Broadway Gondolier (1935) review: A goofy musical about cheese

If you have seventy-five minutes to spare and want to see how weirdly obsessed the 1930s were with radio advertising, this is absolutely worth a watch today. Anyone who likes snappy, fast-talking comedies with great outfits will have a good time.

But if you hate operatic crooning or plots that make absolutely zero sense, you will probably hate this. 🧀

The whole setup is just incredibly silly. Dick Powell plays a New York taxi driver who wants to sing on the radio to promote... cheese.

Specifically, Flagg's Imported Cheese. For some reason, the big boss of the cheese company only wants a "real" Italian singer for the broadcast.

So Dick's character decides the only logical step is to buy a ticket to Venice, pretend to be a gondolier, and get "discovered" by American tourists. It is a wildly roundabout way to get a job.

The Fake Italian Routine

This is where the movie gets really funny, mostly because Powell's Italian accent is just terrible. He basically just adds "a" to the end of every other word and hopes for the best.

Joan Blondell plays Alice, the secretary who travels to Venice with her boss. She is easily the best thing in this movie because she looks like she is the only person on set who realized how dumb the script is.

Her chemistry with Powell is great, even when the movie forces them into these sudden romantic moments. It reminds me a bit of the silly, chaotic back-and-forth romance in The Misleading Lady, where everyone is just yelling their lines with a big grin.

There is this one scene where Powell is singing on a gondola and the background projection of Venice is moving so fast it looks like he is riding a speedboat. I actually laughed out loud at how bad the green-screen effect was there.

Odd little details I noticed:

• The Mills Brothers show up for about three minutes, do an amazing song, and then just vanish from the plot entirely.
• Adolphe Menjou plays a manager who wears some of the wildest suits I have ever seen. Seriously, his lapels are huge.
• There is a dog in one street scene that looks genuinely confused by the crew filming.

The music is fine, I guess, if you like that old-school operatic style. But honestly, the movie gets way better when people stop singing and just start arguing about cheese marketing.

It is not a masterpiece by any means. It just sort of ends very abruptly once the cheese company is finally happy.

But hey, if you want a light chuckle and some cool 1930s outfits, you could do a lot worse than this one.