Clips from Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929)

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Wikipedia excerpts, images added:

Gold Diggers of Broadway is a 1929 Warner Bros. comedy/musical film which is historically important as the second two-strip Technicolor all-talking feature length movie (after On With the Show, also released that year by Warner Bros). Gold Diggers of Broadway became a box office sensation, making Winnie Lightner a worldwide star and boosting guitarist crooner Nick Lucas to further fame as he sang two songs that became 20th-century standards: “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine.”

Based on the 1919 play The Gold Diggers[2] – which was also turned into a silent film of the same name in 1923, now lost – Gold Diggers of Broadway utilized Technicolor, showgirls and sound as its main selling points.

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(above left) According to my source*, this Djer-Kiss advertisement by French perfumer Kerkoff, illustrated and signed by R.L. and Ed Forkum, was found on the inside cover of a program for the original 1919 production of The Gold Diggers at the Lyceum Theatre. According to IBDB, the play opened on 20 September 1919 and closed c. June 1920, after 282 performances.

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more from the Wikipedia article:

Gold Diggers of Broadway was filmed using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system and released on ten reels of full frame 35mm nitrate film, two-component imbibition prints by Technicolor, with accompanying Vitaphone soundtrack discs. The discs, including the overture, have survived, but until around 1986 nothing was thought to have survived from the prints. At that time, an original print of the final reel, minus the final minute, was donated to the British Film Institute. It was faithfully copied to safety film and thus preserved. Nearly ten years later, another reel was discovered in Australia, the end of the distribution line. It proved to be the penultimate reel, featuring the “Tip-toe Through the Tulips” production number. It was missing a short bridging sequence. Only three brief fragments from earlier reels are known to survive…[read more]

Finale production number (medley) — I’ve no information yet on the various gymnastic tumblers, tap dancers, and tumbling tap dancers who perform in front of the chorus intermittently through much of the last four minutes with visual elements intact. The picture goes black at 7:34 while the audio portion continues to the end.

All songs in the medley: music by Joe Burke, words by Al Dubin

  • Song of the Gold Diggers — Nancy Welford with Warner Bros. Vitaphone Orchestra
  • Tip-toe thru’ the Tulips (aka Tiptoe Through the Tulips) — instrumental by the orchestra
  • Painting the Clouds with Sunshine — instrumental, orchestra and chorus
  • Mechanical Man – instrumental, orchestra
  • Song of the Gold Diggers – Nancy Welford with orchestra, reprise and finale

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Tiptoe Through the Tulips (as Tip-toe thru’ the Tulips) — performed by Nick Lucas, dancers, and chorus

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* I believe the source was the following page at performingartsarchive.com, which provides extra-large color copies of each page of a 28 page (24 numbered) program for a performance of “The Gold-Diggers” at the Lyceum Theatre on  13 October 1919:

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