Till the Clouds Roll By (MGM, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Friday night at 9 p.m. I started a quite good – and quite long for 1946 – movie, Till the Clouds Roll By, an ostensible biopic of composer Jerome Kern. The year before Warner Bros. had done a big bio-musical of George Gershwin. Rhapsody in Blue (oddly in black-and-white; it was probably the last big-budget black-and-white musical ever made), and Warners decided to follow up with a biopic of Cole Porter, Night and Day, while MGM decided to green-light a project about Kern and have boy-next-door type Robert Walker play him. Kern was dead by the time the film was finished and released, but he’d been involved in the early stages and did an interview with the writer Guy Bolton – an old friend and frequent collaborator of Kern. (The final film credits Bolton with “story,” George Wells for “story adaptation” and Myles Connolly and Jean Holloway with the actual screenplay.) “If you tell the truth, it will be the dullest picture in the world,” Kern told Bolton.

“I then reminded him of one or two incidents that he had seemingly forgotten,” Bolton later recalled. “I reminded him of how he had planned to take the Lusitania with Charles Frohman – who so admired his talent – and only missed sailing because his alarm clock stopped in the night. [Frohman, played in the film by Harry Hayden, was one of those who died when the Lusitania was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat.] I talked of him meeting the girl he married when he heard her practicing scales and knocked on the door and asked if he could borrow her piano to take down the number that had come to him from somewhere.” (This would actually have made a better sequence than the one we get in the film, in which Kern is strolling through the British countryside – he’s gone to London to try to make a name for himself because at the time, at least according to this script, Broadway producers were interested only in songs by British composers. He walks through an unlocked door, seizes upon the piano in the front porch and is mistaken for a piano tuner by the lady of the house, whom he mistakes for a servant – there are a lot of mistaken-identity gags in the early part of this movie.)

The main fictionalization Bolton and his colleagues on the writing committee did was to invent a best friend for Kern, Jim Hassler (Van Heflin). Hassler is a top Broadway arranger who agrees to work on Kern’s songs even though he thinks Kern should abandon popular music and become a serious composer “like Brahms” – who, ironically, would be played by Robert Walker in a 1947 MGM film called Song of Love about Robert (Paul Henried) and Clara (Katharine Hepburn) Schumann. Hassler nurses the ambition to write a great symphony throughout the film but never gets around to it – he’s too busy arranging Kern’s songs and drinking – and he also has a daughter, Sally, played as an adorable child by Jean Wells and as a spoiled-brat adult by Lucille Bremer, whom Vincente Minnelli in an interview about another film described diplomatically as “a protégée of one of the studio bosses and quite unsuitable.”

The film opens at the Broadway premiere of Kern’s 1927 classic Show Boat – the musical that revolutionized the form and proved it could deal with serious issues like racism, alcoholism and gambling addiction – and contains a haunting prologue with some of the cast members performing Kern’s famous songs from that show, including Kathryn Grayson and Tony Martin doing “Make Believe” and Lena Horne giving us a scorching version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man.” That sequence is a glimpse of one of Hollywood’s most tantalizing might-have-beens: a Show Boat movie with an actual African-American, albeit a relatively light-skinned one, in the part of Julie Laverne, whose status as queen of the show boat and marriage to her leading man, Steve Baker (Bruce Cowling), are undone when she’s revealed as half-Black. MGM had bought the remake rights to Show Boat from Universal. Producer Arthur Freed wanted to do a version in which Lena Horne would play Julie, and used this film as a sort of screen test of her for that role. Only when he announced his plans to MGM’s marketing department, they went ballistic, pointing out that no movie theatre in the South would show a movie featuring an actual race-mixed marriage (even if the character’s race-mixed marriage was a major plot point of the story), so eventually Ava Gardner played Julie in the 1951 Show Boat film even though she needed “Egyptian Blend No. 5” makeup (which, ironically, had been invented during a short-lived attempt to pass off Lena Horne as a Mexican!) to look part-Black and also needed Annette Warren as a voice double for songs Horne could have sung superbly on her own.

As things turned out, the only actor in this Show Boat prologue who got to repeat their role in the complete film five years later was Kathryn Grayson, who according to one imdb.com “Trivia” poster was also “a protégée of one of the studio bosses.” Grayson was also dating Johnny Johnston, who was scheduled to appear in the film and shot three numbers with her, but when Grayson decided to marry Johnston the studio boss of whom she’d been a “protégée” had a jealous hissy-fit. By then Grayson herself was too big a star to be cut out of the film, but they took out all her numbers with Johnston and fired him after just one more MGM film. The film’s plot, to the extent it has one, details Kern’s rise to success and him writing one hit show after another until he’s broken-hearted by the death of Jim Hassler (a quite daring “bromance” for a 1946 movie) and only revived when Oscar Hammerstein II gives him a copy of Edna Ferber’s novel Show Boat and, after he’s successfully tracked down Hassler’s daughter Sally – who walked out on a Kern musical when the song Kern wrote for her is taken away and given to Marilyn Miller (Judy Garland) for a big production number (sne and we are both solemnly told this is “for the good of the show” but it seems like a diva’s hissy-fit to me!), he walks down the Mississippi shore and he’s inspired to compose the songs for Show Boat.

