Trixie was a great friend of mine. Her youngest son was a college buddy of mine. I even went on a vacation with the family once and she gracefully performed at one of my shows. A really sweet lady.
What an absolute delight. Trixie is so highly skilled that her performance is as if she is performing right this moment. What an incredible woman juggler. Thank you for showing this scene.
i'm watching this movie on tv at this moment. this scene just ended. i missed the beginning of it, so i felt compelled to try and find it. amazing skill.
Loved how the old movies would have scenes with skilled vaudeville-types in them. Modern filmmakers should take note and place these performers more often in their comedies to give us nifty little things to talk of after the credits roll. Thanks for posting AW720.
Even for a comedy interlude between the dances and songs, a studio such as Metro always hired the best of their kind. Value for money every minute. The audience coming out of the moviehouse must have been burbling with excitement and satisfaction-- or did they take it all for granted and at the price of a few cents? This is an extended example of Fred's fabled 'nonchalance' and modesty: his heck-I'm-only-human-after-all side. You keep expecting him suddenly to fight back with some brilliant juggling move, but no... he's willing to play the patsy and be upstaged by a maestro. He never looked more like a young, better-looking Stan Laurel than in this scene. But as always he triumphs in the end, if only by the grace with which he let his screen persona of effortless supremacy be undercut. That's charm.
Search 'Cineviews in Brief No. 14' for a glimpse of Martha 'Trixie' Firschke doing the ball-and-mouthstick routine in 1937, the year before the family emigrated from Austria to the States.
An excellent book on TRIXIE can be purchased here: app.thebookpatch.com/BookStore/trixie-child-prodigy-skating-star-and-juggling-icon/55f15ba8-2213-4e0f-9bf0-4042230369aa?isbn=9781947136502
As an interpolated cameo, she's certainly preferable to the guy who lectured on sneezing and snoring in the previous 'Broadway Melodies'. Trixie came from a circus family in Vienna and took up juggling at 11 because she got dizzy on the high wire. She was under 20 here but was already so good that colleagues would bet on how many mistakes she would make in a season- normally they could be counted on one hand. She went on to feature in the Ice Capades until the mid-Fifties. She married a Native American fellow trouper and retired to the Middle West, where she had six kids. Eventually she got a Lifetime Achievement award from the jugglers' trade body. This was her only Hollywood credit, but I have seen amateur video of her doing incredible acrobatics on skates, such as backflips. Maybe the screen missed a combo of Eleanor Powell and Sonja Henie.
@@hebneh The family went to the USA in 1938 for commercial, not political, reasons. Trixie as a teenager performed at the Scala in Berlin when Hitler was in the audience. He congratulated her and gave her a box of candy.
