Grade B early talkie from the tightfisted Tiffany studio, and boy, early talkies don't get early-talkier than this: clodhopping camera, unstable sound levels, and a director who just hasn't learned how to pace sound. There are so many silences between lines that it sounds like real, not scripted, dialog--but it doesn't help. Mae Murray was a big silent star, but, though her voice isn't awful (I assume her singing is dubbed), you can see why she didn't make it in talkies: She attitudinizes rather than acts, moves stiffly (a brief Technicolor dance sequence is particularly painful), and, unflatteringly photographed, isn't the great beauty she's made out to be. The story's a trite bit of barely-post-Victorian morality: Mae, a New York showgirl, decides to abandon the sophisticated businessman she's been seeing and marry a Texas childhood sweetheart, but suspicions about her being a "bad girl" lead to the engagement's collapse. One nice twist: The lounge-lizard-looking plutocrat, who convention tells you should be a snake, turns out to be a decent, forgiving guy, while the all-American D.A. she marries (Jason Robards, father of Jr.), who convention tells you should be the good guy, turns out to be priggish, small-minded, and unforgiving. But the writing is terribly flat--you can often tell what the next line will be--and the jumpy continuity suggests there's some missing footage, or maybe just that these minor-studio hacks don't know how to tell a story. A final question: Why the heck is this called "Peacock Alley"? That's the name of the main hall at the Waldorf Astoria, but this is set in some fictitious New York hotel called the Park Plaza, and it has neither peacocks nor alleys.
Review of Peacock Alley
