Hot Rhythm was a
movie I really hadn’t had much hope for, mainly because it was presented by
Turner Classic Movies as part of a tribute to director William Beaudine — so
notorious for making bad movies that Harry and Michael Medved nominated him as
one of the “Worst Directors of All Time” in their book The Golden
Turkey Awards. Beaudine had actually begun
his career in the 1910’s as a director of comedy shorts (including a spoof of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea called — almost
inevitably — 20,000 Legs Under the Sea) and had actually worked his way up by the mid-1920’s to direct
features with “A”-list stars like Mary Pickford (her last two films in child
roles, Little Annie Rooney and Sparrows, in 1925 and 1926 respectively) before the
Depression wiped him out financially and forced him to accept a long succession
of jobs in “B”-movies (and then, in the 1950’s, in the graveyard of “B”
directors, series TV). He’d still made some good movies in the early sound era,
like Three Wise Girls (1932) with
Jean Harlow (though its quality came more from its writer, future Academy Award
winner Robert Riskin) and The Old-Fashioned Way (1934) with W. C. Fields (but then anybody could make a great movie with Fields — all you had
to do was make sure the camera had him in range and in focus, and the
soundtrack was recording his dialogue audibly), but by the early 1940’s he was
forced to work in the swamp pit of Monogram, making things like The
Ape Man (1943) — Bela Lugosi’s all-time
worst movie, at least until Ed Wood got hold of him! The stars of Hot
Rhythm were Dona Drake, a reasonably
attractive young woman singer with a reasonably attractive voice (she wasn’t
going to keep Anita O’Day or Peggy Lee up nights worried about the competition,
but she was a more than competent band-style singer in the manner of Helen Ward
and Martha Tilton with Benny Goodman, Edythe Wright with Tommy Dorsey or Irene
Daye with Gene Krupa), and Robert Lowery, tall, gangly and oddly clumsy-looking
for an actor who within four years would become the screen’s second Batman (in
the 1948 Columbia serial Batman and Robin). I also knew that even though the title was Hot Rhythm, there was likely to be very little actual hot
rhythm in the movie; “B” studios like Monogram and PRC often made musicals
whose titles promised far swingier songs than the films themselves delivered,
and this was no inception: the hottest rhythm we hear in the film is in the
very opening shot, in which the camera tracks down the various studios of the
“Beacon Record Company” (almost certainly the fictional invention of the film’s
writers, Tim Ryan and Charles R. Marion, though there was an actual Beacon recording company owned by entrepreneur Joe
Davis, one of whose other imprints was modestly called “Joe Davis Records”!)
and the first performer we see is a hot Black boogie-woogie pianist. Alas, the
camera keeps tracking and we end up in the studios featuring less exciting,
though still capable, white performers.
Surprise! Hot Rhythm, though unoriginal, is at least fun and stylishly
done all the way through. The plot is no great shakes; it has to do with Beacon
owner Mr. O’Hara (Tim Ryan) and his battle with crooked attorney (is that
redundant?) Herman Strohbach (Robert Kent), manager of Tommy Taylor (Jerry
Cooper) and His Orchestra, Beacon’s most successful act. Taylor is resisting
pressure from his manager and the owner of the nightclub where he works to add
a girl singer to his band — Taylor insists he’s doing fine taking the vocals
himself (and the first song we see him perform is — surprise! — the old Harry
Barris-Gus Arnheim-George Clifford “It Must Be True” from 1930, recorded then
by Arnheim’s band with Bing Crosby doing a superb vocal Jerry Cooper in this
version is trying his level best to copy). Jimmy O’Brien (Robert Lowery) and
Sammy Rubin (the engaging Sidney Miller) are two aspiring songwriters working
for Beacon in its lucrative sideline of recording jingles for radio
commercials, though instead of coming up with original melodies for these
O’Brien simply recycles public-domain tunes like “Clementine” and “Little Brown
Jug.” One of the quartet of girl singers at Beacon who record the jingles is
Mary Adams (Dona Drake), and O’Brien runs into her — literally — in a hallway
and instantly falls in love with her and is determined to build her career.
