moviejoe79 If not for her great voice and her usual charming performance, and of course Kern and Hammerstein's great music, this movie is total drivel. It's like Warner Bros. was trying to do 42nd Street or one of the Gold Diggers movies in an 1890's setting. And then they add stock players like Ned Sparks and Hugh Hubert who are both annoying as anything, playing the same dumb characters they do in every movie. Wini Shaw was good as usual, but it's annoying to see her singing and talking with a phony French accent. And Donald Woods was no great actor, he really couldn't hold his own next to Dunne. No wonder why he never made it big. The studio went all out on the sets and costumes though, which make the movie a little more enjoyable... It's just a shame that with such great music and production values and Irene Dunne as the star, that this movie didn't turn out better...

mark.waltz It's hard to determine if this is a good example of film operetta because they are usually much different than their stage productions, less stagy and melodramatic than their Broadway versions. This movie has several different element in its narrative, which sometimes makes it seem like its moving all over the place and sometimes out of place with the fast-moving Warner Brothers films of the mid 1930's. This is the story of a Newark barmaid who is cast in the lead of an early Broadway operetta, her romantic issues with the film's composer, and the vindictive (and massively untalented) singer who sabotages her opening night. In a sense, this seems to be a full-length version of the musical shorts that Warner Brothers was making at the time, some of them streamlined versions of their early talkie musicals. Irene Dunne is a charming actress, her singing voice perfect for the few movie musicals she did, coincidently all based upon Jerome Kern Broadway hits. She is definitely perfect for singing the show's best known sing, "Why Was I Born?", originated on Broadway by her movie "Show Boat" co-star Helen Morgan.Torn between two men (Donald Woods and Louis Calhern), Dunne has no idea of the danger following her in the form of Winifred Shaw, unfortunately cast as one of the most vile spider women in film history. For this singer to sound so shrill (considering her participation in other Warner Brothers musicals of the mid 1930's), and be so sinister, she's like the character out of a silent movie. In smaller supporting parts, Ned Sparks, Hugh Herbert and Joseph Cawthorne are amusing, but underused. A hundred dancers got together for the movie's two big production numbers, choreographed by Bobby Connelly in the manner of Busby Berkley. At one point, the chorus girls seem to be floating in mid air. A minor subplot involving a spy ring is briefly brought into the story and seems out of place, as if some footage concerning this ended up on the cutting room floor.This will never surpass the magnitude of "Roberta" or "Show Boat" for its composer and star, or the originality and influence of Warners' other musicals of this period, but in spite of its extremely dated material, it remains an interesting curio in the career of its leading lady with those opulent production numbers and that horrifying bit of needless revenge, a true curtain faller.

Steffi_P It seems that great creative teams, while occasionally able to produce something which is perfect on every level, are just as capable of producing something which is an overall mediocrity. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein had their greatest hit with Showboat, a set of beautiful songs for a stirring adaptation of Edna Ferber's novel, which in 1936 would be turned into a sublime (but sadly neglected) movie. They followed it up with Sweet Adeline, based around a hackneyed love story and featuring no such memorable numbers. However it would be among the first of their collaborations to be brought to the screen.Like so many classic musicals, Sweet Adeline is a nostalgic period piece set at the turn of the century. This wasn't really the sort of thing that Warner Brothers did, their game being more the world of pumping jazz and bare-legged chorus girls. It has to be said that even their lavish period sets have a slightly seedy look to them, like the rooms of some decadent aristocracy about to be carted off by the mob. Oddly enough though, Sweet Adeline is a "backstager", a show about putting on a show, which is what almost all the Warners musicals were. We even have Ned Sparks as a hatchet-faced impresario.In the director's chair we have Warner Brothers stalwart Mervyn Leroy. You can see why producers liked him. No-one had much cash to spare in these dark days of the depression, film studios included, but Leroy was a master at making a picture look fuller and more elaborate than it really was. In those opening scenes at the beer garden, he creates quite a lot of shots where there's someone in the foreground, a handful of extras milling about at the back, and Irene Dunne somewhere in the middle. It makes the place look crowded when actually we've only seen a dozen or so people. And while Leroy doesn't have much rhythm in his style he does know how to capture the emotions of a song, giving us some lengthy close-ups of Irene as she sings, or scanning over the faces of a rapt audience.Miss Dunne is one of the best things about Sweet Adeline. Not only a wonderful voice, but someone who could bring out the soul of a song. Donald Woods on the other hand is decidedly lacklustre, filling the role that normally would have gone to chirpy Dick Powell. Comedy supporting players like Ned Sparks and Hugh Herbert were normally there to add a bit of flavour to proceedings, but here it's more like they're filling the gaps in a rather empty movie. Sweet Adeline does have its moments. The final major dance routine is a passable take on both Ziegfeld and Busby Berkely (even though Warners had the real Busby Berkely at their disposal). It has far more troughs than peaks however, and too little variation. It's the kind of disappointing fare that even the strongest of teams give out from time to time.

ccthemovieman-1 I really wanted to like this film. It had personal sentiment for me as my mother's day was "Adeline" and I had high regard for Irene Dunne ever since I saw her star in "I Remember Maman."Yet, despite that positive attitude going in, this wasn't something I'd watch again. It wasn't bad; just too dated and I didn't care for Irene's soprano voice. Yikes, that women hit high notes that rattled my fillings! At least she looked good: the most attractive I've seen her in her younger years. The film, though, as a whole, had a very dated appearance.Billed as a musical romance, I was impressed with how much humor was in this movie. As for leading men, I knew Donald Woods from "A Tale Of Two Cities" but he never struck me as forceful enough to be a leading man. Louis Calhern, however, always was credible at the detestable villain, as he was here once again.Reviewers here knock the script, but it was the songs that did nothing for me, not the screenplay. Had these songs been more appealing to me, I probably would have kept the VHS, if only for sentimental reasons.