Golden Dawn (film)

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Golden Dawn (1930)

Directed by	Ray Enright
Written by	Walter Anthony based on the operetta by Oscar Hammerstein II and Otto A. Harbach.
Starring	Walter Woolf King Vivienne Segal Alice Gentle Noah Beery
Music by	Herbert Stothart Emmerich Kálmán Rex Dunn, Robert Stolz
Cinematography	Frank B. Good Devereaux Jennings (Technicolor)
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	June 14, 1930
Running time	83 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

Golden Dawn is a 1930 musical operetta film photographed entirely in Technicolor.The film is based on the semi-hit stage musical of the same name and boasts musical numbers by Oscar Hammerstein, Jr.

1 Film Plot
2 Songs
3 Trivia
4 Preservation

[edit] Film Plot

Poster for the film.

This operetta is set at a camp for English prisoners being held by the Germans somewhere in the East African jungle. The male lead is played by Walter Woolf King. Noah Beery plays Shep Keyes, a man used by the Germans to keep the natives under control. Vivienne Segal stars as Dawn, a white girl presumed to be born among the natives in what was once Dutch East Africa. Set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War I, Golden Dawn presents a truce between captors and captives who are facing a common danger: the threat of an uprising among the native African population. The threat becomes almost a certainty when young rubber planter Tom Allen (Walter Woolf King) spends a romantic night with Dawn. That doesn't sit well with Shep Keyes (Noah Beery), a native brute who covets Dawn, despite the fact that she is promised to the god Mulunghu. To quell an almost certain riot among the natives, Tom is sent home to England. The British soon recapture the area and Keyes demands that Dawn be sacrificed to the god Mulunghu to ward off a potentially calamitous drought. Tom, meanwhile, having learned that Dawn is indeed Caucasian, kidnapped by Mooda (Alice Gentle) in childhood and raised as her own, rushes back to the camp just in time to rescue the girl from the evil Keyes.

[edit] Songs

Vivienne Segal as "Dawn".

"Africa Smiles No More" (Sung by Alice Gentle)
"The Whip" (Sung by Noah Beery twice)
"My Bwanna" (Sung by Vivienne Segal and chorus; Reprised by Vivienne Segal)
"We Two" (Sung by Marion Byron and Dick Henderson)
"Dawn" (Sung by Walter Woolf King; Reprised by a chorus during finale)
"Mooda's Song" (Sung by Alice Gentle)
"My Heart's Love Call" (Sung by Walter Woolf King)
"It's a Long Way to Tipperary" (Sung by the British exchange prisoners)
"In a Jungle Bungalow" (Sung by Lupino Lane and chorus; Danced to by Lupino Lane)
"A Tiger" (Sung and danced to by Marion Byron and Lee Moran; Reprised by Marion Byron)
"Mulungu Thabu" (Sung by chorus with spoken interjections by Nigel de Brulier)

[edit] Trivia

Noah Beery recorded "The Whip" for Brunswick Records along with a song from Song of the Flame (1930), another Warner Bros. musical he had recently appeared in.