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DVD & Blu-ray · Reviews

Whoopee! released on DVD! (courtesy of the Goldwyn Archive)

avannemanwhoopee_blackfaceThe first review I wrote for Bright Lights was of Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (I left off the exclamation point) in the early days of the web (May 1998). This 1930 Sam Goldwyn/Flo Ziegfeld/Busby Berkeley 2-strip Technicolor, omni-racist, quasi-classic is now available on DVD at last, looking good and sounding great — better, surely, than it ever did before.

Also available, equally as racist but not nearly as good, is Kid Millions (1934), which makes shockingly little use of Ethel Merman. If you’ve got the stomach for blackface, you’ve got to see the big production number, Irving Berlin’s “Mandy,” featuring the fabulous and very young Nicholas Brothers. Yiddish theater fans might want to stick around for the second half, when Yiddish stage star Eva Sully makes her only film appearance as, of course, a sultan’s daughter. Watch for her in the clip below, around the 2:39 mark.

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Alan Vanneman

— Alan Vanneman

Alan Vanneman is a writer living in Washington, DC. He is the author of two dead-tree novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Giant Rat of Sumatra and Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara, both published by Penzler Press. Sherlock Holmes and the Hapsburg Tiara is available as an audiobook from Blackstone/Downpour. He is also the author of three new Nero Wolfe novellas recreating Rex Stout’s famous fat detective, a FREE ebook, and Author! Author! Auden, Oates, and Updike, a collection of two short stories and a novella, available both as an ebook and print on demand. All of his fiction can be accessed here at his blog Literature R Us. Portions of his article "Alfred Hitchcock: A Hank of Hair and a Piece of Bone," which originally appeared online in Bright Lights, have been included in a textbook anthology by Allison Smith, Trixie Smith, and Stacia Watkins.

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