by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Pardon
My Gun, a 1930 comedy/musical/Western from
Pathé, which Charles and I watched last Sunday right after seeing the comedy
masterpiece True Confession on
TCM. Just about anything would
have seemed like an anticlimax after True Confession — a screamingly funny character-driven comedy with
Carole Lombard at the peak of her powers and Fred MacMurray as a rather
stuck-up leading man (they clash over his insistence on total honesty and her
reliance on lying her way out of embarrassing situations) — but Pardon
My Gun at least had a certain charm. I was
interested in this mainly because it contained the song “Deep Down South,”
recorded September 9, 1930 by Bix Beiderbecke and His Orchestra in that very
weird session he made for Victor with jazz aces like Benny Goodman, Pee Wee
Russell, Jimmy Dorsey and Gene Krupa — and a nerdy-voiced singer named Weston
Vaughan who was also used by Artie Shaw for his first session as a bandleader. Ironically, that was
the only song listed for this film on imdb.com even though it contains quite a
lot of music, including a title song sung by a chorus over the credits as well
as an instrumental version of “Twelfth Street Rag” and a quite nice vocal
version of a far more famous song than “Deep Down South,” Willard Robison’s “A
Cottage for Sale.” Pardon My Gun
was also the last movie ever produced by the U.S. branch of the French Pathé
studio; Pathé’s U.S. subsidiary had got such a good start that in 1913 U.S.
film trade papers were publishing hysterical (in both senses of the word)
stories about how Pathé threatened to take control of the entire U.S. film
industry. The company maintained its success well into the 1920’s, thanks to
their relationship with comedian Harold Lloyd, who produced his own films but
used Pathé as his distributor. Then they were hit by three blows in rapid
succession: first Lloyd decamped to Paramount, then Hal Roach switched his distribution from Pathé to MGM (thereby costing
Pathé the services of up-and-coming comedy team Laurel and Hardy), and in 1929
Pathé was making a quickie musical in New York when a fire broke out on the set
and 11 people died — still the worst accident ever, in terms of loss of life,
during the actual shooting of a film. Pathé’s public image in the U.S. never
recovered from that blow, and though the company nominally continued to exist
for two more years it was taken over by RKO and ultimately completely merged
with it (though Pathé’s actual physical plant was bought by former RKO
production head David O. Selznick, who used it to make the Selznick
International movies, including Gone with the Wind).
Pardon My Gun was ostensibly a vehicle for Western star Tom Keene (t/n George
Duryea) — he’s the only performer billed above the title — and it has at least
a nominal plot: Keene plays Ted Duncan, ranch hand for Pa Martin (Robert
Edeson) and boyfriend of Martin’s daughter Mary (Sally Starr). Alas, there’s a
rival for ownership of both Martin’s ranch and Martin’s daughter: Cooper (Harry
Woods), and Martin and Cooper have bet the ownership of the ranch on an
upcoming horse relay race (the riders remain the same throughout but the
“relay” part means they change horses in mid-race) between Cooper and Duncan. Cooper hires a gang to kidnap
Duncan but he’s rescued, surprisingly easily, by Martin’s younger kids: Peggy
(Mona Ray), Hank (Hank McFarlane) and Tom (Tom McFarlane). Not that the plot
matters much; it’s basically a set of periodic interruptions between the “barn
dance” concert given by Abe Lyman and His Orchestra during the first half of
the film and the rodeo that takes up most of the second half, both of which are
considerably more entertaining than what there is of a story in this film.
During the barn dance we get to see some quite spectacular hoofing by Al Norman
(who plays a ranch hand and anticipates Ray Bolger both as a dancer and a
“type”) and Ida May Chadwick. “Deep Down South” is performed by Mona Ray with
Abe Lyman’s orchestra — and her version is slightly slower than the Bix version
and much better sung. Though the
song is one of those silly longing-for-the-South ditties, Ray tears into it and
belts it out with far more gusto than Weston Vaughan on Bix’s record (Richard
Hadlock called Vaughan “glandless,” which probably wasn’t literally true but
might as well have been), enough so that I couldn’t help but wish Bix would
have had Ray on his record as well. “A Cottage for Sale” is done by the Lyman
band with one of his musicians standing up in mid-song and taking a quite nice
vocal; it’s faster than the song is usually done today, but then so was
Robison’s own recording from 1931. Pardon My Gun isn’t much as a movie, but the musical numbers and
the spectacular rodeo sequences make it a fun way to spend 62 minutes even
though we have to endure a Black “comedian” (quotes definitely intended) named
“Stompie,” playing a character named “Lightnin’,” given a ridiculous fright wig
that makes him look like a beta version of Don King and put through all the
stereotypical shuffling-servant paces — a far cry from the way Hattie McDaniel was
used as one of her voice-of-reason characters in True Confession!
