Streaming on YouTube - Barrie Pattison locates an early Randolph Scott movie - BROKEN DREAMS (Robert Vignola, USA, 1933)

The wonders of technology and the digital highway have mustered their resources to provide us with a copy of 1933's long-inaccessible Broken Dreams. Attention quickens at the prospect of a lost Randolph Scott movie. This anticipation is only dampened by discovering that it's from Poverty Row's Monogram, under the direction of Robert Vignola, who handled the dire Colleen Moore version of  The Scarlet Letter a year later. On his first sound movie, Vignola, who did big Marion Davies silents like When Knighthood Was in Flower, doesn't seem to be uneasy with the staging but he appears blissfully unaware of how awful his weepy material is.

What made then-promising juvenile Randolph Scott abandon the Major Studios, where he was a regular beef cake feature, is not recorded. Maybe he needed fast cash or he wanted to prove he didn't have to strap on side arms and take off his shirt to play a lead. We'll never know. His performance gives the impression that he's been doing acting classes and plans on showing all the stuff he's learned.

We start with anguished Harvard Medical School graduate Randy, in a white coat, being told that his wife has just died in childbirth. Her aged parents (I think) Beryl Mercer (All Quiet on the Western Front) and Joseph Cawthorn (Music in the Air) are cooing over the baby but our hero can't bear to look at it. He determines to hit the road in hobo stubble but professor Clarence Geldert tells him that he's put his protegé forward for a position with the world's greatest surgeon (in Vienna of course) - feeble montage ending on diploma.

Meanwhile the kid, grown to be young Buster Phelps (the Garbo Anna Karenina), calls Mercer & Cawthorn "Mom & Pop" in their local pet shop, where he gets to play with a chimpanzee – at last a character we can empathise with! Randy, now a leading pediatrician, is engaged to socialite Martha Sleeper, without telling her about Buster.

 

Confronted with the kid, Randy abruptly goes all paternal and dumps Martha's matinee booking for a children's party. She is appalled to find Randy in a paper hat at the pet shop in "a cheap, horrible neighbourhood." They get into a serious conversation about bloodlines and Randy resorts to Edward LeSaint's court to reclaim young Buster. I would have thought he'd have second thoughts about a six-year-old in make-up.

Well predictably, things go South when the kid moves into the nice family home under the tutelage of governess Adele St. Maur, who teaches him French. They think that is funny. They are wrong. Butler Sidney Bracey is much more sympathetic about Phelps hiding the chimp and a proper boy's dog in his bedroom. With Randy off performing vital surgery, the home situation deteriorates and Buster is injured. I won't tell you how that works out - even for the dog that looks like a rat. It's too embarrassing.

The script pours on the grief and adds in some observations on parenting that they probably considered thoughtful or at least likely to send the audience home happy.

 

This has got to be Randy's worst movie. Implausible damp damp-eyed clichés are played out in distractingly ugly hand-me-down (no designer credit) studio decors. Attention wanders. While it's over in just an hour, the film still has the viewer checking the clock. Each fade-in provides an image setting up a predictable situation that we really don't want to see worked out. Later MGM ace cameraman Robert Plank might have been expected to provide more imposing images. His moonlight in the bedroom gets by but we've seen that in the silents.

 

The only one who comes out of it credibly is Sleeper in a glamour wardrobe, the once blonde ingenue from Hal Roach shorts. She gets the film's only shaded character, given to busily buffing her nails and smoking at the dinner table. It gives Kay Francis B movie competition. As for Randy, even in this one, he still looks like he'd be a plausible leading man if someone told him what to do.

 

Watch for a line of dialogue that has been muted in the Mc.Cult Hollywood copy on YouTube - listed as "Randolph Scott Classic Romance Drama Movie 1933" with the credits chopped off, which I list here. (There is a better copy, with credits, here.)

 

 

BROKEN DREAMS Directed by Robert G. Vignola, story Olga Printzlau, Script Maude Fulton, Produced by Ben Verschleiser, Trem Carr ... vice president in charge of production, Cinematography by Robert H. Planck, Editing by Carl Pierson, Sound recordist John Stransky Jr, Technical director E.R. Hickson, Monogram Pictures United States, 1933.

 

WITH Randolph Scott ... Dr. Robert Morley

Martha Sleeper ... Martha Morley

Beryl Mercer ... Mom

Joseph Cawthorn ... Pop

Buster Phelps ... Billy Morley

Charlotte Merriam ... Grace

Sidney Bracey ... Butler Hopkins

Adele St. Maur/Mauer ... Mademoiselle

Phyllis Lee ... Nurse

Martin Burton ... Paul

Clarence Geldert ... Dr. Fleming

Edward LeSaint ... Judge Harvey E. Blake

Finis Barton ... Gladys (uncredited)

Sam Flint ... Dr. Greenwood (uncredited)

George Nash ... Undetermined Role (uncredited)