"Heads Up" is a thinly plotted musical comedy which is light on both ingredients. There are only four songs, and only two from Rodgers and Hart's original score. It was based on a Broadway play which ran for 144 performances, and this number has been debated by other reviewers as to whether the show should be considered a hit or not. By today's standards that would be a near flop, but evidently in the 30's it could make a profit for backers.In any case, it could have used a stronger cast. Buddy Rogers was an attractive leading man but not a song and dance man. He has the best song in the show, the old standard "A Ship Without A Sail" and puts it over in good fashion but is accompanied by a hearty, full-throated chorus of sailors which crush the slender thread of the song with a loud, overpowering backup job. This has to be one of the most peculiar arrangements ever put on film.Also in the cast are Helen Kane and Victor Moore. Ms. Kane is given too much to do and is an overrated performer, getting by mainly on her Betty Boop voice. She sings a little, dances a little and shows minimal talent and looks for a Hollywood musical. Victor Moore was a famous Broadway figure who made the transition to Hollywood on the strength of his unique shtick, that of a flustered half-wit, which is dwelt on at length here and which soon becomes tedious. The two are entertaining together in a sequence in which he describes his kitchen inventions accompanied by some funny back-and-forth dialogue.The plot is mildly interesting, about a private vessel being used by bootleggers (Prohibition was still in force), but is neither compelling nor suspenseful. The main reason to see this film is for the viewer to evaluate its place in the history of musical comedy.

You could tell a movie musical in those days by their short and snappy titles - "Hit the Deck", "Top Speed", "Hold Everything", "Heads Up". By the end of the first musical cycle it was hard to tell them apart - may be that was the trouble. "Heads Up" is okay. Rogers and Hart were bought to Hollywood in the first surge of screen musicals - their film scores included - "Spring is Here", "The Hot Heiress" and "Love Me Tonight". Helen Kane was the female star and apparently lost 15 pounds for what would be her final role in a feature film. Her vogue was well and truly over - it had lasted for only a few films. Charles "Buddy" Rogers was. I think, a very bland leading man, who also wore out his film welcome pretty quickly. Victor Moore (who played the cook "Skippy") was one of the best comedians on Broadway during the 20s - but again, the films he did at this time, "Heads Up", plus another film with Helen Kane (her worst and that's really down there) "Dangerous Nan McGrew" did not show him at his best.The film is set at a Naval military school but Georgie (Billy Taylor) didn't graduate with the rest of his class - his mind wasn't on exams because he was in love with Betty (Helen Kane). Coast guard Jack (Charles Rogers) also has his eye on Mary (Margaret Breen - from the Broadway production. She was typical of the stream of colourless ingenues who were bought to Hollywood by the major studios). It doesn't take long to get into the musical numbers. At a Naval dance Buddy croons "If I Knew You Better" to Mary, while Mary's mother desperately tries to find her. She already has someone picked out as a possible suitor for her daughter - shifty Rex Cutting (Gene Gowing). Betty finds them first and sings the song with a comic slant. At the end of the night Betty launches into a rollicking song called "Readin', Ritin' Rhythmn" - complete with a chorus line of lovely girls in beautiful flimsy dresses and a stag line of navy cadets. The song was written by director Victor Schertzinger (a noted composer of popular songs) to compliment the Rogers and Hart score. While on the pleasure boat Betty sings "My Man Is On the Make" and with partner Georgie, engages in a very cute dance.Meanwhile the pleasure boat that the young people have taken out is secretly being used to smuggle illegal liquor. Of course Mary's mother is completely against Jack - even though he lays on the compliments with a trowel. Jack is then asked to expose the bootleg racket on his sweetheart's family yacht - something he doesn't want to do. He then desolately walks to the end of the pier and sings the best remembered song from the Broadway show "A Ship Without a Sail". It is a sailor's lament but Roger's doesn't have the voice - the end of the song builds to a crescendo (which fortunately drowns Rogers out) as a boat of sea- men join in the chorus. The cigarette that Buddy casually smoked during the song apparently got the reviewers in an uproar. Buddy didn't usually do things like that in his films - he was the personification of a clean cut young man. Like Helen Kane's boop boop a doop cuteness, audiences were getting tired of Buddy's "niceness" and he was vainly trying to change his image - in one scene he even brandishes a gun!!!"Heads Up" clocked up a respectable 144 performances - not bad, considering it opened after the Stock Market crash - so it was not a flop. At the end of 1930 people were staying away from musicals - cinemas were putting out signs proclaiming - "This Film is Not a Musical"!!!

