Note: This is the second in a series of posts on the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture. Check out my first post on first-ever winner Wings for a fuller explanation of what I’m doing.

When I started on this quest to see every winner of the Best Picture Oscar, I was a bit nervous about the older movies. With a few exceptions, I don’t generally enjoy really old movies. The stiff acting, the slow storytelling… it’s just not my thing. But after watching and rather enjoying 1927’s Wings, I began to feel better about the project. And that feeling lasted right up until I saw the second movie on the list, 1929’s The Broadway Melody.

The Broadway Melody was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, directed by  Harry Beaumont, and written by Edmund Goulding, Norman Houston, and James Gleason. It starred Bessie Love, Anita Page, and Charles King.

(A brief bit of Academy history: the first Academy Awards ceremony, which lasted 15 minutes, was in 1929 and awarded films made in 1927/1928. The second ceremony, held in 1930, was for films released between August 1928 and August 1929. That is why there appears to be a two-year gap between 1927’s Wings and 1929’s The Broadway Melody; it just worked out that no film released in 1928 won the award. This two-year span trend for the awards would remain in place until 1934, although each of the subsequent awards would go to a movie released the prior year. Also, the award won by Wings and The Broadway Melody was technically called The Academy Award for Outstanding Picture.)

Anita Page, Bessie Love and Charles King in The Broadway Melody

In addition to being the second movie to win the top award, The Broadway Melody had a bunch of other firsts. It was the first movie to feature a Technicolor sequence (which has, unfortunately, been lost). It was also MGM’s first musical and the first all-talkie Hollywood musical.

But for all those achievements, it unfortunately just isn’t a movie that has aged well. The plot is very paint-by-numbers: two small-town sisters, Hank and Queenie, arrive in New York with big aspirations to be Broadway stars. Hank’s fiance, Eddie, has connections that can get them a part in a big production, but when he sees Queenie, he immediately realizes that he’s in love with the wrong sister.

The movie plods along as the love triangle interferes with the production. Queenie, trying to hide her own feelings for Eddie, begins a relationship with notorious playboy Jock, and when both Eddie and Hank try to interfere, Queenie initially cuts them out of her life. Later, however, Eddie shows up to save Queenie when Jock gets a bit too forward, and in a time job that made me question if I had dozed off and missed an entire act of the movie, we suddenly catapult forward to find Eddie and Queenie married, with Hank having mostly forgiven her sister and agreed to give up Broadway to tour the country with their uncle.

I’m not alone in thinking the movie hasn’t aged well. It currently has a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and the consensus is that the staging of the musical might have been enough for audiences to overlook the poor acting and directing 90 years ago. Today, though, we’re so used to seeing lavish Hollywood musicals that do it all.