Stormy Weather (20th Century-Fox, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Turner Classic Movies was showcasing last night was the 1943 all-Black musical Stormy Weather from 20th Century-Fox, one of two major-studio films that year with all-Black casts (MGM’s Cabin in the Sky was the other) that showcased the breadth of African-American entertainment talent in general and one African-American entertainer in particular, Lena Horne, who starred in both films. Both may have come about as a result of a 1942 meeting between major-studio managers and representatives of the African-American community, which Thomas Cripps argued in his 1977 book Slow Fade to Black marked a turning point in the history of Blacks in American cinema and a move away from the racist stereotypes that had dominated Black representations in U S. cinema before that. I read Cripps’ book shortly after it came out but I never thought there was such a strict dividing line, or that the way American films depicted Blacks improved much after that supposed turning point. One thing that might have motivated the green-light for these films was World War II, in which Blacks were being asked to join the war effort – though the U.S. military was still segregated and therefore, when Blacks fought in combat, they did so in their own units (though still under white commanders) – and one purpose behind these movies seems to have been to tell the African-American community, “You’re a part of this country, so you have a stake in us winning this war, too.” (The NAACP accordingly launched a campaign they called “The Double-V” – victory in the war and victory against racism at home. Of course, the victory against racism is still proving elusive; real progress didn’t come until the 1950’s and 1960’s and there have been white backlashes since.)

While Cabin in the Sky was based on a successful all-Black Broadway musical and carried over the story’s stage star, Ethel Waters (it’s a Faust-like tale of good wife Waters and evil temptress Horne, sent by a Black Satan played by actor Rex Ingram – who incidentally had played “De Lawd” in the 1936 film The Green Pastures and therefore became the first actor to play both God and the Devil on screen), Stormy Weather was an original loosely based on the career of its male star, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In the opening he’s hanging out on the porch of his nice suburban home with a group of Black kids to whom he’s teaching his famous staircase dance to a song called “Rang Tang Tang.” (I haven’t seen the other film in years but I suspect this is the same set on which he did that dance with Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel eight years earlier. Incidentally, Robinson said that Temple was the quickest study he ever worked with – all he had to do was demonstrate the routine he wanted once and she would pick it up easily. That’s pretty incredible praise, especially since Robinson also taught Sammy Davis, Jr.) He’s called “Bill Williamson” in the script (by Jerry Horwin and Seymour Robinson, story; H. S. Kraft, adaptation; and Frederick J. Jackson and Ted Koehler, script; incidentally Koehler had also written the lyrics to the title song, “Stormy Weather,” over a decade earlier) and he’s settled down to life in Hollywood and the fruits of a long struggle. One of the kids picks up Bill’s mail for him, and it contains a lavish edition of a show-biz magazine saluting “Bill Williamson’s” career, complete with ads from various people who figured prominently in his rise to fame.

Naturally he combs through the pages of the magazine and explains to the kids who the various people mentioned in it are, and the film flashes back to Bill and his scapegrace friend Gabe Tucker (Dooley Wilson, a Black singer best known for his role as Sam the piano player in Casablanca, even though he really couldn’t play piano and had to make excuses when he was inevitably asked to play “As Time Goes By” at Hollywood parties) returning from World War I and marching in the band led by James Reese Europe (Ernest “Bubbles” Whitman, the announcer of the Armed Forces Radio Service’s Jubilee program aimed at Black listeners; I didn’t recognize him visually but his voice was unmistakable). The real James Reese Europe had been the musical director for the white dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle before the war (their story was filmed in 1939 with, inevitably, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers playing them, but the Castles’ Black bandleaders weren’t depicted and their manservant, a Black man in real life, was played by Walter Brennan) and essentially created the big swing band. Europe made relatively few records, but the ones he did make reveal a band that had the familiar brass, reed and rhythm sections familiar from the later swing era but also an entire section of banjo players. Europe led a band that played under fire for the American troops in World War I but was murdered in 1919 by a musician in his band who thought Europe was having an affair with his wife, though before he died he founded the Clef Club, an organization aimed at raising the profile of Black American music and encouraging Black bandleaders and composers to create their own style that would be neither the low-down jive of the minstrel show or a copy of white classical and band music. The Clef Club was short-lived but had a major legacy – among its members were Ford Dabney, Cecil Mack, William H. Thiers and Will Marion Cook. You may not know who these people were but you’ve heard the songs they wrote, and Cook may have been the most important of them because he not only led a band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, that toured Europe in 1919 (and earned a rave review from classical conductor Ernest Ansermet, who particularly praised Cook’s reed soloist, Sidney Bechet), he was also Duke Ellington’s composition teacher.

