first assignment is to debut a new song called "The Broadway Melody" that's been written by Hank's on again, off again boyfriend Eddie Kearns (Charles King), himself a Broadway performer and songwriter.

When they audition the song for Eddie's producer, Zanfield (Eddie Kane), Queenie is quickly singled out for her beauty while Hank is increasingly marginalized as Queenie's sidekick. Unfortunately Eddie also forsakes Hank for Queenie and wins her affection over rich rival Jock Warriner (Kenneth Thomson). In the end everyone is reconciled, Eddie and Queenie marry and Hank is paired with another female performer courtesy of her stuttering Uncle Jed (Jed Prouty).

There are also cameos by the movie's composer, Nacio Herb Brown, and the movie's lyricist, Arthur Freed. Along with veiled references to Warner Bros. head Jack Warner through Thomson's character "Jock Warriner" and the legendary promoter Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. through Kane's character "Francis Zanfield, the picture is an insider's look into musical theater and movie production during the early twentieth century.

Unfortunately it's not a particularly detailed look inside the entertainment industries. As such it seems more like producers Irving Thalberg and Lawrence Weingarten were trying to please various friends and potential investors more than they were trying to deliver the goods on what we would later call a back stage musical.

Yet the movie does feature the sound film debut of new songs from the composition notebooks of Brown, Freed, George M. Cohan and Willard Robinson making the picture the first musical to win picture of the year honors. It includes variously entertaining and shockingly amateurish song and dance numbers, among them the film's title song three times over, "You Were Meant for Me" and "The Wedding of the Painted Doll."

In these signature sequences capitalizing on the new sound technology little can be said for their visual appeal or even their musical success. Static camera placements, dubbed singers and clumsy acrobatics mar much of the action although the building blocks of future brilliance can be seen in the choreography of dancers used as components of exciting visual fields. Of course it was unknown that later production numbers would be more impressively organized around lyricist-turned-producer Freed in his so-called Freed unit of the 1930s, '40s and '50s but the germ of greatness is present in The Broadway Melody even if you have to look hard to find it.

When considering the turn to sound movies in the late 1920s it must always be remembered that it was a revolution in screen entertainment. Innovations aside, it was also a moment of adjustment and failure in that old aesthetic styles and standards of performance, direction, writing, editing, production design, cinematography and literally every other element of a film's production were changed to suit the spoken word.

Actors and actresses had to be understandable in the native language of their eventual audience despite however remarkable they were to silent film audiences. More than a few non-English speakers or prominent movie personalities with squeaky voices were therefore ushered out of the industry just as sound recording equipment was initially so large as to prohibit adequate camera mobility.

Seeing these complications as the necessary baby steps of what should be rightfully regarded as a new medium, the sound film, The Broadway Melody's accomplishments are obviously antique though no less justifiably impressive when considering the moment. The second year of competitive awards sponsored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the period 1928-1929 saw Beaumont's picture competing with Alibi, Hollywood Revue, In Old Arizona and The Patriot. That each of these movies is caught in the vacuum of changing times is not to cruelly slight their accomplishments in comparison to later years so much as it's to remember how the late '20s saw the death of silent movies and the birth of what we now know as the cinema.

If my jaundiced eye were to ignore how entrenched my opinions are in the world of sound movies and visual effects extravaganzas I wouldn't be worth the pile of words at my disposal. Even so it's not in my job description to ignore what a movie is when viewed through circumstances that differ from the time of its original release.

The Broadway Melody is a piece of history and like many pieces of history it isn't particularly noteworthy. In fact it's often dated, silly and nearly unwatchable. Still, it's been remembered across the passage of years and should thus be looked at by those who consider themselves serious about the movies.