I guess you’d call me a semi-apologetic Eddie Cantor fan. I think he was funny and most of the songs he was best known for are also pretty great too. In nearly every film he appeared in there is at least one scene that today would be considered at least problematic or at most downright racist. Roman Scandals, which I do enjoy, leans a bit closer to the latter. You really have to take into account when this movie was made in order to get over one particular sequence. It’s both the best and worst sequence of the film.
In Roman Scandals Cantor plays a timid but kind young man in the town of West Rome Oklahoma who dreams he’s in ancient Rome, where he’s taken by Roman soldiers and put up for sale in the slave market. He is purchased by a young nobleman who thinks Eddie is funny and frees him so they can be friends. Now being called Oedipus, he gets mixed up with Emperor Valerius becoming his “food taster” and later helps his friend to be with the beautiful Princess Sylvia (played by Gloria Stuart, who would much later be “old Rose” in the 1997 film Titanic).
Personally, I think the gags, both of wordplay and physical, land more than not. There are some 1933 references that I only got because I’m a nerd who loves old movies, but there could have been a few that got past me. As usual the highlights are the Busby Berkeley choreographed production numbers. The first being Build a Home and my favorite (and least favorite for reasons I’ll share momentarily) being Keep Young and Beautiful, which I was first introduced to when Annie Lennox recorded it 1992, long before I saw Roman Scandals. The lyrics are funny, but I’m sure didn’t play the same kind of funny in 1933 as they do today. Today, and in 1992, they play as ironic, especially sung by a female in the case of Lennox. In the number, Cantor is surrounded by beautiful “slave girls” some wearing only very long blonde hair that conveniently covers their “naughty bits”. One of whom is a young Lucille Ball. The song and the choreography are great...BUT, and it’s kind of a big but...Cantor at this point in the story has disguised himself in “Blackface” and plays the entire number that way. There are also actual black, also beautiful, dancers in the number. The downside for them is that for much of the number they are “beautifying” the white slave girls. Massaging them, combing their hair, even bathing them, until a point in the song where they join in on the dancing themselves. It’s a terrifically entertaining number, if you can get over it also being openly racist on a few different levels. Again, at least for me, I focus on what is funny and role my eyes, not unlike Eddie Cantor, and tell myself our society was really ignorant at this time in our history. It’s a shame because it is my favorite song in the film.
Being made in 1933 it came out a year before the infamous Hays Code. That’s why we could have women wearing nothing but long blonde hair and silky tops with no bras. Today it seems tame but, especially in the Keep Young and Beautiful number, some of these female performers were very close to nude. There are a couple of double entendre jokes that would have been cut one year later as well. Roman Scandals was one of the biggest hits for United Artists that year and proved Cantor was still a popular performer. He was a talented comedian and musical comedy performer. It’s a shame that the times had him relying on blackface in so many of his films. This film, along with Whoopie, are probably my favorite Cantor movies, but there is good stuff, and horribly problematic stuff, in all of them. You just have to find a way to “get over” the uncomfortable moments and focus on the funny. At least that’s what I try to do.
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