The film next shows Bill and Gabe arriving at a club in a limousine Gabe has actually poached from his white employers, but Gabe has made it look like he has money and attracted the attentions of a stereotypical movie gold-digger. He’s saved from a bill he has no way of paying by Chick Bailey (Emmett “Babe” Wallace), who’s at the club with his fiancée, singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne, top-billed). Needless to say Bill falls for Selina at first sight, and the rest of the movie consists of him rising through the ranks of the entertainment business and pursuing Selina, whom at one point he proposes to but only if she’ll give up her career and stay at home to raise their kids. She turns him down flat (good girl!) and he mopes for several reels before they’re finally brought together at a World War II benefit by an unlikely deus ex machina, Cab Calloway, who hires Bill to perform and then asks him to sit in front while an unannounced guest appears. Of course, it’s Selina, and they settle their differences and appear headed for a two-career marriage at the end. The film cheerily ignores that fact that Bill Robinson was old enough to have been Lena Horne’s grandfather (he was born May 25, 1878 and she on June 30, 1917), which may be why the writers and director Andrew Stone (who used Calloway again on a musical he made the next year, Sensations of 1945), don’t give them any scenes showing them getting too intimate. I also suspect they heavily dyed Robinson’s hair and used makeup to make him look younger.

Of course what really matters in this movie is the great Black musical acts Bill meets along the way; first there’s a group billed as “The Tramp Band” whom he meets on a riverboat on his way to Nashville, where he hopes to find work. They do a song called “Linda Brown” and I suspect they were really the Spirits of Rhythm, a great but only sporadically successful band headed by novelty singer Leo Watson and guitarist Teddy Bunn (their 1933 record of “I Got Rhythm” is surprisingly advanced for the time and features licks Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the other bebop pioneers thought they were discovering over a decade later); though the guitarist is playing an acoustic instrument on screen, what we hear is an electric guitar and it’s played in Bunn’s usual scorching style. Then, when he finally gets to work at a Nashville cabaret, the proprietress and principal entertainer is 1920’s blues shouter Ada Brown and her piano player and bandleader is Thomas “Fats” Waller (in his last film; after making it he took a train from Los Angeles to New York City, his home, but died on board the train in Kansas City at only 39). Brown does a hot version of the blues “That Ain’t Right” (though there’s also a subtler, more ironic version by Nat “King” Cole on one of his early dates for Decca) and then Waller and the band – led by Benny Carter, who for the film played trumpet instead of his usual alto sax – do a nicely laid-back version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Alas, Bill’s nemesis Chick Bailey shows up and offers both Brown and Waller in the all-Black revue he’s putting together, thereby putting Bill out of work. Selina pleads with him to hire Bill, but he gives him only a humiliating job banging a drum in an “African” production number. Bill fights back one night by doing a spectacular dance in which he leaps around and jumps on various sizes of drum – it’s his best number in the movie and really showcases the talent that made Bill Robinson a superstar in the African-American community (so much so that when he died in 1949 hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Harlem as his funeral procession passed, giving him the sort of send-off you’d expect if the President died) even though most white people had never heard of him.