This interesting filming of an almost (now) forgotten Broadway musical is enormous fun for any serious student of 20's/30's Broadway and Hollywood and a classic example of how writers today frequently mislead by failure to understand the economics of earlier eras.Another reviewer cavalierly refers to HEADS UP as "a Rodgers & Hart flop" when it was anything but. Racking up a respectable 144 performances despite opening less than two weeks after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 (following serious out-of-town problems and a major re-write between Detroit and Philadelphia while the Market was crashing), HEADS UP has not survived as one of the R&H classics, but clearly lives up to the original New York Times assessment of "a fairly lively diversion (with) new tunes worth a hearing." 8 of the 27 musicals that season ran longer., but only a couple of them got filmed without waiting close to a decade.The 1929 hit song "A Ship Without A Sail" (one of two retained in their original form from the Broadway score by the "Hollywood know-it-alls) is intriguingly filmed to incorporate the sailor chorus which made the number on stage a fascinating attempt on Rodgers & Hart's part to duplicate the success of Jerome Kern's great male chorus "Some Girl Is On His Mind" in SWEET ADELINE, opening only a few weeks before (and inexplicably omitted when that show was filmed in 1935!). "My Man Is On The Make" retains its fun as do most of the re-written musical numbers in the staging by George Hale, repeating his Broadway choreographic duties. Only the great Victor Moore repeats his Broadway role of "Skippy Dugan," but with all too little Moore on film (his 1941 film transfer of Irving Berlin's LOUISIANNA PURCHASE with other members of the Broadway cast and Bob Hope in the William Gaxton role is a must-see) this record of much of Moore's early Broadway schtick is priceless. (It's also interesting to see the uneven makeup conventions of this transitional era in stage and film - with Moore's heavily pointed "comedian" lips among the rest of the more modern, naturalistic representations.)Joining Moore are Broadway cast member John Hamilton, shifting over to play the smuggling captain, and the marvelous talents of Helen Kane (showing exactly why she was a Broadway comic star of the era) and Charles "Buddy" Rogers (three years after top billing the first Oscar winner, the silent film, WINGS). For some reason, Rogers was not uniformly appreciated by the critics of 1930 for this musical, but his and Kane's comedic performances both play today as modern and fresh as any performance filmed in the LAST decade, even filtered through the early sound technology on display in HEADS UP which was so quickly outpaced by the rapidly improving technology of the next decade after musical was filmed.With HEADS UP's Broadway book writer John McGowan joining Jack Kirkland in scripting the film, we have an unusually faithful picture of what a moderately successful Broadway musical of the era looked like - shorn of too much of its music but retaining the most successful tunes and comic "bits." It may not "wow" the dilettantes who don't think anything older than they are has value, but connoisseurs of our musical history shouldn't miss this one.

