by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Transatlantic
Merry-Go-Round Charles and I ran a couple
of items featuring the great singer-bandleader-alto saxophonist-songwriter
Louis Jordan, both downloaded from archive.org: a clip from the short film Caldonia (1945) of Jordan performing the title song (the
biggest hit he ever had and one that’s been covered by innumerable
artists, from Woody Herman to B.
B. King — alas, for tax reasons his manager, Berle Adams, decided to credit
Jordan’s then-wife, the appropriately named Fleecie Moore, with writing the
song, so when they broke up she, not he, got the royalties) and the full-length
(67 minutes, anyway) feature Reet, Petite and Gone! Jordan’s involvement in film was one of the many
innovations he pioneered, including the shuffle beat he had his drummers play
that became the basis of rock ’n’ roll, the novelty talking songs that became
one of the roots of rap, the use of a prominent electric guitar and a lot of
the other elements that became fundamental aspects of rock (though in a
late-in-life interview Jordan bitterly complained, “Rock ’n’ roll is just
rhythm-and-blues played by white people”). Jordan’s first film was the 1945
short Caldonia, directed by William
Forest Crouch and produced by Berle Adams, who made it at a time when Jordan’s
record label, Decca, was caught in a bind due to World War II-era price
controls. The U.S. branch of Decca Records, founded in 1934, had specialized in
low-cost records — they sold their main blue-label pop records for 35¢ per
two-song 78 rpm single while the other majors, Columbia, Brunswick and RCA
Victor, asked 75¢. Decca was immediately successful partly because of their low
price and partly because they had the biggest musical star of the period, Bing
Crosby. Then the U.S. got involved in World War II, inflation pushed up the
cost of manufacturing everything and the record business was particularly hard-hit because shellac, an
essential ingredient in the mixture from which 78’s were pressed (it was
generally a mixture of shellac and clay, and the exact proportion of those
ingredients was tricky — a higher percentage of shellac made the record sound
better but also made it more brittle and fragile), was a scarce material
imported from the Far East, which meant it had to be shipped during the middle
of a war zone. (For a time, many record stores would allow you to buy a new
record only if you brought in an old one in trade, so the old one could be
ground up and reused in new pressings.)
As a result, Decca could no longer
sustain the 35¢ price for their new records — but according to the U.S. Office
of Price Administration (OPA), they weren’t allowed to raise the price.
Eventually they worked their way around the problem by starting a new
sub-label, the “Decca Personality Series” (which makes one wonder who was making
their records before — earthworms? Aardvarks? Space aliens?), for which they
could charge 50¢ per record since it was legally a “new” product, but in the
meantime the folks at Decca stopped releasing anything. Louis Jordan had just recorded “Caldonia” and
Jordan and manager Adams both smelled the potential of an enormous hit —
especially when they got word the white bandleader Woody Herman had already
covered the song for the 50¢ Columbia label — but how could they get Decca to
release the Jordan record? Adams hit on the idea of putting out a film based on
Caldonia, a 20-minute short that
was shot on the strangulation budget typical of “race” productions (films with
entirely Black casts aimed at Black audiences) but whose writers, William
Forest Crouch, Mickey Goldsen and John McGee, made a virtue of budget necessity
by cleverly making their financial limitations the main issue of the plot.
Famous bandleader Louis Jordan is on his way to Hollywood to make a film when a
shady Harlem promoter, Felix Paradise (Richard Huey), waylays him and convinces
him to make a film for him in Harlem instead. Only Felix hits a run of
stunningly bad luck on the numbers (and, later, on a horse-race bet as well),
so every number Jordan sings in Caldonia is set in a tackier place than its predecessor, with the band wearing
sillier and sillier costumes (they do one song in Pagliacci-style clown outfits because that’s all Felix’s
warehouse has available). Alas, though the opening of this film — Jordan
singing “Caldonia” and kicking his legs up in the air like a particularly
excited baby as he intones the deathless line, “What makes yo’ big head so hard?” — is available on archive.org, the whole movie
isn’t.
