Shopping at the Dollar Tree for a passel of leather chew rolls for the dogs, I recently happened to pick up a one buck VHS tape of the 1933 MGM musical comedy, Roman Scandals. (Hold onto some of yer twentieth century electronics, kids, 'cause there's still o' bunch of cheap entertainment to be found in it!)
A vehicle for banjo-eyed trouper Eddie Cantor, the flick's an enjoyable amalgam of pre-Hays Code one-liners and Busby Berkeley-directed showgirl set pieces. Cantor plays an easy-going chump in a Depression Era small-town called New Rome; when he runs afoul of the town avaricious rich guy, he's kicked out of town – and as he tramps his way along the dusty road, he gets conked on the head (or sump'n) and dreams he is back in ancient Rome. In dream Rome, he runs afoul of the Emperor Valeria (durable bad guy Edward Arnold), whose double-dealings none too surprisingly parallel those that we’ve already seen in New Rome.
Not much different from the kind of movie comedy that Danny Kaye would be making in the forties and fifties (there's even a poisoned food bit that anticipates one of Kaye's more famous movie routines), Cantor gets several song-and-dance bits (music courtesy of Al Dubin and Harry Warren) in addition to his good-natured clowning about.
The Busby Berkeley showpieces provide his pronounced blend of the titillating and the bizarre. In one, singer Ruth Etting, playing one of the emperor's slave girls, does a torch ballad that turns into a long parade of "naked" blond-haired lovelies being chained to the wall and whipped as a group of fat Roman senators leer suggestively. (On the basis of this and Hips, Hips, Hooray!, Rute Etting seemed to have a knack for getting prime billing in pictures that basically required her to sing one big number and then disappear for the rest of the movie.)
In a second, Cantor disguises himself as an "Ethiopian beauty specialist" using some remarkably durable mud to put himself in blackface. He sings to a chorus girl audience of blond slaves and their black hairdressers – who both get to tap and parade around in typical Berkeley fashion before Cantor is inadvertently exposed by lifting his toga while dancing and showing off his lily white thighs. They force him into a steam room to get the rest of the mud off him, and then turn on the steam. But when he emerges, he's Billy Barty with the mud still on him!
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