by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was Sensations of 1945, a semi-major musical produced and directed by Andrew
Stone for United Artists release and the last starring role for super-dancer
Eleanor Powell (and her only film
for a studio other than MGM). Powell was getting tired and was also in a
troubled marriage with Glenn Ford, who didn’t want her to work, and after this
she confined herself to guest appearances. Sensations of 1945 is also the last film W. C. Fields made before his
death on Christmas Day, 1946, though he appears only in one brief scene as
himself and in another in which he performs a stage skit in which he plays a
U.S. traveler in England crashing a train compartment reserved for “Lord Robert
R. Roberts.” We were watching a DVD from the same grey-label source as our DVD
of the 1941 Olsen and Johnson comedy Hellzapoppin’ — though the print wasn’t in as good shape: this was
the Astor Pictures TV reissue that shortened the title merely to Sensations, and there was a bad scratch through the first few minutes
and occasional other scarring during the film. The opening scene reminded me of
the scandal a couple of years back involving the Gay Black actor Jussie
Smollett, who hired a couple of friends to beat him up and then claimed he’d
been Gay-bashed by two homophobic Nigerian immigrants, all to win more money
and a more prominent role on the TV show he was then appearing on. Instead he
got fired and the Chicago police and prosecutors went ballistic, at one point
indicting him on 16 charges before a Chicago judge threw the case out —
whereupon the police and prosecutors denounced her as corrupt. It was ironic that when we watched the
newest episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit after the movie, it also did a riff on the Smollett case: a Black rapper
who’s about to be “outed” as Gay on the TMZ Web site has his brother assault
him on the street and sodomize him with a beer bottle, copying a real-life
Gay-basher who’s been doing the same thing to Black Bisexuals on the “down
low,” confident that his victims won’t report the crimes to police because they
don’t want their wives and kids to know they go to Gay bars and pick up men for
sex.
The Smollett parallel in Sensations occurs during the opening scene, representing a performance of the
current Broadway show featuring ace dancer Virginia “Ginny” Walker (Eleanor
Powell), which is interrupted by a black-clad woman who rises up from a theatre
box with a gun, points it at the stage, yells out at Walker, “You’ll never
steal another man from his wife again!” and fires at her. Later it turns out
that Walker set up the whole thing: the supposedly wronged wife is a friend of
hers, a circus markswoman whom Ginny could hire to shoot at her, confident that
she would (deliberately) miss. Ginny’s publicity stunt shames her P.R. people,
an agency run by the father-and-son team of Gus Crane (Eugene Pallette) and his
son, identified only as “Junior” (Dennis O’Keefe). The Cranes have been arguing
since “Junior” got out of the army after World War II and took a job co-running
the agency with his dad. Dad loves flamboyant publicity stunts while “Junior”
thinks they’re embarrassing and counterproductive — so dad demotes his son and
gets Ginny to run the agency in his place. Not surprisingly, the movie’s plot
is merely a pretext to showcase various acts, including the big bands of Woody
Herman (they’re supposedly the pit band for Ginny’s show, which she continues
to perform in for eight shows a week while co-running the P.R. firm as well)
and Cab Calloway. Herman’s band was on the cusp of becoming the famous “First
Herd” and I spent some time and mental energy trying to figure out who his
drummer was: he was too stocky and heavy-set to be Dave Tough (who drove the
First Herd during its early years and was a superb Dixieland and swing drummer
who adapted surprisingly well to Herman’s bebop-influenced style; like a lot of
the musicians of his generation, he was also an alcoholic and would drink
himself out of the Herman band in 1946 and die two years later), I didn’t think
it was Frankie Carlson (who’d been Herman’s drummer through the band’s origins
in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) and it didn’t look like Buddy Rich (who
took over for Tough on a few gigs and one recording session before the bop
drummer Don Lamond got the job on an ongoing basis).
Calloway is featured in
one number, but it’s a doozy: Ginny has arranged to promote the Plantation Club
where Calloway is appearing by projecting his show on the side of the New
York Times building in Times Square, and a
huge crowd gathers in Times Square and has a great jitterbug party as Calloway
does a song called “The Hepster’s Dictionary” (Calloway actually wrote and
published a book called The Hepster’s Dictionary, a dictionary of Harlem slang) and
classically-trained Black jazz pianist Dorothy Donegan does a spectacular
rendition of one of the Hungarian Rhapsodies, first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie, after which it turns
into a piano duel between Donegan and the band’s regular pianist, Bennie Payne,
who’d previously done this sort of thing with his former employer, Fats Waller.
(Their joint feature was George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm,” which Waller
recorded with his full band instead of the cut-down “Fats Waller and His
Rhythm” he usually recorded with, but the record was only issued in
Switzerland, apparently because Waller didn’t think he’d outplayed Payne enough
to want his American fans to hear it.) The high point of the film comes towards
the end, in which the stage of Ginny’s show turns into a giant pinball machine,
with the Herman band as the back display and Powell as a pinball dancing
between the various cushions and scoring points appropriately. (I had
remembered that she did this dance to the Mexican song “Las Chiapanecas,” but
she didn’t — though Herman had recorded that song and he does play it in the film.)
The show ends with Ginny and
“Junior” pairing up even though he’s got so discouraged by the complications in
their relationship that he’s re-enlisted (their final clinch features him in
Army uniform) and him sneaking behind her back and giving a 10 percent interest
in a new 1890’s-themed nightclub to Dan Lindsay (C. Aubrey Smith) because his
contacts have recruited such genuine stars of the period as W. C. Fields and
Sophie Tucker (doing a weird song called “You Can’t Sew a Button on a Heart”)
to perform on the club’s opening night, only Ginny was prepared to welch on the
deal and cut him out once the club had its big opening and its success was
assured. (A New Yorker who welches on deals and exploits people to make herself
richer — gee, with a background like that she could run for President!)
Sensations is a fun movie, though as
Charles pointed out afterwards there were plenty of similar —but much better —
movies like it being made in the early 1930’s (when W. C. Fields’ routines were
screamingly funny, whereas here his sketch is entertaining but only moderately
amusing). Andrew Stone’s most famous movie was probably The Last
Voyage (1960), a story about a shipwreck at
sea for which, instead of building sets, he actually bought an ocean liner that
was about to be scrapped, brought his cast, crew and equipment onto the liner
and sank it for real for his final scene. That’s an example of his
heavy-handedness as a director, which is somewhat in evidence here, but a film
featuring Eleanor Powell, Cab Calloway and Woody Herman can’t help but be
entertaining!