'Heads Up' stars Helen Kane, who is now remembered only in parody as the prototype for Betty Boop. The animated character in the Fleischer cartoons is blatantly similar to Helen Kane's screen persona: same hairstyle, same annoying speaking voice (Kane sounds like Gracie Allen on helium), same 'boop-oop-a-doop' syllables scatted into the breaks in her lyrics. Kane sued the Fleischer studio: amazingly, she lost, and Max Fleischer then released a gloating newsreel clip featuring several chorus girls made up to look like Kane. Helen Kane's home studio (Paramount) didn't care about the controversy, as they were also distributing Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoons ... and making more money off the animated imitation than off the live-action original.None of Helen Kane's movies are very good, except for 'Paramount on Parade' (in which she has merely a guest shot) and just possibly 'Sweetie' (in which she plays only a supporting role), so her films are seldom revived. The Boop cartoons, of course, are constantly revived ... so, for modern viewers seeing Kane for the first time, it's hard to avoid the perception that Helen Kane is imitating Betty Boop rather than just the other way round. It seems very unfair that the original has been entirely upstaged by the Boop-a-Duplicate.In 'Heads Up', Kane actually plays a character named Betty, which gives you an idea of where Fleischer got the name for his cartoon character. 'Heads Up' was originally a flop Broadway musical with tunes by Rodgers and Hart, who are the only songwriters listed in this film's on-screen credits (unless you count director Victor Schertzinger, who also wrote tunes). The songs in this movie are quite lame, easily Rodgers's and Hart's bottom-drawer stuff. I did enjoy some very spirited hoofing by little Billy Taylor during one of Kane's songs: why didn't Taylor ever make it in musicals?High-society Newport widow Martha Trumbull owns a yacht, the Silver Lady, for the private use of herself and her two daughters Mary and Betty. Mary (Margaret Breen) is meant to be the 'pretty' sister, and Betty (Helen Kane) is meant to be the 'funny' sister, but neither is much of either. The wealthy Mrs Trumbull employs Captain Denny and Skippy Dugan to staff the yacht, but they're often kept idle at the quay because the family aren't using the yacht. So, to make valuable use of his time, the villainous Denny uses the Silver Lady for bootleg runs. He takes her out beyond the three-mile-limit and comes back with hooch.The galley cook Skippy -- more like a galley slave -- is played by Victor Moore. I've never found Moore funny, but I'm intensely in awe of his career as a performer. Some major Broadway musicals had roles written specifically as vehicles for Moore. I've interviewed old-time Broadway figures who worked with Moore, and they tell me that he was a genuinely modest and self-effacing man. I really want to like him on the screen, but he tends to play the same character every time ... and I find that character very wearying. Here, Moore invents bizarre contraptions that seem more appropriate for certain other comedians of this same period (Ed Wynn, Joe Cook, Clark & McCulloch) rather than for Moore's usual characterisation. Moore keeps mispronouncing his dialogue: he pronounces 'baloney' so it rhymes with 'mahogany'. Most of his other mispronunciations are so subtle, it's not clear whether they're genuine errors or bad attempts to be funny.The male lead is Charles 'Buddy' Rogers, except that the credits don't include his nickname 'Buddy'. He plays a handsome Coast Guard officer who teams up with gumshoe Gene Gowing to catch the bootleggers. There is, of course, a romantic subplot between Rogers and Breen ... and if you can't guess how it ends, you haven't been paying attention. The camera-work throughout is wretched. During the cotillion sequence, a shot begins with two people standing slightly off-centre in the frame. The camera nudges itself slightly to starboard, to centre the actors. Then a third person enters at the left, and the camera moves leftward to re-centre the shot. Similar adjustments occur throughout the film. During Kane's most elaborate dance number, we briefly see an overhead shot of the sort which most people think was invented by Busby Berkeley. Elsewhere in this same number, a very personable and beautiful chorus girl does splendid knee lifts right behind Kane: I wish that the camera had shoved Kane out of the way to concentrate on this chorus girl.I suspect that the title of this movie is a cheeky joke. The phrase 'Heads Up' is never spoken nor sung anywhere in the film ... but the movie has a maritime theme, and guess which part of a ship is the 'head'. Otherwise, the jokes on offer here are slightly mouldy. When villainous Captain Denny (Harry Shannon) asks Victor Moore 'You know what mutiny is, don't you?', Moore replies 'Yes, sir. Mutiny is a show they give in the afternoon.' Get the hook! I'll rate this flotsam 4 out of 10, mostly out of sympathy for the production difficulties of early movie musicals.