Road to Happiness

John Boles is an opera singer, but he can't get a job. He has a son, Billy Lee, an ex-wife, Mona Barrie, who isn't interested in the boy, so Boles takes a job playing an Indian on a radio western show. Billy is thrilled, but agent Roscoe Karns is not. He gets Boles a job in touring company, but Boles prefers to stay with his son and a regular paycheck.

The script is a little simplistic; people are either very good and nurturing, or they are horrid people. Nonetheless the cast, including Selmer Jackson as Miss Barrie's current husband, is a very good one, and Boles gets to sing some standards and an aria.

Be warned about the misinformation circulating about this film on the archive.org Web site (where the complete version linked to above is stored); archive.org dates it as 1934 (which perplexed me since John Boles looked visibly older than he did in his early-1930's credits — the true date of 1942 is a lot more believable) and their print lasts only 74 minutes, omits Boles' performance of the song "America," and has some quite obvious splices where missing scenes would have occurred. Even in this less than ideal form, however, this is a very impressive movie, managing to make us care about the characters precisely by NOT milking the tear ducts. Boles is a bit old for his role (it would have suited him better in 1934) but he makes the character's paternal love and sometimes counter-productive pride believable. It helps that Billy Lee plays his son Danny in a fairly tough fashion rather than trying to be a male Shirley Temple, and Mona Barrie's performance as Danny's mom is chilling in its utter indifference to his welfare. (One of the most interesting parts of the Matt Taylor-Robert Hardy Andrews script is that Danny's stepfather, played by Selmer Jackson,clearly cares more about him emotionally than his mother does.) Scene after scene of this movie avoids the obvious clichés and instead is played for real sincerity and emotional power. The film is also noteworthy for a surprising degree of class consciousness for an American film, especially one made as late as 1942 (a decade past the depths of the Depression). Only towards the end, when they're obliged by movie convention to start making things break for Boles' character, does the movie turn flat and ordinary. Phil Rosen's direction is well above his norm and indicates that the two fine films he turned out in the early 1930's ("The Phantom Broadcast" for the first iteration of Monogram and "Dangerous Corner" for RKO) weren't flukes, and overall this film is a nice surprise that indicates the second iteration of Monogram (post-1937) wasn't all an artistic wasteland of lousy East Side Kids, Bela Lugosi and Charlie Chan movies.

Struggling singer Jeff Carter fulfills his career aspirations by taking a difficult step: he becomes a radio producer. His youngest son Danny and his deputy printer Charley Grady support him in this venture.

Dashing John Boles was a heartthrob leading man of the 1930's, quite popular early in the decade as a gentle, charming, cultured man usually of means. Superstardom understandably elluded him in an era where most of the big men on the screen were rough and/or brash: Gable, Cagney, Tracy, Raft, etc. He's probably best known today for the films in which he played Shirley Temple's father and the soap operas BACK STREET and STELLA DALLAS. His screen career crashed in 1938 and returning to the screen three years later, there were only a few more films for him, often low-budget pictures for poverty row sudios like ROAD TO HAPPINESS . This one is also a soap opera but it can't be called a "women's picture" since the sympathy is completely for the man here.

Boles is cast as a rather in the tooth aspiring opera singer, a voice student whose been abroad studying for several years only to return to discover his wife has divorced him, married a millionaire, and packed off their son Billy Lee to military school. Boles is indifferent to get his wife Mona Barrie back, seeing her as the frosty money lover she is but he demands custody of their son which his utterly disinterested wife hands over without much protest. Boles takes a small room at a boarding house for him and his son but finds it impossible to crack the high-brow music market but after long unemployment finds a gig as the voice of an Indian in a kid-oriented cowboy radio show. But it's not much money and Billy's kind-hearted stepfather wonders if perhaps he should adopt the boy, not that mother dearest gives a hoot preferring some curiously low-class friends for the Park Avenue social climber she is (one of these pals supplies my title quote upon hearing Boles' western broadcast).

John Boles is the whole show here, he's his patented charming gentlemen, as in his salad days, so sober and mature on screen to seem years older than his true age (early forties now). Billy Lee, a child actor with dozens of small credits in the 1930's, has one of his largest roles as the beloved son and does well walking a fine line of sincerity without being cloying. The print I saw of this film had a few cuts that were probably film repairs rather than editing; Boles' audtion for radio comes out of nowhere after a scene at the boarding house that clearly hadn't wrapped up. The print also had no credits beyond a title card naming the four lead players (comic Roscoe Karns is the fourth in a fairly straight part as Boles' agent), no mention of writers or director but this is also likely a case of missing footage rather than anyone not wanted to be credited. The print I viewed also contained no "shipboard" scenes, hence no Ruth Clifford. It's not a bad little film but not very memorable however if you are a fan of John Boles, you might actually like it.

Ten years earlier this would have starred Al Jolson, but now it's John Boles and the father is a washed up baritone with a flint-hearted, high maintenance ex-wife with horrible friends rather than a crooner and the son is the pushy one. (Technically it feels like an early talkie too, and the end is pure Jolson.)

Boles' favourite song is 'Danny Boy', and the lad just happens to be called Danny too, so he duly serenades him with the piece; which is repeated on a violin from time to time on the soundtrack for the rest of the film.