Product Description

Her girl-next-door looks combined with a sultry singing voice made Alice Faye one of Hollywood's biggest stars in the Golden Age of Cinema.

It's the gay 90's and headliner Lillian Russell (Alice Faye) is unstoppable! Called, "The English Ballad Singer" her beauty, charm and unforgettable voice packed playhouses everywhere. Offstage, she was equally amazing with an extravagant lifestyle that included four husbands, a jewel-studded bicycle and a wardrobe filled with furs, jewels, gowns and diamond-decorated corsets. As Russell, Faye breathes life into this glamorous icon singing old standards such as, "After the Ball" and new songs including, "Blue Love Bird." One of Faye's best dramatic roles; she stars with actors Don Ameche, Henry Fonda and Edward Arnold.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30595 in DVD
• Brand: TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT
• Released on: 2007-02-20
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 127 minutes

Features

• Her girl-next-door looks combined with a sultry singing voice made Alice Faye one of Hollywood s biggest stars in the Golden Age of Cinema. It s the gay 90 s and headliner Lillian Russell (Alice Faye) is unstoppable! Called, The English Ballad Singer her beauty, charm and unforgettable voice packed playhouses everywhere. Offstage, she was equally amazing with an extravagant lifestyle that inclu

Amazon.com
This 1940 biopic of the famed Gay '90s chanteuse was intended as a big dramatic role for Alice Faye, then at the top of her box-office run as the queen of the Twentieth Century Fox studio. And Faye, with her cornfed appeal and mellow singing voice, looks capable of delivering the goods, if only the movie had more real Russell and less romantic-biography formula. Lillian Russell was truly the Madonna of her day, a gigantic star who steered her own tough-minded path through husbands and lovers. This tale is considerably whittled down amid the period trappings and old-timey songs.

Of course, the songs give Faye the chance to wrap her husky voice around some classics, including "After the Ball" and "My Evening Star." The big-time supporting cast includes Henry Fonda, as the somewhat miserable newspaper man who remains loyal to Lillian throughout her life; Edward Arnold, reprising his title role from Diamond Jim Brady; Don Ameche, as the frustrated composer who marries Lillian; and Warren William, as Jesse Lewisohn, another of Lillian's famous suitors. The famous vaudeville team, Weber and Fields, appear as themselves; they toured with the real Russell, and do one of their old routines (which looks like something out of an inscrutable comedy time capsule; funny once, puzzling now). It's all well-dressed and tuneful enough to keep going for over two hours, but the movie rarely breaks into living, breathing life.

The DVD includes a 20-minute documentary about the real Lillian Russell, which most viewers will be curious about once they've watched the movie. The film itself is preceded by a disclaimer referring to best-available print sources; the reason becomes clear after the early reels, as some print damage (especially some obvious tears and holes) is visible. It's probably not enough to ruin the film for the average moviegoer, although purists might be frustrated. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews

Visually splendid, marred by historical inaccuracy
This was Alice Faye's personal favorite among her films, and to my knowledge is still the only full-length film biography of Lillian Russell available. That's why I have mixed feelings about its release on DVD - good, for the reason previously stated and since it'd long been unavailable on VHS (I had to watch it for the first time on a home-tape copy years ago), because it's one of Faye's better performances and because technically and visually it's outstanding. Faye's costumes are, as one might expect in a film about a woman who along with the "Gibson girl" defined style for American women in the Gay Nineties (1890's), dazzling. In this day and age where there's so much front-page concern about supermodels and actresses starving themselves to meet some (in my opinion) perverted standard of super-thin "beauty", it's also especially good to have a film celebrating a woman - the greatest American celebrity of her time, and one of the first and greatest pop stars the United States has ever produced - who reveled in her plumply voluptuous body shape. (Indeed, at one point during the zenith of her fame, she would tip the scale at 200 pounds!) Alice Faye is, of course, more slender than the original, but still exceptionally shapely; according to the booklet accompanying the disc, one corset she wore for the role shaped her waist down from 26 to 20 inches.

However, this film is seriously hampered by significant historical inaccuracies from beginning to end. Many of these are no doubt due to the need to keep the Hays Office happy, as Lillian Russell had a flamboyant private life with four husbands and several high-profile romantic liaisons (including her famous relationship with "Diamond Jim" Brady, which gets fairly short shrift aside from a cute scene where Russell and Brady boast about how much they can eat). Her relationship with her second husband (presented in the movie as her first), Edward Solomon, is a key case in point. In real life, Solomon was arrested for bigamy in 1886, two years after they married, and Russell divorced him soon thereafter.

(Spoiler alert!) He did not die of a heart attack while trying to write a musical for Russell in London. This is a bowdlerized retelling of the fate that befell composer John Stromberg, who committed suicide while in the middle of a writing project for Russell; the last song he wrote for her, "Come Down Ma Evening Star", was found in his pocket after his death and became Russell's signature song during the latter part of her career. (Contrary to the movie, it was not written into a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Russell was indeed originally hired for the title role in "Princess Ida", but she was fired during rehearsals.) Alexander Moore, her fourth husband (Henry Fonda), is portrayed as the love of her life, but in fact they didn't marry until 1912, at which point she basically was ready to retire from the stage; in the movie, it's presented as happening sometime in the mid-1890's when she was still at her career peak, if one is to judge the apparent age of her daughter in the last few scenes of the movie correctly. These are just the most egregious of the movie's historical fiddlings; the fact that it basically covers her life only up to about 1895 means that it leaves out some of the most interesting times, such as her advocacy of women's suffrage (following in her mother's footsteps), her political work after World War I, and especially her yeoman recruiting efforts for the U.S. Marine Corps during the war - which would have made a boffo finale for the movie, especially considering that it was released in 1940, not too long before America's entry into World War II.

Oh, and as for what I said earlier about "from beginning to end"? Russell's birth is shown as happening in the middle of the Civil War, with the town doctor, who has enlisted for the Union Army, narrowly missing going AWOL in order to help with the childbirth. In reality, though, Lillian Russell was born on December 4, 1860 - before South Carolina had even seceded.

Don't get me wrong. This isn't a bad movie by any means. If you concentrate on Alice Faye's luminous performance - accentuated by her beauty, her singing, and those costumes - it's a very good movie. But it's not the movie a superstar of the caliber of Lillian Russell truly merits.

Alice is Great as Lillian Russell - So Are Weber & Fields
LILLIAN RUSSELL is a good example of Alice Faye's prime films from her prime era in the late 1930s and early 1940s. My focus here is on her 1940 epic, LILLIAN RUSSELL, a rather problematic film but not for those who understand that 1.) it's a musical, not a documentary; and 2.) as the author of the film's screenplay stated, "My is purpose is to present Lillian Russell as people remember her, not as she really was." In other words, this is meant to be an escapist musical film, not a docudrama.

The real Lillian was quite a gal who apparently had had affairs with wealthy Jesse Lewissohn (try finding HIM on an Internet search) and Diamond Jim Brady (today his claim to fame is that the Johns Hopkins Urological Center is named after him). But William Anthony McGuire, who is credited with the film's screenplay (he wrote routines for Broadway producer Florenz Ziegfeld in the 1920s) cannily wove his story with a nod both to the film censors and to his insider's knowledge of Broadway in Russell's heyday. If you know what REALLY happened, you will realize that McGuire did a pretty good job of suggesting the events of that day.

For me, the highlight of LILLIAN RUSSELL is a short sequence near the end of the film by Lillian's real-life employers back in 1895 - Joe Weber and Lew Fields. If I have one complaint about this film - and it's one nobody else seems to have picked up on - it's that the film presents Lillian as a singer and not an actress. Fact is that she was a successful dramatic actress who sang, but by 1895 her career was somewhat stalled. At that point Weber & Fields hired her and took a chance on her having comedic abilities. A highlight of the "Weberfields" shows as they were called, was a spoof of a hit dramatic play currently on Broadway. The burlesque required the ensemble cast to think on their feet and adlib frequently. Lillian Russell came through with flying colors and her association with Weber & Fields revitalized her career. None of this is even hinted at in the film.

Weber & Fields were a comedy team who began as teenagers in New York City's Bowery of 1879. Imitating the Dutch German immigrants (not Jewish as is usually assumed today) they saw on the streets, Joe and Lew developed bewhiskered characters Mike and Myer (with short, skinny Joe Weber padded around the waistline to make him look like he weighed 300 pounds). Weber & Fields became their own producers by 1889, then began producing other Broadway shows during the 1890s.

Weber & Fields initially parted company in 1904 when they disagreed on the types of musical plays they wanted to produce, but reunited in 1912 and therafter, while continuing to produce various shows independently of each other.

Remarkably, although all their contemporaries had died long before the film LILLIAN RUSSELL was produced in 1940 (Lillian herself expired in 1922, Diamond Jim Brady in 1917), Weber & Fields were still going strong in 1940 (although retired and living in Beverly Hills, CA).

The film's producer Darryl Zanuck contacted the team and they filmed one brief routine for the film in January 1940. That should have been the end of their involvement. But Zanuck liked the routine so much, he invited them back and asked them to expand the routine. Zanuck set aside three days to film the expanded sequence. Weber & Fields, by then in their mid-70s, filmed a total of four different takes in only three hours. The only retakes were due to laughter by the film crew - the boys were letter perfect in all four takes. Curiously, they seem to go in and out of character, sometimes playing themselves, then playing Mike and Myer. It's a remarkable performance. It also turned out to be their final performance.

The sequence is so rich that after watching it five times I'm still discovering lines and bits of business that somehow I missed in earlier viewings. One throw-away bit occurs when Lew Fields is shuffling a deck of cards - he tells Joe Weber that he was talking to David Warfield back stage (Warfield was a comedian in Weber & Fields' company who successfully managed to transform himself into a dramatic star on Broadway). Fields says, "Do you know what he said?" Weber replies, "I dunno - he wants more money?" "No," says Fields, "He wants to play dramatic parts." Admittedly, a viewer who never heard of David Warfield will make no sense of this dialogue. Movie viewers in 1940 would have followed the conversation perfectly. Many film critics in 1940 thought the Weber & Fields sequence was the best scene in the film.

To Fox's credit, a short bio on the real Lillian Russell is part of the bonus material, along with "on the set" photos of Joe Weber and Lew Fields taking their last bow a half century later. I'm sure that Joe and Lew never thought that their 19th century routines would be watched by us in the 21st century. Such is the magic of the movies.

A Great Movie!!!!
I have been put into the glory of watching a movie that is nothing like they have on the screen today. Watching and hearing the talent of Alice Faye in one of her greatest films brings me back to my youth. Seeing Henry Fonda, Don Ameche, Edward Arnold and a superlative cast made it even more nostalgic. The true story of Lillian Russell which is in the bonus area of the DVD made the movie even more enjoyable. I only wish more of these old gems would be released. I'll buy them all.