Killer Diller (All American News, Sack Amuse,emt Enterprises, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 10:20 p.m., after my husband Charles and I listened to the Charlie Parker CD The Complete Birth of the Bebop, I ran Charles Killer Diller, a 1948 movie (that’s the date of release; it seems to have hung around the vaults for two years before the picture’s fate was sealed). It turned up on YouTube because we had previously watched Nat “King” Cole’s superb vehicle as W. C. Handy in St. Louis Blues a decade later and the people running YouTube obviously decided they had a live one here and they should send me more items with Nat “King” Cole. Alas, while St. Louis Blues is a fascinating movie despite its flaws (a cheap-jack production and blatant borrowings from The Jazz SingerI), Killer Diller is a really cheap movie that took advantage from two sources of footage, a middle section presenting Black vaudeville acts of the time and a framing sequence that passes for the film’s plot.

The plot, such as it is, consists of an incompetent Black magician (Dusty Fletcher, who has got his 15 minutes of fame just then when an old comedy routine he’d written called “Open the Door, Richard” had been recorded by Jack McVea’s band and become a million-selling hit; Fletcher recorded the piece himself for the Natioal label, whose founder Herb Abrahamson later was a co-founder of Atlantic, but his version didn’t come anywhere close to McVea’s sales) who shows up at a theatre and demonstrates his latest trick. Unfortunately, his latest trick works too well; he makes the boss’s girlfriend disappear just as the boss has handed her a string of pearls as a wedding present. The boss calls for the police and gets four Black equivalents of the Keystone Kops, and they spend the rest of the time chasing each other around the theatre and ultimately disrupting the brilliant comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley as she attempts to do her act.

Mabley is also one of the great Black performers seen in this film’s revue sequences, along with Cole, Andy Kirk (nearing the end of his long career as a bandleader that had got its start in Kansas City in the 1920’s), and some fine Black performers that have got lost in the shuffle. Beverly White does a ribald song called “I Don’t Want to Get Married” and a rewrite of the old classic blues song “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” There are some fine, spectacular tap dancing routines from the Clark Brothers – though both Charles and I found them Nicholas Brothers wanna-bes – and less interesting but still fun dances from the Congeroos, a two-man, two-woman group cavorting around wooden sets cut to resemble palm trees. A comedy team called Patterson and Jackson also prove to be surprisingly agile dancers despite their jumbo size – one of the songs they dance to is Thomas “Fats” Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’” – and they also do a screamingly funny parody of the Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care.”

Andy Kirk’s band does a quite hot number called “Gator Serenade” that’s a honking tenor sax duet between Ray Abrams (whom I’d heard of) and Shirley Green (that’s a man, by the way, and I’d never heard of him). There are also two other band numbers, one of which features a surprisingly lyrical trumpet solo; I suspect the player is Theodore “Fats” Navarro, yet another of the bebop world’s casualties to heroin. By 1948 Navarro was at the peak of his all-too-short career and was out of the Kirk band, but I suspect much of the footage for this film had been shot two or three years earlier and stuffed into it. As for the King Cole Trio – Nat “King” Cole on piano and vocals (befitting their importance in his act just then, before his magnificent voice overwhelmed his career), Oscar Moore on guitar and Johnny Miller on bass – they do a novelty song called “Ooh! Kickeroonie” written and sung by Cole alone and a jazz number called “Breezy and the Bass” co-credited to Cole and Miller. “Breezy and the Bass” was included in the documentary The Unforgettable Nat “King” Cole and it’s a highly infectious song that shows off just what a fine pianist Cole was and how much he had to offer the world of jazz before he became a superstar singer instead. (As he got older and fell out of practice, his skill level on his left hand visibly deteriorated.)

Midway through the revue acts we cut to a scene of Dusty Fletcher running around the rooftop of the theatre building and we remind ourselves that this movie is actually supposed to have a plot. The climax, such as it is, consists of the various characters emerging fron the magic boxes – first the manager, then the cops, and finally the missing girlfriend, her pearls intact (ya remember the pearls?). Along the way there’s also been a comedy romance between Fletcher and the boss’s secretary, played by Butterfly McQueen – so we know everyone else in this cheap-jack movie is one degree of separation from Gone With the Wind. Killer Diller is a truly weird movie and through much of it we’re only put off by its pretense of a plot and wish we were seeing more Black vaudeville acts instead – and yet it’s also an artefact of its period, an example of how little work producers of Black-oriented movies had to do just then to create products that would entertain their audiences.