Hollywood’s weirdest Depression-era musical, encompassing Leftist political leanings, racy pre-Code humor, and sequences of rhyming dialogue, as well as a striking and uncompromising ending. Homelessness has never looked more fun than it does here. The Central Park bums, led by smilin’ and singin’ Al Jolson, are a kind of proud society of free spirits who look down on the workaday public as sellouts. Meanwhile, the workers, as represented by Harry Langdon’s Marxist garbageman, look down on the bums and know that they’re not really free despite their rhetoric. Then there are the capitalists who solve all of their problems with money. Al Jolson, by virtue of sheer charisma, moves freely across all three facets of society. Despite being a park bum, he’s one of the confidantes of the mayor of New York City (Frank Morgan) and eventually joins the worker class himself after he falls in love with an amnesiac and wants to provide for her.
It’s an entertaining film, whatever your own politics are, that sparkles in an oddball, tragicomic space of its own apart from other musical-comedies of the time. The strange supporting cast of a few former silent film stars who hadn’t quite maintained their fame in the talkie-era (Langdon, the bizarre Chester Conklin) only makes this feel further out. Al Jolson’s own star was fading and this was another flop for him.
The songs (and the rhyming dialogue) come from Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart.