by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last May 29 Charles and I
watched another item from the Mill Creek Entertainment box of 20 public-domain
musicals: Minstrel Man, a 1944
oddball from PRC (the little studio that made a few genuinely great movies —
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Strange Illusion and Detour, Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp) but also put out so much garbage that Hollywood
wags joked that the studio’s initials, which officially stood for “Producers’
Releasing Corporation,” really meant “Pretty Rotten Crap.” Despite the
intrinsic awfulness of the concept — an ode to the joy and staying power of
minstrelsy — and the rather odd casting of Benny Fields as the lead minstrel
(he looks the part, somehow being
more attractive in blackface than he is out of makeup, but his thin, whispery
voice seems odd if your concept of a minstrel is Al Jolson), Minstrel Man emerges as a pretty good film. It had an unusual
level of talent both in front of and behind the camera: the director is Joseph
H. Lewis, who would return to the world of minstrelsy two years later in a far
more prestigious production — he directed, uncredited, the musical numbers in
the biopic The Jolson Story (Alfred E. Green got sole credit but apparently did only the plot
portions), and the writing committee included Martin Mooney from Detour, who co-wrote the story with Raymond L. Schrock;
and Pierre Gendron from Bluebeard, who co-wrote the script with Irwin Franklin. The actors include Gladys George as Mae White,
long-suffering wife of Lee “Lasses” White (Roscoe Karns), manager of minstrel
man Dixie Boy Johnson (Benny Fields —his real first name, if he has one, is
never used). Ironically, there was a real Lee “Lasses” White who’s also in the
movie, in a minor role; Jerome Cowan also appears as Johnson’s agent, Bill
Evans (reuniting him and George from the cast of the 1941 version of The
Maltese Falcon); and Alan Dinehart, the
marvelously slimy villain of 1930’s minor classics like A Study in Scarlet and Supernatural, turns up in a sympathetic role as Johnson’s
producer, Lew Dunn (a name probably derived from the real-life Lew Dockstader,
in whose minstrel company Al Jolson got his start).
The film opens in the
1920’s —though we don’t learn when we are until much later, when Johnson attempts a comeback and is told
that talking pictures have killed the demand for all forms of live entertainment — with Johnson
performing on opening night of his new show, Minstrel Man, singing a song called “Remember Me to Caroline”
(sometimes sung as “Remember Me to Carolina”) which he supposedly wrote in
honor of his wife, who’s about to have his baby. Johnson would rather be with
his wife in the hospital than on stage, but it’s opening night and The Show Must Go On. Through hand
signals and lip movements Mae White tells him while he’s in the middle of his
song that the delivery went well and his child is a girl, but then things take
a turn for the worse and the daughter lives but mom dies. Broken-hearted and
traumatized by the loss of his wife on the day which should have been the
happiest of their relationship, Dixie quits the show and decides to tear around
the world — or at least as much of it as PRC had stock footage of — and blows
all his money in casinos. Meanwhile Lee and Mae White take his baby daughter and
raise her as their own, naming her Caroline after her late mom. Five years
later Dixie returns home and tries to re-establish a relationship with his
daughter, but the Whites say no, you abandoned her and you can’t just come
smashing your way back into her life as if you never left. Dixie gets a job
singing in a movie theatre as the fourth of five acts performing between
showings of the film (a common practice in the 1930’s; major stars like Benny
Goodman and Frank Sinatra got important career boosts from gigs like this) but
decides he can’t bear to be in New York any longer.
He gets a job at a club in
Havana — a location which strains the resources of PRC’s set department — but
freaks out and walks off in mid-performance when the audience demands he sing
his big song, “Remember Me to Caroline,” which he can’t bear to do because of
the memories it brings back. Then he takes another trip to Europe and goes home
on the Morro Castle, whose
real-life disaster (the ship caught fire at sea and sank) was at the time this
film was made probably the second most famous accident on a tourist ship, after
the Titanic. Dixie Boy Johnson’s name
appears on a newspaper list of the dead passengers (both Charles and I were
amused when his is the only name that isn’t accompanied by an age, as if he’s
maintaining his actor’s vanity to the end), but he really survives and finds
whatever work he can as “Jack Carter.” A quick dissolve from Caroline’s seventh
birthday cake to her 15th (which looks absolutely identical except
for the change in number and the extra candles) indicates the passage of time,
and Caroline has unknowingly followed in her dad’s footsteps, sneaking out of
her bed at night miming to her dad’s records. At some point — the writing
committee is maddeningly vague as to when — she’s learned that the legendary
minstrel performer Dixie Boy Johnson is her father, and she practices for her
own career by miming, singing and dancing along with his records. She’s got
good enough (and the actress playing her as a teenager, Judy Clark, is good
enough at both singing and acting she should have had more of a career than she
did) that producer Lew Dunn decides to revive Minstrel Man in an updated version and star Caroline White as
“Dixie Girl Johnson.” Bill Evans finds
out and persuades Dixie Boy Johnson to quit his gig at a seedy nightclub in San
Francisco, come to New York and sue for a share of the proceeds, but Dixie Boy
drops any intent of suing the show when he learns his daughter is the star, and
there’s a Show Boat-like reunion
sequence between father and daughter at the end as she triumphs.
The big final
number features Dixie Girl’s spectacular dance and a solo by a male vocalist —
John Raitt, later a Broadway star (he played Billy Bigelow in the premiere
production of Carousel and
quite frankly did the big “Soliloquy” better than anyone since) and father of
blues singer/guitarist Bonnie Raitt. Minstrel Man seems like an unimpressive movie in synopsis, and
like Trocadero (the last musical Charles
and I watched from this 20-film Mill Creek Entertainment box) it’s the sort of
movie in which you’re a reel or two ahead of the writers as they trot out
familiar cliché after familiar cliché to keep their plot moving, but it’s done
surprisingly stylishly, thanks largely to Lewis’s direction. In his early days
as a director in Universal’s “B” Western unit Lewis had acquired the nickname
“Wagon-Wheel Joe” for bringing a set of various sizes of wagon wheels to the
location and aiming his camera through them every time he had to shoot a dull
dialogue scene and wanted to liven it up visually. There are plenty of examples
of that trademark in Minstrel Man, including a scene in the Whites’ home in which he suddenly cuts to an
outside location so he can film their conversation through a window, and
another at the end of Judy Clark’s dance number in which he frames her by
shooting through a gap in an ornate railing used as part of the stage set.
Though Benny Fields’ singing is oddly somnolent and one misses the energy and
verve Jolson could have brought to this part (but even at this low point of his
career Jolson was too big a “name” for PRC to afford!), and in these more
racially sensitive times it’s hard to take the assertion Lew Dunn makes in the
last reel that minstrelsy’s appeal will never die, Minstrel Man is a surprisingly well-done movie with a real
sense of pathos and charm … even if it does seem like we’ve seen it all before.
