Broadway to Hollywood Reviews

Popular vaudeville couple Morgan and Brady take time off from show business when Brady learns that she is pregnant. Losing their headliner status because of their absence from the stage, Morgan and Brady get back in the limelight when their now-grownup son Hardie catches the public's eye. Breaking up the family trip to join a very successful company and to marry pretty hoofer Evans, Hardie turns his back on his mother and father. Becoming a womanizer and a drunk, Hardie is not to be found when Evans has their child and commits suicide soon after the boy's birth. Hardie joins the army at the outbreak of WW I in an effort to cleanse his soul and is killed while fighting. Morgan and Brady raise the child and again become popular stage stars with the boy adding to their act. As a man, their grandson (Quillan) is invited to star in a Hollywood musical and flies to California. Tempted by the hedonistic lifestyle he sees there, and without his grandparent's guidance, he comes close to becoming a drunken loser like his father, before concentrating on his film work. On a visit to grandson Quillan's set during a shoot, Morgan dies in Brady's arms. Owing what little charm it has to Morgan's intelligent and sensitive performance, the film as a whole fails to create any interest in the trials and tribulations of its show business family. Although it was initially intended as a vehicle in which to include footage from MGM's ill-conceived Technicolor musical, THE MARCH OF TIME, BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD contains very little from that never-released epic. Songs: "We Are the Hacketts" (Al Goodhart); "When Old New York Was Young" (Howard Johnson, Gus Edwards); "Ma Blushin' Rosie" (Edgar Smith, John Stromberg); "Come Down Ma Evenin' Star" (Robert B. Smith, Stromberg); "The Honeysuckle and the Bee" (Albert H. Fitz, William H. Penn).