Stage Mother (1933) User Reviews (11)

Stage Mother falls on its face in the last act.

[st-shot · 5/10 · 3 June 2011]

Husband wife high wire act Freddy and Kitty Lorraine split up the team while she tends to having a child. When dad is killed in a fall she and the new baby move in with his staid New England parents. Buzz killers from the outset Kitty decides to take kid Shirley (Maureen O'Sullivan) on the road and push her into a stage career. With mom managing her career gets traction and she's soon headlining. Making a nostalgic visit to her old home in Boston she meets Warren (Franchot Tone) a painter and the two fall in love. When mom gets wind of it though she puts a stop to it as well as shake down his family for ten grand. Shirley is devastated and seeks to get out from under the influence of her mother.

Stage Mom is Alice Brady's picture as she cajoles and plays hardball with all comers to advance her daughter's career including pimping her to a prominent politician causing things to get hot enough to blow town and head for Europe. Brady's raspy voice suits her hard bargaining style well as she negotiates with some pretty tough customers along the way. O'Sullivan's Shirley is sharp innocent counterpoint to a point of insipid. She dances poorly and remains naive and childlike most of the picture while her suitors (Franchot Tone and Phillip Holmes) can only wish they had a backbone like Kitty.

The dance scenes are flat and uninspired as director Charles Brabin does his best to mask O'Sullivan's abysmal hoofing abilities with close-ups while at the same time offering some pretty racy pre code enforcement shots of the chorus replete in diaphanous costume.

There are a handful of well played scenes (particularly with C. Henry Gordon) in Stage Mother as Brady brawls her way to the top with tough talk and a touch of extortion void of sentiment but in the end it depends on sentimental tug to bring the curtain down and the limpid denouement forcing Kitty to go meekly simply reinforces the films mediocrity.

Mama is going to see to it

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 2 January 2014]

If you find yourself humming the songs from Gypsy after seeing this film you can't help it. What Alice Brady does with the title role in Stage Mother makes what Ethel Merman did on stage and Rosalind Russell on the big screen as Mama Rose would make Mama blush.

Left with a baby daughter to raise after her husband is killed during a performance of their high wire act, Brady takes the little girl to her in-laws in Boston where they still frowned on associating with the theatrical profession. She can't provide so for a while she leaves the girl with the in-laws and takes up with fellow performer Ted Healy.

But eventually Brady quits the stage for the business end of show business working for a booking agent. And when she discovers that her daughter who grows up to be Maureen O'Sullivan and has talent, watch out world.

Watching this film all I thought of was how unfortunate Gypsy wasn't written two generations earlier. What Brady could have done with Mama Rose.

Sad to say that the film is spoiled by a really bad ending which I won't reveal. Look for good performances by Franchot Tone and Phillips Holmes as a pair of callow youths O'Sullivan takes up with. Holmes comes with a title as well. Also if you look quick you'll see Larry Fine of the Three Stooges in a small part.

Snappy before the Code dialog and a great performance by Brady are wasted in an unreal climax.

Mom pushes daughter right into show biz

[ksf-2 · 7/10 · 30 January 2009]

With the rows and rows of dancing girls all in unison, I would have sworn that Busby Berkley or Ziegfeld had to be involved in this, but no sign of them mentioned on IMDb. Alice Brady is Kitty Lorraine, the pushy mom who makes sure her daughter Shirley (Maureen O Sullivan) gets ahead in show biz. As usual, Brady is loud and a little lower-class, but you know exactly where you stand, and she means well. O'Sullivan made a whole bunch of Tarzan movies, and was in the Thin Man. Franchot Tone is Shirley's boyfriend in one of his earliest film roles. O'Sullivan sings (or pretends to sing) several numbers. Story is soooo similar to Gypsy Rose Lee... she would have been about 20 when this film came out. Novel and screenplay of "Stage Mother" written by Bradford Ropes. Viewers will recognize Alice Brady as the silly giggling aunt from Gay Divorcée; she seems to have died young at 47. The cast list shows Larry Fine (one of the Stooges) as a customer in the music store, but I must have missed him. Fun story. Plot starts a little slow and sad, but gets better as it goes along. Director Charles Brabin had been making films for 20 years, and this was one of the last ones he made. Turner Classic shows this now & then, and has it listed as G rated, but that can't be right....

Move Over, Mamma Rose!

[marcslope · 19 May 2004]

For most of its length, a good, tough melodrama of a mama (Alice Brady, excellent) living her life through her reluctant daughter (Maureen O'Sullivan), pushing her into show business and scaring away her suitors, and with them any chance of happiness.

Co-screenwriter Bradford Ropes, who also wrote the novel on which "42nd Street" is based, knew this tawdry milieu intimately and wasn't afraid to expose its seamy sides; fortunately, the movie came just before the Production Code, so its portrayal of the shabbiness and moral compromises of the show biz doesn't pull its punches. It resembles "Gypsy" and the great early talkie "Applause," and in particular, its look at backstage and onstage vaudeville is historically fascinating. Its main shortcoming is a too-fast, too-tidy final reel that races unconvincingly toward a happy ending. Also, Maureen O'Sullivan, pretty and spirited as always, doesn't really convince as a young miss aiming to become the toast of Broadway. (She's dubbed, and that's clearly a double dancing in the long shots.) Till that rushed denouement, though, it's a brash and winning backstager, and Brady's uncompromising, unsympathetic performance stays with one for days.