O’Brien decides to make a test record of Mary by tuning a radio to a broadcast
of Tommy Taylor’s band and having her overlay a live vocal on his broadcast
performance of the song “Where Were You?” (written by Lou and Ruth Herscher
and, while hardly as good as the similar but better-known song “Where Are You?” is actually a quite nice ballad, worthy of
revival, that showcases Dona Drake’s voice better than the rather forced
“swing” numbers she sings later in the movie). Rubin questions whether that
would be legal, but O’Brien assures him there’s nothing wrong with it as long
as the record is used only as an audition test and is not publicly released.
Well, the inevitable happens and the record gets picked up by mistake along
with the six instrumentals Taylor recorded that completed his contract with
Beacon; it is publicly released,
and despite O’Hara’s and his ditzy secretary Polly Kane’s (Irene Ryan, Tim’s
real-life wife and later Granny on the TV series The Beverly
Hillbillies) attempts to go around and
break all the records of it that have been put on sale (which gets them
arrested and O’Brien and Rubin have to bail them out), the record gets
released, it’s a hit and Herman Strohbach threatens a lawsuit that could put
Beacon out of business. O’Hara decides to pull a fast one on Strohbach by
claiming that Polly is the mystery singer on the illegal record — she actually
filled in on one of the jingles and thought that was the record her boss was talking about — and
O’Brien cuts a record with Polly that turns out to be a novelty hit. It all
ends happily, of course, with Strohbach publicly humiliated, O’Hara with two
huge hits on his hands and O’Brien and Mary together.
Though owing a lot to Manhattan
Merry-Go-Round and virtually every other
Hollywood movie of the period depicting the recording industry as a bunch of
bozos who, if they ever stumble
on something the public will buy, do so purely by mistake, Hot Rhythm is fun start to finish and is especially
entertaining when Irene Ryan is front and center. It’s obvious she’s channeling
Gracie Allen — and the whole crazy business between her and her boss, played by
her real-life husband, is all too reminiscent of all those movies in which
Gracie played a bizarrely incompetent secretary for her real-life husband, George Burns — but like Burns,
Tim Ryan wrote excellent material for his wife and she manages to duplicate
Allen’s feat of being surrealistically dumb instead of just ditzily dumb à
la yet another great comedienne who worked
with her actual husband, Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy. Her best moments are when she gets so confused about
various people’s names she starts introducing people to themselves and then
quits in frustration and says things like, “Names! They’re so confusing! Why do
people have to have them?” One imdb.com reviewer, who signed himself (herself?)
only as “ptb-8” from Australia, made the interesting case that in the
mid-1940’s the quality of Monogram’s output was actually improving, mentioning
a couple of other musicals, Lady, Let’s Dance and The Sultan’s Daughter, as well as the “B” noirs When Strangers
Marry (an early credit for Robert Mitchum)
and Dillinger, before the studio
got into bigger-budgeted films like the quite good 1946 Suspense (an intriguing mixture of ice-skating musical and Double
Indemnity-ish crime drama with Belita as
the skater and Barry Sullivan as her corrupt manager and husband, directed by
Frank Tuttle and with Belita showing real acting chops that eluded her
ice-skating consoeurs Sonja Henie
and Vera Hruba Ralston). Dillinger
is the only one of these movies I’ve seen and it’s no great shakes as a film
(though it has its moments), but it’s certainly arguable that one shouldn’t
judge Monogram just by those dreary East Side Kids/Bowery Boys movies, Sam
Katzman’s cheapies with Lugosi and the endless Charlie Chan movies with the
dying Sidney Toler and his replacement, Roland Winters; though even the best
movies of Monogram 2.0 (the incarnation formed by original founder W. Ray
Johnston in 1937 after he exited the 1935 merger that had created Republic)
don’t equal the films of genuine quality made by Monogram 1.0 (The
Phantom Broadcast, Sensation Hunters and
the 1934 Jane Eyre with Virginia
Bruce and Colin Clive), it’s nice to know the little studio wasn’t entirely a
wasteland — and Swing Parade of 1946, with Gale Storm, Louis Jordan and the Three Stooges (!), also counts as
well worth watching.
