Step Lively

RKO’s Step Lively opens with a pair of song and dance numbers. They’re not bad. They’re also not memorable. But they’re the high point. Once the plot takes over, so does George Murphy—and there’s the problem.

Murphy plays a broke Broadway producer living large in a posh Manhattan hotel penthouse, courtesy of his brother-in-law managing the place. He’s desperate for a backer for his new show. He finds one, a mystery man who wants his girlfriend in the show and his name nowhere near it. Into this chaos stumbles Frank Sinatra, a wholesome playwright from across the Hudson, demanding royalties for a script Murphy has no intention of honoring. Murphy discovers Sinatra can sing and schemes to conscript him into his production.

This is Murphy’s film, but he plays a scheming megalomaniac—one who lies, bullies, manipulates his girlfriend, and betrays anyone who trusts him. All for the show. His show. The one he’s producing and starring in.

He’s not a charming rogue, he’s a monster. What was RKO thinking?

To understand, a little history: This material began as a hit play in 1937 titled, Room Service. RKO made a film version with The Marx Brothers and Lucille Ball in 1938, with Groucho in Murphy’s role. Just six years later, they remade it as Step Lively.

That explains things. Groucho could make this kind of roguery charming. But George Murphy is not Groucho Marx. He’s not even close.

It also explains several other things. The small number of sets. The pair of hangers-on trailing Murphy through every scene—those are the other Marx Brothers, now reduced to furniture.

It also explains Sinatra. The original film had Sinatra’s character as a minor player who feigns illness to keep the hotel from ejecting the company. Simple, effective. But Sinatra could sing, and RKO couldn’t resist shoehorning in musical numbers and a love triangle.

So we have Sinatra miscast as a milquetoast, all nerves and naivety. The role gives him little to do besides rush to call his mother and recoil from a predatory woman. Quite the stretch for a man who was already living it up in California at twenty-eight—wife and two children notwithstanding.

The disconnect between the real Sinatra and this fictional innocent registers onscreen. His gaunt face and poorly applied makeup don’t help. In some shots, he looks a decade older than his years, which makes it strange when Murphy calls him “kid” and “son.”

The script’s antics needed the kind of zany energy the Marx Brothers could inject. Without them, the contrived premises and stale gags fall flat. Comedy was never Sinatra’s strong suit.

As if that weren’t enough, the grand finale delivers one final insult: cheap optical tricks. In Murphy’s stage show, performers vanish with a finger snap. The kind of chicanery that reminds you the camera exists to make the impossible look real, not to broadcast the fakery. Someone forgot.

That said, this is what it is—a rushed, thrown-together production made to capitalize on Sinatra’s rising stardom. There’s no reason to watch this over the Marx Brothers original.

While Sinatra fans may find pleasure in the few moments he croons, his Bobby-soxer era Columbia records offer the same music without the surrounding wreckage. To them I say: Pick the records. There’s nothing to see here.