Watch Golden Dawn For Free

Why so much hype?

Thanks for the memories!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The reviews of this one simply compelled me to give it a try; I wasn't disappointed. I love films made at the dawn of sound, and in this case also the dawn of taste, apart from often being entertaining they usually tell me a lot about who we were and who we now are. All white people back then apparently considered they were innately superior to all other races, nowadays gifted with movie-hindsight all races can all afford to be retrospectively superior to everyone in the primitive past, and in both cases, innocently. Where we will end up though is another matter – it even tells me something that the original New York stage play ran to 184 performances in 1927, and that this film in black and white (if you "know black from white") has actually survived Time when much worthier films were left to rot.Dawn is a white native goddess with a hazy past, white Britisher Tom Allen loves her purely but jet blacked-up native Shep Keyes lusts after her. It was still clunky old Noah Beery for all the make-up though – I just had to laugh at the blackened armpits of his shirt. He's worth watching singing to his whip too. The first song is shrilled out by a blackface Margaret Dumont lookalike – I looked out in vain for Captain Spaulding. Vivienne Segal and Walter Woolf King (pre-Marx's Lasspari) are excellent in their lead roles with every word and every lyric perfectly enunciated, every emotion delivered complete with Capital Letters. I loved Woolf's line at one point about not letting Segal sacrifice herself and "go through with this savage religious stupidity" – out of the mouths of babes! The songs, even when the lyrics make you sit up are in the main dull as ditchwater except for We Two (I was wishing for Eddie Cantor though) and the energetic A Tiger (the routine later bettered in King Of Jazz's Ragamuffin Romeo).It's exhilaratingly barmy doing Vienna in the jungle, but it must have played pretty old-fashioned and pointless even in 1930. So if you decide to hunt this down as it's probably banned from TV and watch it, keep it in the strict amber of context and you will have a unique experience no matter what your colour or prejudices. Unfortunately I can't say the same for Blazing Saddles (my personal bête noire) which was not innocent but malicious.

This wacky operetta, bursting with flagrant racism, takes colonialist kitsch to levels perhaps never surpassed. It is, as they say, a hoot and a howl and a real eye-popper. The story, little more than melodramatic scaffolding for a generous heap of songs, some pertinent and others stuffed in to jazz up the otherwise standard operetta-style score, involves the attempt to rescue a white girl (Vivienne Segal) from the East African tribal community that raised her before she can be "married" to Mulungu, the local god, who favors her above her black- skinned tribe members because, of course, she is white. All of this occurs against the backdrop of a German occupational force in British East Africa during World War One. Heavy-handed melodramatic plot developments are interspersed with "comic" interludes involving slapstick, novelty songs and joke routines right off the vaudeville stage.Inconsistencies and absurdities abound, the most flagrant being the portrayal of a native go- between by Noah Beery in blackface and a ridiculously inappropriate Stepin Fetchit accent; among the most straight-out entertaining sequences are songs added for the film version: "We Two" sung winningly by ace music hall veteran Dick Henderson with Marion Byron. Byron also delights with "A Tiger" – another jazzy number which she milks to the last drop of her pint-sized self. The other, slower songs which came from the stage original ("My Bwana," "Dawn," and "Mooda's Song") fare less well and are harder to understand, despite the fine voices of Segal, leading man Walter Woolf and Alice Gentle as Segal's "mother." Lupino Lane does some astounding acrobatics for "In a Jungle Bungalow." This is not the only bad musical film he enlivened.The campiest moments occur during the climax when the white girl is about to be married to Mulungu by a bug-eyed, blacked-up witch doctor (Nigel de Brulier) who delivers his lines like a 19th century Shakespearean ham. The rock-bottom melodramatics are so over the top by the time you get to the atrociously dubbed finale, nothing matters any more. You can either goof on it or shrug, be grateful that those days are over, and move on to something more edifying. All in all, a fun fest for parties of musical theatre/musical film aficionados. This movie is to musicals what "Plan Nine from Outer Space" is to science fiction.

...and isn't boredom the worst cinematic experience one can have anyways? I watched Golden Dawn expecting a bore-fest full of static performances and wretched operatic screeching, having heard its reputation as the worst surviving movie musical ever made. Instead I experienced something so campy it is worthy of TCM Underground's Friday night cult film festivals.This film definitely did not turn out like Warner Brothers expected, I'm sure. It failed at the box office and is today a very unintentionally funny film. The film is set during the first World War in Africa. It is about a native girl, Dawn (Vivienne Segal), who has supposedly been blessed by the gods to appear white, thus marking her as the future bride of the native's god - a statue that appears to be a giant likeness of Mr. Bill from the old 70's skits on Saturday Night Live. A British soldier loves Dawn, but their love is thwarted at every turn both by the fact that the occupying Europeans don't want any trouble with the natives, which they'd have if Tom Allen (Walter Woolf King) eloped with the bride of the native god, and by Shep Keyes, a native bully and strong man who wants Dawn for himself.Shep (Noah Beery) is supposed to be an African native, yet his name and his accent are purely Gone with the Wind. Plus his black-face makeup is very obviously melting off of his body through his clothing under the hot Technicolor lights, but nobody seems to notice.There are a large group of civilian Americans and Europeans in the story, and the reason for their presence in this remote African village is never explained. Neither is any reason given as to why they all speak like they're from Queens. One of the things in this film that does work as funny and probably intentionally so is the wiry anemic Ned Sparks-like Lee Moran as Blink and Marion Byron as Joanna, Blink's rough and bossy girlfriend. The one number that works in this film is their rendition of the Song "A Tiger", which Joanna certainly is and Blink definitely is not.This film, made in 1930, is still using title cards to transition between scenes, something that was still common in the late Vitaphone era. However, even here there are laughs to be found. One title card reads "There was no joy among the natives. A draught was destroying them." As there is no mention of beer or wind in this film, I can only assume the title card writer meant "draught" to be "drought".For a little over an hour of campy fun in the tradition of "The Dueling Cavalier" in Singin in the Rain, you just can't beat this one.

True, as a film, this is ludicrous, with "native African" Noah Beery speaking in a combination of U.S. Southern Black ("I'se gwine...")and cowboy dialects ("I'm a gonna pump ya plum full of lead")and some horrendous choreography. But there is some beautiful music from perhaps the greatest composer of Viennese operetta: Emmerich Kalman. This movie is based on Kalman's operetta "Golden Dawn," which premiered in New York in 1927. Especially noteworthy are two Kalman songs: "Just We Two" and a lovely ballad "You Are the One." To fully enjoy the music, one must,of course, ignore the fact that the lilting Viennese melodies and sometimes-Hungarian harmonies seem just a bit out of place in Africa.