Meanwhile, Lena Horne – oops, I mean “Selina Rogers” – is becoming a singing star with songs like “There’s No Two Ways About Love” (by James P. Johnson and Ted Koehler, with publisher Irving Mills taking a “cut-in” credit – Mills got a special producer credit on the movie, no doubt for allowing songs he had published to be used, and he was undoubtedly well paid too), “Diga Diga Doo” (written by white songwriters Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields for one of Mills’ most lucrative properties, the all-Black musical Blackbirds of 1928, though the Production Code Administration forced the filmmakers to delete the song’s best line, “So let those funny people smile/Say, how can this be a virgin isle?”), “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (another Fields-McHugh song – they had a reputation of being white songwriters who could “write Black”) and the title song, “Stormy Weather.” “Stormy Weather” was composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Ted Koehler after Arlen had taken over from McHugh as house songwriter for the Cotton Club. It was introduced there by Ethel Waters in 1932, and a year later it was filmed spectacularly by the great singer Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra for the 1933 short A Bundle of Blues, but starting with this movie it became identified with Lena Horne. (Ethel Waters was notoriously jealous of other Black women singers; a decade earlier she had blackballed Billie Holiday from opening from her at the Apollo Theatre, and during the filming of Cabin in the Sky she had been totally rude and stand-offish towards Horne. So it couldn’t have helped her moods when this film publicly identified Lena Horne with a song originally written for Waters!) It’s used here for a sequence in which Horne sings it at a window looking out at a driving rainstorm, and the scene dissolves into a production number featuring the dance troupe of Katharine Dunham, who essentially becomes Lena Horne’s dance double. (Dunham had played the temptress role in the stage version of Cabin in the Sky, and because she was a dancer instead of a singer Ethel Waters had got along with her just fine. But when MGM replaced her with Horne, a fellow Black woman singer, for the film, Waters was angry and went out of her way to snub Horne. So in a way Stormy Weather is one of my “doubles” movies.)

Then Cab Calloway enters the action and does one of his established specialties, “The Jumpin’ Jive,” and an unusual song, “Geechy Joe.” Calloway had introduced this song in 1941, when the young Dizzy Gillespie was still in his band, and in his compilation of his big-band reviews from “the day” George T. Simon printed a review of a radio broadcast in which Dizzy took the song’s spectacular opening trumpet solo (and Simon singled out his work for praise). But I suspect Dizzy had already left the band by the time they recorded it, since the solo in the studio version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CymvScEuYE) begins on a long held note and doesn’t sound like Dizzy at all. The trumpeter on this version from 1943 is certainly not Dizzy, but he sounds more like him than the one on Cab’s record from two years earlier, and the song overall shows that Calloway wasn’t content to rest on his laurels but was heating up his band’s music to keep pace with the galvanic changes already beginning to sweep the jazz world. The big finale, which reunites Bill and Selina, is set to a song called “Ain’t That Something” on which Bill and Cab do a vocal duet and the Nicholas Brothers do a spectacular dance routine. It seems odd in a film whose male star is the great Bill Robinson that Fox put in an act at the end that almost totally overshadows him. (The older Nicholas Brother, Fayard, was born October 20, 1914 and the younger, Howard, March 17, 1921. That’s a bit of a surprise since I’d always assumed they were closer in age than that.) There’s a sense of the passing of the torch in this ending, especially since in the years after the film Black musical tastes would move away from jazz and towards the new, rawer style that was originally known as rhythm and blues and then – once white people took it up – rock ’n’ roll. The Nicholas Brothers were already getting a big “push” from 20th Century-Fox when this movie was made – they’d been in big white movies like Down Argentine Way, Tin Pan Alley, The Great American Broadcast and Glenn Miller’s two films, Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives – and so it’s not surprising that they get the final scene, leaping over staircases and nightclub tables while Bill Robinson and Lena Horne are billing and cooing off to the side. It’s as if the filmmakers were clearing away the refined, subtle artistry of Robinson to make way for the wild kids!