Spoonatects
Am i the only one who thinks........Average?
Taha Avalos
The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.
Juana
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
drednm
STAGE MOTHER is almost a great film, starring Alice Brady as a so-so Vaudevillian who pushes her daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan) into "the business" when it's clear she can't make it on her own. As in Applause (1929), we see the seedy side of the business with lots of backstage scenes. Film starts out with pregnant Kitty (Brady) watching her husband do an aerial act that goes bad. After she has the baby she goes to "his people" in Boston and is grudgingly taken in by the stereotypical Boston family. Eventually she can't stand it and moves out, leaving the kid. Years later she gets the kid back and pushes her into dancing lessons etc. Of course she becomes a star. She's preyed upon by men (Ben Alexander) and has romances with a couple guys (Franchot Tone and Phillips Holmes) before the end credits.Brady is great as the ferocious mother whose life centers on controlling her daughter while she lives off her. O'Sullivan (looking very busty indeed) is very good until she's supposed to be this dancing and singing mega star. O'Sullivan can't do either, so it's long shots of some other performer while O'Sullivan smiles sweetly in the close-ups. Tone and Holmes are fine as the romancers. Ted Healy plays a ham comic and the second husband. Others include Russell Hardie as Fred, Larry Fine (minus More and Curly) as a store customer, Lillian Harmer as the Boston mother, and C. Henry Gordon as the hood. No IMDb info on who plays the old maid sister or the auditioning kid singer.Songs include "Beautiful Girl," which also showed up that same year in GOING Hollywood and the infectious "Dancing on a Rainbow," which is a big production number. This MGM production has the look and feel of a Warners backstage musical, which in this case is a good thing.
MartinHafer
In some ways, "Stage Mother" is a decent film. But to me, it was really lacking something that it sorely needed....characters you could care about and like. Too often, folks are either jerks or plastic.When the film begins, Kitty (Alice Brady) is a stage star, as is her husband. However, he's killed and Kitty is stuck...pregnant and without much of a life for the kid. So, she moves in with the husband's family and spends a few years living the suburban life. However, she becomes bored and goes back to the hard life of the vaudeville stage and she leaves her daughter with his family. Years pass, Kitty's prospects are exhausted so she takes a behind the stage job--and brings her daughter, Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan) to live with her. Kitty doesn't do this out of the goodness of her heart. Her plan is to make Shirley a star and live off her! And for the remainder of the film, Kitty manipulates her daughter and sees her rise to the top. But, when Shirley meets a nice guy (Franchot Tone) and wants to settle down, Kitty decides to destroy this relationship for her own selfish reasons. What's next? See the film...or not.As I mentioned, the characters (particularly Kitty) all seem like low-lifes. As for Shirley, she's nice...but in a very bland way and has little backbone. All in all, a curiously uninvolving story that should have been either more humanized or more hard-edged. By the way, there are a lot of song and dance numbers that looked like they were choreographed by Busby Berkeley's less talented cousin...or dog.
kidboots
When Phillips Holmes signed a contract with MGM at the end of 1932 he had had a very up and down career at Paramount. When he was good (ie "Stolen Heaven") he was great, but when he was given a one dimensional role (ie "Confessions of a Co-Ed") he didn't have the ability to rise above the part. Even though he worked hard in 1933 (9 movies) he was obviously considered just another actor - he wasn't even considered important enough to be given a reasonable part in MGM's prestigious "Dinner at Eight", being relegated to Madge Evan's boyfriend, a part of only a few minutes screen time. Alice Brady, on the other hand, was having a wonderful professional year. She had been an ingenue in movie's early days but after a few setbacks left the movies for the stage where she dazzled critics with her performances. By 1933 she was ready to give movies another go and in this one she played the title role a "stage mother" and her eccentric mannerisms were kept to a minimum.Life has not been kind to Kitty (Brady) - her first husband is killed during a high wire vaudeville act (Russell Hardie looks impossibly young - young enough to be her son, it is not a good look) and husband number two (Ted Healy) is divorced for being caught once too often in a chorus girl's dressing room. She then pins all her hopes on her daughter, Shirley (O'Sullivan) who had been brought up by a puritanical aunt. If Warners had made the film it would have been a hard hitting expose of the real life of a young performer but MGM made Brady's character sympathetic by giving her a lot of humour. She becomes a "stage mother", pushing and prodding her daughter into dancing lessons that eventually pave the way to a Broadway show. As played by the fetching Maureen O'Sullivan, Shirley appears to have got by on her looks as her dancing in the big production number "Beautiful Girl" (Bing Crosby had a big hit with the song) is at best quite amateurish. You will definitely not mistake the dance routines for any that Busby Berkeley created!!!But Shirley's heart has never been into "showbiz" and when she meets artist Warren (Franchot Tone) who has bought her childhood home, she soon dreams of wedding bells. That romance is quickly killed by Kitty, who is not above turning up at his parent's home and demanding $10,000 to call the wedding off and she is also not above blackmailing the producer of Shirley's current show into tearing up her 5 year contract so she will be free to star in "Rainbow Girl"!!! Kitty gets a taste of her own medicine when she and Shirley are forced to flee the country as some gangsters feel Shirley is getting too chummy with Broadway angel Al Dexter.It is on the continent that Shirley meets Lord Aylesworth (Phillips Holmes in a particularly thankless role that lasts only a few minutes) and finds out what the upper crust really thinks of her pushy parent. There is the usual showdown, in this case Shirley tearfully admits that she denied Kitty was her mother but just as quickly she is begging forgiveness as Kitty shows her a letter from Warren (that she had hidden!!!), where he confesses he will never stop loving her.A nice movie to watch on a rainy afternoon but not one you will remember.
John Seal
Stage Mother is one of those astonishingly camp early '30s musicals that are worth watching for their outrageously over-the-top production numbers--in this case, Dancing on a Rainbow ("I'm higher than a kite!"). If that isn't pre-Code enough for you, however, there's also a swishy dance instructor (Jay Eaton) who chants "we are fairies, we are elves" and some extremely translucent dance wear that shows off some shapely gams to good effect. As for the story--well, the less said the better. Brassy Alice Brady is awful as titular pushy parent Kitty Lorraine, who forces ugly duckling daughter Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan, horribly mis-cast) to take up a career as an entertainer. The low-point comes when O'Sullivan bursts into song: her 'voice' clearly belongs to another, and little effort was made to align the actress' mouth with the words supposedly coming from it.
