The middle of the avenue rating is based upon my feeling that this deserves to be seen as a curious piece of bad taste of the early years of talking films, Cecil B. DeMille's attempt to do the kind of films he was famous for doing during the silent era. The first half of the film is a gruelish bore; Wife Kay Johnson attempts to keep her marriage intact even though husband Reginald Denny turning to the vampish Lillian Roth. Kay is basically a placid character, too sweet to hate and definitely too boring to have wifely feelings for. The film goes down the whole "A Fool There Was" frame of mind with Kay turning herself into the vampish Madam Satan to win Denny back from slutty Roth, showing up at the most outlandish party that any metropolis has seen. In fact, much of this sequence (A party aboard a zeppelin) looks like the silent film "Metropolis" and becomes one of the most outrageous examples of pretentious audaciousness, throwing in some antique looking musical numbers that had showed up in such early movie musicals as "Sunny Side Up" and "Just Imagine".
Having seen the Lunts do this much better in "The Guardsman" and Norma Shearer changing her own image in the less creaky "Let Us Be Gay", it is surprising that Louis B. Mayer didn't see that this was a retread of stuff already on the production schedule. It's the perfect example of a need for "less is more", that the garishness of the sets and costumes (most likely recycled from some of the movie musicals which MGM had already made, and much better) make this a pictorial reference to what bad taste in 1930 would look at. The whole plot really makes no sense when you put the two halves together as one, and it at times seems like two totally different films. When the zeppelin explodes threatening to kill everybody aboard, I rolled my eyes so far back I could almost see into the past. Fortunately, DeMille would tone things down slightly, making his historical epics at Paramount so much better than what came out of this. Had it not made me laugh at it so much I surely would consider this one of the greatest bombs ever to flatten out the Culver City lot. This is where Leo almost roared "the end"!
Having seen the Lunts do this much better in "The Guardsman" and Norma Shearer changing her own image in the less creaky "Let Us Be Gay", it is surprising that Louis B. Mayer didn't see that this was a retread of stuff already on the production schedule. It's the perfect example of a need for "less is more", that the garishness of the sets and costumes (most likely recycled from some of the movie musicals which MGM had already made, and much better) make this a pictorial reference to what bad taste in 1930 would look at. The whole plot really makes no sense when you put the two halves together as one, and it at times seems like two totally different films. When the zeppelin explodes threatening to kill everybody aboard, I rolled my eyes so far back I could almost see into the past. Fortunately, DeMille would tone things down slightly, making his historical epics at Paramount so much better than what came out of this. Had it not made me laugh at it so much I surely would consider this one of the greatest bombs ever to flatten out the Culver City lot. This is where Leo almost roared "the end"!