Caldonia was such a success Berle
Adams decided to keep producing “race” films starring Jordan, while also
signing contracts for him to appear in mainstream musicals like Follow the
Boys, Swing Parade of 1946 and Meet
Miss Bobby Sox alongside white
performers. Jordan’s first feature was Beware (1946), directed by Bud Pollard — a white indie
guy who in the mid-1930’s had made an ultra-obscure feature called The
Horror which he repurposed in the
1940’s for religious groups, cutting it to four reels and offering it as an
educational anti-alcoholism film called John the Drunkard — which centered around Louis Jordan’s alma
mater being threatened with
closure by its founder’s scapegrace grandson, who embezzled the college’s
endowment and then announced it was broke. For Adams’ next Jordan feature, he
brought William Forest Crouch back as director — according to imdb.com, Crouch
mainly filmed “Soundies” (three-minute short films of famous musical performers
doing their songs that were played on a coin-operated sort of video jukebox
called a “Panoram” — in the 1980’s I bought a couple of videotapes collecting
“Soundies” and would show them for friends, announcing, “This is what MTV would
have looked like if it had existed in the 1940’s”) and this film, Reet,
Petite and Gone!, is his only feature.
Unfortunately, they also used Don Malkames as cinematographer, and while
somehow during the “Caldonia” song from Jordan’s short-film debut he had
actually lit Jordan to look like a normal African-American male, on both Beware and Reet, Petite and Gone! he gave Jordan bizarre lighting that made it look
like he had a permanent three-day shadow on his cheeks. Reet, Petite and
Gone! is basically a feature for
Jordan and also the heavy-set light-skinned Black singer June Richmond, who in
1937 had been hired by Jimmy Dorsey — she was the first Black singer to perform
with a white band, anticipating Billie Holiday with Artie Shaw by six months —
who was basically known as a blues belter, a throwback to the great 1920’s
Black blues queens like Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith.
It’s mostly a
showcase for Jordan performing — its imdb.com page lists no fewer than 14 songs
— but it has a plot that seems cobbled together from quite a number of sources,
as if the writers (director Crouch and Irwin Winehouse) dumped a lot of movie
clichés into a paper shredder, reassembled the pieces as they came out and
filmed that. In 1944 Columbia had made the musical Cover Girl, co-starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, which
contained a long and important flashback scene in which Hayworth played her own
mother, so Crouch and Winehouse copied that device for Reet, Petite and
Gone! Through most of the film
Louis Jordan plays “Louis Jarvis,” sensationally successful
jazz/rhythm-and-blues bandleader, but early on there’s a cut to a sequence in
which Jordan, in heavy age makeup and possibly with a different voice dubbed in
to deliver the dialogue, plays Louis Jarvis’s grandfather Schuyler. Somehow,
despite the severe limitations on African-Americans in 1917, Schuyler not only
had a successful musical career but amassed a major fortune as a businessman
which he stashed, like W. C. Fields, in various bank accounts across the
country. The only people who know where Schuyler’s fortune is are his attorney,
Henry Talbot (Lorenzo Tucker), and Talbot’s secretary, Rusty (Vanita Smythe). Alas,
the two of them are in cahoots to rip off the fortune for themselves. We get a
flashback of Schuyler Jordan leading a band in 1917 (though the music they play
sounds nothing like anything recorded
that early) and discovering the fabulously talented singer Lovey Linn (Bea
Carter). Against the opposition of his producer, Schuyler Jordan gets Lovey
Linn into his new musical show. He also starts dating her off-stage and the two
seem altar-bound when a misunderstanding the writers aren’t terribly clear about
breaks them up. Both marry other people, and Schuyler gives birth to Louis
Jarvis’s father while Lovey brings into the world a daughter, Honey Carter
(also Bea Griffith). Crouch and Winehouse rip off the central plot device of
Sigmund Romberg’s operetta Maytime (though it wasn’t used in the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie)
that the older people aren’t going to get together but their offspring will.
