Roman Scandals (Frank Tuttle, 1933)

Directed by Frank Tuttle

Written by William Anthony McGuire, George Oppenheimer, Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin
based on the original story by George Kaufman & Robert E. Sherwood
Music by Alfred Newman
Cinematography: Gregg Toland, Ray June
Edited by Stuart Heisler
Eddie Cantor (Eddie/Oedipus), Gloria Stuart (Princess Sylvia), Edward Arnold (Emperor Valerius), David Manners (Josephus), Ruth Etting (Olga), Verree Teasdale (Empress Agrippa), Alan Mowbray (Majordomo), John Rutherford (Manius).
Produced by Samuel Goldwyn. Distributed by United Artists 

December 25, 1933
93 minutes


West Rome, Colorado. Eddie, a good-natured but clumsy delivery boy with a passion for Roman history, is tired of the deceit of the local authorities. Humiliated and banned from town, he daydreams and is transported to his idealised ancient Rome, where he becomes entangled in even more treacherous plots. As with the opening scene of the film, in which the Roman statues of the local museum are dressed in Eddie’s clothes, for Tuttle the story serves as a means of reconciling the old world and the new through popular entertainment.

 

Should we be thankful that producer Samuel Goldwyn couldn’t acquire the rights to George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion, leaving the duty of sending Eddie (Eddie Cantor) back to Roman times to the imagination of the scriptwriters (who in return offered a fabulously entertaining melange of genres)? Scandal indeed! The Roman slave market musical number (featuring Goldwyn Girls, among them the still unknown Lucille Ball and Paulette Goddard) is highly provocative, with its suggested nudity and sadism. As if that were not enough, the women’s bathhouse scene epitomises the pre-Code contempt for political correctness, and fascination with female skin.

Shooting Roman Scandals

While the unbelievably comic-strip like chariot sequence was directed by Ralph Ceder (with the film being edited by Stuart Heisler), the musical numbers were directed by Busby Berkeley, serving as an experimental precursor to the full flowering of the ‘Berkeleyesque’ in the Warner period, as Martin Rubin has suggested. It is, however, Tuttle who should be fully credited for masterfully weaving everything into the fabric he had in mind, one of pre-Code eroticism and progressive politics. (Look at the uplifting ‘Build a Little Home’ number – choreographed by Berkeley – echoing its leftist director’s utopian vision.) Like the best of Tuttle’s early sound films, the viewer will be caught up in the rapid-fire succession of events, without the film ever losing its airiness.