Here’s a remarkable piece of film. It’s the surviving five minutes from an otherwise lost 1933 film called ‘Mr. Broadway’, featuring a very young Ed Sullivan (you can see him in a couple of cutaways sitting at a table with Bert Lahr). The film is essential viewing for any devotee of 1920s/30s period New York nightclub/showbiz stuff. It was co-directed by Edgar G. Ulmar and a man named Johnnie Walker who has precisely two other directing credits of films even more obscure than this one. (I assumed the name was a pseudonym until I found his IMDB page. And I was going to make a joke about how they hired him when their first choice, Jack Daniels, wasn’t available but I decided against it). Jack Benny can briefly be spotted at about 2:20–he was still broadcasting from New York at the time and we get a complete dance number from Joe Frisco, a dancing comic who was popular at the time and who, years later, turns up as ‘Herbie Temple’, a low-rent comic in ‘The Sweet Smell Of Success’. Isham Jones conducts the orchestra and the emcee is named Harry Rose. There’s also a male singer but he’s so poor that I just don’t feel like going back and finding his name.

One of the most important things about this piece of film is where it’s shot. It was filmed in a popular Times Square nightclub called ‘The Hollywood Restaurant’ located at 1400 Broadway, a place with a notoriously salacious floor show. In The New Yorker magazines of the day, The Hollywood Restaurant was captioned in the nightclub listings as ‘Broadway Atmosphere’. This was their way of saying it was a tourist trap, a place more affordable than the better clubs and more likely to allow the out-of-town business guys to get drunk and pick up the chorus girls (or sample the available call girls who hung about the bar). The club was started by nightclub impresario and Broadway man-about-town Niels T. Granlund and survived the demise of prohibition. This film shows us what these nightclubs actually looked like–which was small. We tend to look back at older generations notions of what was too overtly sexual in entertainment as charmingly quaint. But here we see that the girls are so scantily clad that the ‘Hollywood’ clearly earned its reputation as a place with a ‘naked revue’, as described in ‘The New Yorker’ listing. By the way, if you want to reserve a table their number is Chickering 4-7522. At least it was when that particular issue of The New Yorker hit the stands on October 31, 1931…