Gold Diggers of Broadway is a 1929 American musical comedy film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Winnie Lightner and Nick Lucas. Distributed by Warner Bros., the film is the second two-strip Technicolor all-talking feature-length movie (after On With the Show, also released that year by Warner Bros). As with many early Technicolor films, no complete print survives, although the last twenty minutes do, but are missing a bridging sequence and the last minute of the film. Contemporary reviews, the soundtrack and the surviving footage suggest that the film was a fast-moving comedy which was enhanced by Technicolor and a set of lively and popular songs. It encapsulates the spirit of the flapper era, giving us a glimpse of a world about to be changed by the Great Depression. (More from Wikipedia)
In Tiny Tim’s version, “Tiptoe through the Tulips” came off as a novelty song, but that is certainly not how the song started out. Written by Al Dubin and Joe Burke, “Tiptoe through the Tulips with Me” was a featured song in an historic film in 1929, Gold Diggers of Broadway and became a #1 hit recording by one of the film’s stars, the “crooning troubadour” and guitarist Nick Lucas later that year. Only the second all-color “talkie” film (and using an early version of the Technicolor process), it quickly became the best-selling film of all time that year, a record that it held for 10 years until eclipsed by (you guessed it) Gone with the Wind. (Sadly, Gold Diggers of Broadway is now a partially lost film; the loose remake, Gold Diggers of 1933 is better known these days).
(March 2013)
