by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
The film I showed my husband Charles last night was a 1945 Universal “B” called The Crimson Canary, a movie I’ve had on my favorites list since I first saw it in 1970 and made audiotapes of some of the songs from it two years later. I watched it from a grey-label DVD that for some reason eliminated the opening number, Claudia Drake singing “I Never Knew I Could Love Anybody (Honey, Like I’m Loving You”), for reasons I can’t fathom unless there’s some weird and take-downable issue with the copyright of that song. The reason it’s a favorite movie of mine is it deals with the world of jazz, particularly a six-piece white combo (trumpet, tenor sax, clarinet, piano, bass and drums) holding forth at Vic’s, a small Los Angeles nightclub owned and run by Vic Miller (Steven Geray). The band’s leader is Danny Brooks (Noah Beery, Jr.), and in a nod to topicality for 1945 all the members first met when stationed together on the same ship during World War II, found a shared interest in jazz, started jamming together and decided after they were mustered out to stay together as a unit.
The main characters are Danny, Johnny (Danny Morton) – the band’s drummer and one of the many men in the life of the group’s singer, Anita Lane (Claudia Drake), Jean Walker (Lois Collier) – Danny’s girlfriend, though they’re stuck in a long-distance relationship since she’s a schoolteacher in San Francisco – and homicide lieutenant Roger Quinn (John Litel), who’s also a jazz fan and for that reason is picked to handle the case when Anita is found murdered in the back room of Vic’s club and the band members, all of whom were cruised by her at one time or another, are the prime suspects. Vic sets up a gig for them with a friend of his who owns a club in Monterey, but when they show up the owner tells them they’re hot, the cops have his place staked out to catch them, and they need to scatter. Danny gets a job as a piano player in a small club in San Francisco and Johnny stays there with him, trying to regain his memory of the night Anita was killed – he had got drunk and one of the other members of the band had taken over at the drums during “China Boy,” the number during which Anita was killed, and Vic gave Danny a recording of the song that’s supposedly the fatal performance.
The record ends up with Quinn, who’s convinced he will recognize the trumpeter if he hears him again – which he does in that San Francisco club in which Danny is playing piano, but one of the other musicians leaves a trumpet on top of the piano and Danny can’t resist blowing a few notes on it and then leading the band on trumpet in a rendition of the old song “Sleepy Time Gal.” Quinn immediately recognizes the horn, though Danny, Johnny and Jean evade him and turn up at another club where Coleman Hawkins is leading his Esquire poll-winning sextet with Howard McGhee on trumpet, Oscar Pettiford on bass and Denzil DaCosta Best on drums. Though Hawkins had been active since the 1920’s, by 1945 – when other musicians of his generation were putting down the new bebop style, Hawkins was not only praising it, he was playing it. He was recruiting bebop musicians to record with him – including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, pianist Thelonious Monk and drummer Max Roach – and the band he leads in The Crimson Canary was almost certainly the first bop group ever filmed. The club also features smooth-voiced Black folksinger Josh White singing “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” and the nice novelty “One Meat Ball.” (Charles said he’d never heard that song sung so “seriously,” but the only other version I’ve heard was by the Andrews Sisters as the flip side of their mega-hit “Rum and Coca-Cola.”)
Alas, after that interlude with Hawkins and White – and yes, it is Coleman Hawkins and his bandmates on the soundtrack (some sources claim the musicians who dubbed for the white actors playing the main band in the film’s plot – Nick Cochrane and Eddie Parkers, trumpet; Dale Nichols, trombone; Barney Bigard, clarinet; King Guion, tenor sax; Stan Wrightsman, piano; Budd Hatch, bass; Mel Tormé, drums – as having played for Hawkins and his band as well, but the piece Hawkins plays here, “Hollywood Stampede,” also exists on a record he made for Capitol at the time and the two performances, though not note-for-note identical, are certainly the work of the same musicians) – the music ends and we get a resolution of the murder plot. A restive Johnny has placed a personal ad in the San Francisco Times to call the band back together and have them meet at Vic’s back in L.A. Jean starts snooping around and hooks up with Anita’s old roommate (a nicely hard-boiled performance by Christinei McIntyre, who was usually the nice-looking girl in the Three Stooges’ shorts). She finds an anklet in the pocket of one of Anita’s old dresses, traces it to the jeweler who sold it to her and learns that the same man who bought the anklet also bought a distinctive cigar clipper – which Jean spots Vic using, thereby indicating that he is Anita’s killer (his motive was her laughing at him when he made advances to her). The climax occurs when Vic grabs a gun and threatens to kill Jean and the band members, but Quinn stops him in time, arrests him and exonerates the band musicians.
The Crimson Canary is an intriguing film not just because first-rate players like Coleman Hawkins, Oscar Pettiford and Josh White are in it but because it has interesting plot parallels to two far better known films made a year later, The Blue Dahlia (directed by George Marshall from an original script by Raymond Chandler) and Detour (directed by Edgar G. Ulmer from a script by Martin Goldsmith). Detour used the plot device of a musician on the run from a murder he didn’t commit who can’t contact his girlfriend and especially can’t go to see her because then she’ll be compromised and he’ll likely be arrested, and The Blue Dahlia also has key elements from The Crimson Canary, including a suspect who can’t be sure he didn’t commit the murder because he blacked out at the time, and even the flower Anita wore in her lapel which Johnny removed and kept as a love token – in The Blue Dahlia it was one of the titular blue-dyed flowers whose petals the murder victim was picking out just before she was killed.
The Crimson Canary doesn’t really qualify as film noir, and interestingly it was originally advertised as an exploitation film (the headline on the original ads was,. “Rhythm Cults Exposed!”), but there’s enough of the atmosphere that was floating around Hollywood in 1945 that the film, directed by John Hoffman from a script by Peggy Phillips and Henry Blankfort (Blankfort was also named as an associate producer and later when he was called as a hostile witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee he had to explain that the title The Crimson Canary wasn’t intended as a Left-wing political reference!), works not only as a jazz movie but a nice little vest-pocket thriller. It’s also perhaps the first movie to have a jazz background score (by Edgar Fairchild), though the billing of it as “Background Music in ‘Jazz’” seems odd – it fooled the editors of the film’s imdb.com page to think a piece called “Jazz” actually occurs in the film.