Bremer, with Truty Erwin as her voice double, appears in that Memphis nightclub doing “I Won’t Dance” with Van Johnson, who had enough song-and-dance chops that he replaced Gene Kelly in the original Broadway run of the Rodgers and Hart musical Pal Joey (though Hart was disgusted enough with the change that a friend remembered Hart telling him not to see the show because “Gene Kelly’s gone off to Hollywood and the guy they got to replace him is terrible”). They’re actually pretty good in “I Won’t Dance,” as is Bremer (or Erwin) in her big final number, “The Land Where the Good Songs Go,” a song that’s as preposterous as its title makes it sound. That’s part of a huge finale that features various cast members standing on a series of plinths as they belt out various Kern songs, culminating in Frank Sinatra, who otherwise isn’t in the mnovie at all, doing a truly odd version of “Ol’ Man River” that turns this ode to labor, pain and the promise of justice in the afterlife into an immaculate ballad sung by a white man in a white dinner suit with white jacket, tie and pants standing on a white plinth and introduced by a white drummer playing a white set of kettledrums.

James Agee, who reviewed the movie for The Nation in 1946 and acknowledged he’d always liked Kern’s “graceful, nacreous music” (according to online dictionaries, “nacreous” means “consisting of or resembling mother-of-pearl [or] having a play of lustrous rainbow colors”) but faulted the filmmakers for “the failure, twice around, to give ‘Ol’ Man River’ any of the pulse and momentum which go so far towards making it Kern’s best song. Both Sinatra and a colored singer [Caleb Peterson] do it, instead, with all misplaced reverence, as if they were retranslating at sight, out of Tacitus, the Emancipation Proclamation.” (My husband Charles actually liked Sinatra’s “Ol’ Man River,” particularly the way he bent and shaped the notes, which he attributed to the African-American musical tradition but I thought might also have come from the great opera singers of Sinatra’s own people. But then the definitive versions of “Ol’ Man River” as far as I’m concerned remain Paul Robeson’s and, in a different musical idiom, Ray Charles’.)

The main reason you’d want to see Till the Clouds Roll By is the various performances of Kern’s songs, which run the quality gamut from great to acceptable but never become as outright bad as, say, Perry Como’s rendition of “Mountain Greenery” in the MGM biopic of Rodgers and Hart, Words and Music. Thie highlights of the film are Judy Garland’s numbers, for which (at her insistence) MGM had the overall director, Richard Whorf (usually an actor, but he does an O.K. if not a spectacularly great job here) step aside and let her then-husband, Vincente Minnelli, take over. Minnelli had a big problem; at that moment Judy was pregnant with their daughter Liza (making Liza Minnelli one of those stars, along with Mia Farrow, who essentially made their screen debuts before they were born) and Vincente had to pull out all the tricks to keep that from the audience. On “Look for the Silver Lining” he stacked Judy in front of a sinkful of dishes she was supposedly washing, and on “Who?” – for which the singer had to do a spectacular dance number involving elephants, horses and other circus animals – he doubled her every chance he could. Judy was supposed to be playing the tragically short-lived Ziegfeld singing-dancing star Marilyn Miller, but when Miller’s own films got re-released on Turner Classic Movies it became clear that she and Garland weren’t at all alike. But who cares? Judy is brilliant in this film – she and Lena Horne are really the stars – it doesn’t matter that she’s playing someone she doesn’t resemble in the slightest.

Other highlights include Angela Lansbury playing a British music-hall entertainer singing Kern’s “How’d Ya Like to Spoon with Me?” (Lansbury continually fought the “suits” at MGM, who insisted on giving her voice doubles even though she had sung in British music halls and later would prove her vocal chops by starring in two huge Broadway hits, Mame and Sweeney Todd; I’d read elsewhere that she never got to sing for herself in an MGM movie in the 1940’s but the imdb.com “Trivia” posters insist that this time she did – and she repeated the song over 40 years later in a Murder, She Wrote episode); Virginia O’Brien’s “Life Upon the Wicked Stage” in the Show Boat prologue; June Allyson’s delivery of the novelty song “Cleopatterer”; the Wilde Twins’ (Lyn and Lee) doing “She Didn’t Say Yes”; and the young Cyd Charisse dancing to “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (though the guy singing it is pretty sorry).

One song I found myself haunted by and was sorry was not performed vocally is “Go, LIttle Boat,” a piece Kern and P. G. Wodehouse wrote in 1919 and an utterly haunting ballad heard here as the exit music for Kern’s bromance partner, Jim Hessler. I just played this off YouTube in Joan Morris’s haunting rendition, with William Bolcom on piano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L62nWGnp_Yw), and I was astonished not only by the beauty of Kern’s melody but Wodehouse’s lyrics as well. Here, for those of you (including me) who thought Wodehouse was only capable of upper-class satire and brittle wisecracks, are the lyrics (including the verse) to “Go, Little Boat”:

Soft, softly as over the waters we creep
Winds seem to sigh
Dark, dark is the night and the world is asleep
Wakeful and wide
Slow, slow though the river may flow
Soon, soon I shall be
Safe, safe in the harbor where someone I know
Waits for me.

Go, little boat, serenely gliding
Over the silver water, biding
Naught but the stars I see, shining above
Flow, river, carry me to him I love.

Go, little boat, serenely gliding
Love at your helm, your course is guiding
Fair winds to hasten you, may fortune send
’Til I come safe to journey’s end.