All-Star Vaudeville (1935) watch online HD

All-Star Vaudeville (1935)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

The fourth film in Warner's "Vaudeville Reel" series has another four acts trying to recreate the vaudeville days. Up first is The On-wah Troupe, some Chinese performers doing all sorts of body tricks, which pretty much means they're twisting their arms and legs to make them look like a pretzel. Up next is Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields doing "Why Don't You Practice What You Preach," a very catchy little number that just happens to be the highlight of the film. Up next Pat Rooney and Pat Rooney, Jr. do their act, which includes a song with each of them talking about how great it would be to be better than their dads. The fourth and final act is The Runaway Four, a group of men dressed like sailors who do various dances and all of it built around some slapstick, which includes several kicks to their butts. ALL-STAR VAUDEVILLE isn't a masterpiece but it's certainly entertaining enough for fans of this type of material to enjoy. I think the best act was Seeley and Fields doing their catchy tune but all four are actually pretty entertaining here. At just 9-minutes the short goes by at a very fast pace and it at least gives people of today a chance to see what a vaudeville show would be like.

I'm sure that the Vaudeville performers who are featured in this short subject from Warner Brothers were grateful for the work. It was in fact the advent of motion pictures that killed live vaudeville shows. The day that Al Jolson spoke and sang on screen was finis for vaudeville.

Acts like Pat Rooney Sr. and Jr. and Benny Fields and Blossom Seeley would do hundreds of dates a year in lots of tank towns and bigger venues like Shea's in my town of Buffalo or the fabled Palace in New York City. We should be grateful that their art is preserved even if it is just in these short films. Fields and Seeley were both prominent single performers who married and became a double act. Pat Rooney Sr. is probably best known today for introducing the song More I Cannot Wish You from Guys And Dolls.

No Vaudeville bill would be complete without acts like the contortionists and the dance troupe that opened and closed this Vitagraph short.

My only complaint, we never got to see Fink's Mules who were a trained animal act who George Burns made famous by referring to them constantly when he talked about his days in Vaudeville.

When motion pictures started out, they often played as part of a vaudeville show. By the time this short came out, the roles had been reversed and the bigger movie houses in the major cities would have variety acts to class up their shows. This one shows some good acts, including Chinese acrobats, singers, dancers and sailor-suited comedy acrobats.

No comics, no animal acts, no musical soloists, though. The genre would dead-end in television variety shows like Ed Sullivan's long-running program and die out in the 1980s with the final fracturing of much of what had been mass-standardized American culture. It survived a bit longer in Great Britain. Here, though, it's still pretty lively and this one-reel effort helps fill a movie program nicely.

Quite the unusual cast of characters are combined to produce this vaudeville styled film short, with an unusual Chinese acrobatic troupe called the 'Om-Wahs' opening up the show. Their forte was twisting their bodies into unusual positions as contortionists with superb body control. For what they did, it was an interesting segment.

Following them was the married team of Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields, names I first became familiar with while reading a biography of their contemporaries, The Marx Brothers. As a duo they were billed as Seeley and Fields, here singing "Why Don't You Practice What You Preach". Passable, but not particularly exciting. However they were a little better than the father and son singers Pat Rooney, Senior and Junior. I don't know what it was but I found them to be just a bit creepy in their presentation. Could be just me.

The final act was a bit of a head scratcher, as four guys dressed in sailor suits and billed as the Run Away Four did a sequence of acrobatic flips and fey dance steps that came across to this viewer as kind of goofy. It's not much of a wonder to my mind that we never heard of these acts again.

The On-Wah Troupe, an East Asian group of acrobats perform some amazing stunts. Next, Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields sing a duet of the song, "Why Don't You Practice What You Preach". While the song is enjoyable, the performance by Seeley and Fields is just okay. Third up, father and son Pat Rooney and Pat Rooney Jr. perform a recitation and dance musing about if they will ever be as clever as their dad--and like the previous act, it's not particularly outstanding though when they danced, it was a bit of an improvement. And, speaking of dancing, the last act on the bill is The Runaway Four, a group of comical acrobats--and they were cute and enjoyable. Overall, watching this is like a trip back to Vaudeville...both the good and the bad. And the best of it was the On- Wahs.