Black and Tan (RKO, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 17) when my husband Charles actually did get home shortly after 11 p.m., I ran him an oddball item off YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qHc0rxm628&t=6s): the 1929 short Black and Tan, starring Duke Ellington (in his film debut) and light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington in a film written, directed, and probably produced by Dudley Murphy. Dudley Murphy (1897-1968) had a quirky career; according to his imdb.com page, his “output varied wildly from modernist avant-garde to routine studio programmers.” He’s best known for three films he made featuring major African-American performers: this one, St. Louis Blues (1929) – another short, and the one film we have of the legendary blues singer Bessie Smith – and the feature The Emperor Jones, made in New York City in 1933 and preserving Paul Robeson’s performance as Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play (though Porgy and Bess writer DuBose Heyward worked on the script and “opened up” the play to show how Brutus Jones got to be a Caribbean dictator in the first place). I’d seen Black and Tan several times before, usually in pretty grungy and beat-up prints presented on programs about jazz in films. This version from the Cult Cinema Classics YouTube page was ballyhooed as a major restoration: “The source material used includes a 35mm print from the collection of KAVI (a film archive in Finland) and a 16mm duplicate negative from the collection of Blackhawk Films.” The restoration was a big improvement over any version of the film I’d seen before. The plot of Black and Tan is simple: Duke Ellington and his trumpet player, Artie Whetsol, are shown rehearsing the title song, “Black and Tan Fantasy” (actually co-composed by Ellington and his earlier trumpet star, James “Bubber” Miley, but it’s possible that Miley had already drunk his way out of Ellington’s band by the time this film was made) in a grungy Harlem apartment.

Two men (Edgar Connor and Alec Lovejoy) come over to repossess Ellington’s piano, but Ellington’s girlfriend, dancer Fredi Washington, arrives with the seemingly good news that their financial troubles are over. “I've just landed a job in a nightclub. And I’m going to dance and you’re going to play. Isn’t that wonderful?” Ellington reminds Fredi that her doctor had just diagnosed her with heart disease and told her she shouldn’t dance anymore, but Fredi ignores his warning and takes the job anyway. We then cut to the band’s and Fredi’s debut performance at the club, which is probably as close as we’re going to get to what Ellington’s actual performances at the Cotton Club, the prestige nightclub in Harlem that featured Black performers but didn’t let any Blacks in the audience, looked like. Among the acts are a group of five Black male dancers who move in a staggeringly perfect unison to Ellington’s composition “Black Beauty” while Fredi waits to do her number. Murphy gives us “Black Beauty” first filmed normally and then through a point-of-view shot showing how Fredi sees the number in a series of fragmented, kaleidoscopic vistas that let us know without stressing it just how sick she is and how dangerous it is for her to be working there. Then Fredi does her big number to Ellington’s “Cotton Club Stomp,” flails her arms and legs around big-time, and Murphy gives us an astonishing angle shooting up at her legs and her crotch. As the dance number stops Fredi literally collapses on stage, and the club’s manager tells Ellington to keep playing. He does so until someone comes up to him on the bandstand and gives him word that Fredi is literally on her deathbed, whereupon he orders his band members to stop playing and pack up so he and they can be with Fredi as she dies. They all end up in Fredi’s bedroom, where she makes her last request: “Duke, play me the ‘Black and Tan Fantasy.’” The Hall Johnson Choir turns up and sings a version of the song (all other renditions I’m aware of present it as an instrumental), and we get a final point-of-view shot from Fredi’s perspective as Ellington’s face gets blurrier until Murphy and cinematographer Dal Clawson cut to a more conventional angle as Fredi finally dies. The restoration definitely improved the picture quality and seems to have helped the sound as well, though it’s still awfully difficult to make out the words the Hall Johnson Choir is singing to “Black and Tan Fantasy.” (The Hall Johnson Choir also appeared in the 1929 St. Louis Blues, but there they just seemed to get in the way.)

One thing I hadn’t realized until last night is that Black and Tan is actually at least loosely based on a true story; Fredi Washington’s character is based on Florence Mills, a spectacularly successful and tragically short-lived African-American entertainer. Born in 1896, Mills made her New York stage debut in the all-Black revue Shuffle Along, which was such a huge hit it convinced white promoters there was a market among white audiences for Black entertainers. White producer Lew Leslie hired Mills and other Black stars for the Plantation Club and later developed a Broadway show out of the club’s roster, the Plantation Revue. Alas, Mills’s rise to stardom ended abruptly when she caught tuberculosis after 300 performances of a show called Blackbirds in London. She made it home but died at a hospital in New York City on November 1, 1927. More than 10,000 people attended her funeral; Black poet James Weldon Johnson was one of them, and Ethel Waters, Cora Green, and Lottie Gee, all of whom had performed with Mills, were honorary pallbearers. One giveaway that the plot of Black and Tan was inspired by the real-life death of Florence Mills was that the film includes “Black Beauty,” a song composed by Ellington specifically as a memorial tribute to her. The connection between Fredi Washington’s fate in the movie and Florence Mills’s in real life gives Black and Tan a poignancy most 1920’s and 1930’s band shorts don’t have, while Murphy’s amazingly creative visual direction (at a time when most Hollywood musical features were still being filmed from straightforward angles, in which dancers were seen cavorting on big sets from far away and looking like ants on a wedding cake) also makes this film really special – though Ellington’s later band shorts, A Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller at Paramount before he left to invent Cinerama, are also unusually creative visually. I’ve long suspected that Ellington, who began as a painter and showed off his visual flair by (among other things) naming so many of his songs after colors, had a lot to do with the unusually rich visual “looks” of his band shorts.