They also steal from Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances the gimmick of a young man having to get married
immediately — that day — to claim an inheritance: Schuyler Jordan croaks before
Honey and her friend June (June Richmond) can make it to New York City to see
him (their hand-to-mouth existence recalls My Sister Eileen) but not before he dictates a will that specifies
that in order to receive his inheritance, Louis Jarvis must marry a woman whose
measurements are specified in its text. So Jordan, who’s producing a new
musical for himself, invites all the most attractive Black women in New York to
audition for his show, but requires them to show up in bathing suits so his
producer and manager, Sam Adams (Milton Woods), can measure them to see if they
come up to the template specified in Schuyler’s will — or, rather, in what they
think is Schuyler’s will, since
corrupt attorney Talbot has forged one changing the measurements from Honey
Carter’s to his secretary Rusty’s. The idea is that Louis Jarvis will be forced
to marry Rusty to get the money to produce his show, then Louis will divorce
her but she and Talbot will hold out for a large settlement. Talbot even calls
up the $10,000 backer Jordan lined up on his own and gets him to cancel his
investment in the show. Fortunately, there’s a deus ex machina in the form of a Black police officer who somehow
got hold of the real will and exposes Talbot and Rusty as frauds; he arrests
them and Louis Jarvis marries Honey Carter, gets his granddad’s money and his
show goes on as scheduled. Reet, Petite and Gone! is a great showcase for Louis Jordan (though the
extant print is so splicey that some of both the film’s dialogue and Jordan’s
lyrics get chopped up and rendered almost incomprehensible; fortunately, the
greatest song in the movie, the classic “Let the Good Times Roll,” is
splice-free) even though it’s not much as a film. Jordan and June Richmond are
both excellent performers, and Jordan shows real acting talent; as Charles
pointed out, he’s the only person in the movie who has true star charisma.
Unfortunately, as far as the rest of the cast is concerned, this is one of
those “race” movies that will have you wondering, “Where were all the Black
people who could act?”
Crouch’s direction
of Jordan’s songs is livelier than Bud Pollard’s in Beware, but there’s nothing as far off the beaten path
for Jordan musically as his remarkable cover of Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning,
Heartache” (one of those odd records that, like Jordan’s cover of Bessie
Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and his own “Why’d Ya Do
It, Baby?”, shows off that for all his association with jive and novelty songs,
Jordan was also a quite capable ballad singer) in Beware. June Richmond gets two songs, a surprisingly
sensitive slow ballad called “I’ve Changed Completely” (from her loud, raucous,
exciting records with bandleaders Jimmy Dorsey and Andy Kirk, this is not the sort of singing someone would expect from
her!) and a more typical piece of material for her, “You Got Me Where You Want
Me.” The show’s musical highlights are the opening song, “Texas and Pacific”
(which Charles pointed out was actually closer to country music than R&B —
but then Blacks had been investigating country music since Leadbelly covered
Jimmie Rodgers’ “Daddy and Home” in 1935), “Let the Good Times Role,” “Reet,
Petite and Gone,” “That Chick’s Too Young to Fry” (one of Jordan’s most
engaging novelties and one whose warning not to cruise underage girls recent
U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore should have heeded), “The Green
Grass Grew All Around” (an old nursery-rhyme folk song that seemed to be there
just to prove Jordan could swing anything) and a quite interesting blues called “The Blues Ain’t Nothin’” that at
first I thought might have been an “answer” record to Duke Ellington’s “The
Blues” from Black, Brown and Beige, but according to imdb.com it was actually composed by Ida Cox, one of
the great Black blues queens of the 1920’s and both a friend and a fierce
competitor to Bessie Smith. (In 1934 Cox attempted a comeback by billing
herself as “The Sepia Mae West,” and Bessie Smith was passing the club where
she show that on the marquee. She angrily growled, “Who the fuck is this ‘Sepia
Mae West’?” and insisted on going into the club — and was stunned to find it
was Cox, her old friend from the TOBA Black vaudeville circuit, whose official
name was “Theatre Owners’ Booking Association” but which was so miserable for
performers they joked the name really stood for “Tough on Black Asses.”) It’s a song that deserves to be
better known.