Alice Brady pushes Maureen O'Sullivan

[wes-connors · 6/10 · 21 May 2011]

Flying trapeze swinger Alice Brady (as Katherine "Kitty" Lorraine) is grounded when she becomes pregnant, then takes the baby girl to go live with her husband's family in Boston, Massachusetts. Eventually, with encouragement from comedian Ted Healy (as Ralph Martin), Ms. Brady returns to the vaudeville stage. When her daughter grows up to be gawky Maureen O'Sullivan (as Shirley), the now older Brady makes pretty Ms. Sullivan over as the leggy star of a successful Busby Berkeley-type chorus girls show.

"Stage Mother" attempts to convey some seedy theatrical realities, but they are hesitant and humorous instead of dramatic. Writer Bradford Ropes helped adapt his original novel, but obviously had to tone down much the sexual content; what's left is a little silly. Two attractive young men, painter Franchot Tone and cruiser Phillips Holmes, court pretty O'Sullivan. Brady slices through the leading role. A highlight is the production number for "Beautiful Girl", which effectively celebrates the female form.

****** Stage Mother (9/20/33) Charles Brabin ~ Alice Brady, Maureen O'Sullivan, Franchot Tone, Phillips Holmes

Healy's Real-Life Parallels, Mommy Dearest, Tarzan's Jane and Larry Fine

[PCC0921 · 6/10 · 11 August 2023]

This is one of the MGM feature films Ted Healy did, while still with Howard, Fine and Howard. Along with Healy, Larry Fine has a cameo, as a music store customer. That was an interesting scene because, in record stores in 1933, to sell records, live singers would sing samples of the song and charge 50 cents for the actual song on a record. It's the 1930s version of going to iTunes. In Stage Mother (1933), a pregnant theater-singer loses her trapeze artist husband, in a tragic accident. I wasn't ready for that. It was a good start to this film. Although, when the doomed husband landed on the ground, you could clearly see the giant mattress he safely lands on. In the next shot, he's lying on a hard stage floor. This was a technical mistake, that could have been fixed, even in 1933. Later on in the film, after the baby has grown to three years old, the mother Kitty Lorraine (Alice Brady), has to give the kid up to the in-laws, because the theater life isn't a place for a child. Healy, who's character, Ralph Martin, a friend of Kitty's, goes after her quickly, with desires for marriage. They go off, get married, make it through things, for about a decade and then Martin becomes a drunk, that ruins their theater act. This is an eerie sequence of events, considering the real-life story, that happened to Ted Healy in his real life.

The crazy life of a theater performer in the 1930s, is the main drive of the plot. The kid grows up to be Maureen O'Sullivan. Yes, that Maureen O'Sullivan. The one, who would go on to play Jane, in six of the Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan films. After staying with her grand parents for a number of years, Shirley is reunited with her mother, Kitty. She is 16 years old and this is the point O'Sullivan steps in for her character. In fact, I was impressed with the way the filmmakers made-up 22 year old O'Sullivan, to age from 16 to her 30s. So, stage Mother wants her daughter to be a dancer. An idea, Shirley isn't to keen about, but accepts the direction her life is about to go in, thus setting up a possible Mommy Dearest scenario. Fortunately, Shirley will age to a point, that the Mommy Dearest phase doesn't fester.

When Shirley goes for her first try-out, the collection of kids routines were pretty funny. I did notice some bad edits in Stage Mother (1933), even by 1933 standards, but the camera work was really nice. 55 minutes into the film, Shirley breaks up sadly, with her man she is seeing and minutes later, does a great show, with some amazing sets, created for the dance numbers. Some may question moments of the acting in the movie, but I liked C. Henry Gordon as Ricco. The film ends kind of quickly and abruptly, plus there's a uneasy feeling, that things didn't go the way you thought they would. The happy music, playing out to the film's end, doesn't hide the real anguish behind Shirley's eyes. Did Mommy Dearest actually win? Stage Mother (1933), is still a cinematic artifact, from an earlier time. I thought it was cool. It's not a great film, but still, fairly good.

6.3 (D+ MyGrade) = 6 IMDB.

Don't you have stage mothers in England?

[JohnSeal · 5/10 · 26 June 2011]

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.

This film is missing something....

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 17 September 2015]

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.

Maureen O'Sullivan is Very Fetching!!

[kidboots · 8/10 · 12 October 2012]

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.

The Great Alice Brady

[drednm · 4 March 2016]

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.

Zippy Little Precode Moves Along With Style

[museumofdave · 8/10 · 26 July 2021]

There are older films one sits through to see a specific star, or because there is a legendary scene as highlight, but frequently when stories of this period so close to the silents or snatched from the theatre move into explication, they drag, are full of static scenes or wooden performances. Stage Mother is no such case--powered by the energetic, electric "on" personality of Alice Brady in most of the film, a high interest in plot development ensues, and the expected conflict between mother and daughter similar to what Merman and company essayed in Gypsy some 25 years later keeps the narrative moving right along--it doesn't hurt that peppy Franchot Tone pops in for an early film appearance as a wealthy suitor, or that Maureen O'Sullivan can hold her own with Brady. Some folks complain about the final melodrama, but given the period when audiences expected to be send home feeling good, and given that this is an MGM studio product, it doesn't matter one way or another. It's a fun film to watch! Singing! Dancing! Jokes Aplenty!