Sweet Music, directed by Alfred E. Green for Warner Brothers in 1935, is a relatively uninspired musical comedy, though the music is more inspired than the comedy, which consists of seltzer bottles squirted and violins broken over heads. Rudy Vallee leads his band and sings a number of nice songs, mostly by Harry Warren and Al Dubin, and Ann Dvorak does some dancing. Warner Brothers was still stuck on Busby Berkeley routines of overhead shots -- parodied in Sweet Music by men in drag, choreographed by Bobby Connolly -- and teen heartthrob Vallee was not a dancer and Ann Dvorak was a clunky one. The Warner Brothers musical was about to fall out of favor, replaced by the more subtle and elegant musicals of Rogers and Astaire for RKO; the year Sweet Music came out there was also the Rogers and Astaire Top Hat, with music by Irving Berlin and a much bigger budget than Warner Brothers ever spent on a musical. Of course the Astaire/Rogers musical was gradually replaced by the Technicolor musicals of MGM, produced by Arthur Freed and often directed by Vincente Minnelli, the only major American director to make musicals.
Rudy Vallee's voice gradually changed from tenor to baritone and he fell out of favor (though his radio show ran until 1955), only to be rediscovered by Preston Sturges, who used Vallee's deadpan speaking style to great comic effect in several movies, especially The Palm Beach Story (1942) where he is singing "Goodnight Sweetheart" outside Claudette Colbert's window, unaware that inside she is canoodling with Joel McCrea. Ann Dvorak had a major role in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) but often fought with studio heads and spent most of her career in B films. When she did get a good role, as in Albert Lewin's The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), she would make the most of it.
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