Three Shorts: The Story That Couldn't Be Printed (MGM, c. 1942); The Voice That Thrilled the World (Warner Bros., c. 1942); Blackface in Hollywood (Tujrner Classic Movies, c. 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Along with the two features TCM also showed three fascinating and compelling shorts. One was an entry in MGM’s Passing Parade series called The Story That Couldn’t Be Printed, about one of my personal heroes, John Peter Zenger, whom I named the magazine I published for 18 years after. It was a 10-minute vest-pocket retelling of the story with the familiar cast of characters. Among them were the anonymous source for the story who was thrown in the stocks and whipped; New York’s tnen-governor, William Cosby, who was stealing public money for his personal use and threatening to prosecute anyone who attempted to expose him; John Peter Zenger, reporter and printer who was bound and determined to get the story out no matter what; his friend Mr. Alexander, New York attorney who, like anyone else taking Zenger’s case against Cosby, was threatened with disbarment if he represented Zenger; and Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer from Philadelphia (and therefore outside Cosby’s jurisdiction) who was brought in by Mr. Alexander and made an eloquent plea to the court saying that there should be freedom of the press. Naturally this dramatization set the story in what was then the modern context, with the rise of dictatorial governments throughout the world who wanted to stay in power by controlling what their people were allowed to speak, hear or read about what was going on in their world, and the need for the U.S. and the world’s other democracies to unite and fight to protect freedom against tyranny.

A second was The Voice That Thrilled the World, about the coming of sound to motion pictures and the attempts of Thomas A. Edison to bring his two great inventions, movies and audio recording, together to create pictures with sound. As befitted a short produced by Warner Bros., who pioneered early sound but used the wrong process – Vitaphone, in which the soundtrack was on a separate record that had to be played independently of the film (the record player was attached to the turntable with a mechanism that was supposed to keep them in synch, but they didn’t always stay together and you often had scenes like the one dramatized in the film Singin’ in the Rain in which the man started speaking with the woman’s voice, and vice versa) instead of Movietone, in which the sound was photographed on the film itself. (Actually the system that became standard was yet a third one, Photophone, which like Movietone photographed sound on film but used variable-area instead of variable-density recording, which produced better and clearer results.) The Voice That Thrilled the World was a whirlwind history of sound from its earliest uses in experimental shorts to tne scene between Al Jolson and Eugenie Besserer (playing his mother) in The Jazz Singer to bigger, larger movie scenes that could only have been done with sound-on-film, including the titular scene in Charge of the Light Brigade and Busby Berkeley’s still bizarre “By a Waterfall” number from Footlight Parade.

The short opened and closed with scenes from the 1942 musical Yankee Doodle Dandy, illustrating that the movie won the Academy Award for Best Sound as well as its star, James Cagney, winning the award for Best Actor. (I’ve pointed out before that Cagney always considered himself a song-and-dance man at heart and in his autobiography he said his one career regret was he had made so few musicals. He even devoted a whole chapter of the book to his 1937 film Something to Sing About, the only musical he was in between Footlight Parade and Yankee Doodle Dandy.) There are also scenes showing the government training films the studios producing to help teach soldiers and sailors how to fight in World War II, and a brief and amusing bit from the film Sergeant York showing how the film was dubbed in French and Italian to serve as a training ground and as propaganda for democracy.

The last short we watched was about blackface in Hollywood and featured a lot of African-Americans, including film historian Donald Bogle and TCM “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, giving what’s become the politically correct blanket condemnation of blackface even while acknowledging that it also gave white performers an excuse to let their hair down and be more open as to who they really are. I’ve already noted on various blogs that blackface was just one of many ethnic stereotypes American popular entertainment traded in. For example, the Marx Brothers began by playing standard ethnic humor: Chico the Italian, Harpo (until his character evolved and became mute) the Irishman, and Groucho the Jew. (Modern-day audiences, knowing the Marx Brothers were actually Jewish, tend to read Groucho as the most “authentic” of the three, but that’s not how audiences of the time would have read them.) And Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler parody in The Great Dictator was done as the standard comic stereotype of a German. The film included clips from the famous fantasy heaven in the 1934 film Wonder Bar – including the scenes of pork chops hanging off the vines and giant slices of watermelon (manipulated much the way the giant bananas were in The Gang’s All Here nine years later), and though the film acknowledged Fred Astaire for admitting how much he owed to Black tap dancers in general and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in particular, it faulted him for the comic minstrel-show outfit he wore in his big “Bojangles of Harlem” number from the film Swing Time when Robinson’s costumes in his films were always immaculately turned out dress suits. (I used to joke, “Fred Astaire got to dance with Ginger Rogers. Gene Kelly got to dance with Judy Garland. Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson got to dance with Shirley Temple. A case study in American racism” – though all Robinson ever said about Temple was how good she was and how she only had to demonstrate a routine once before she picked it up perfectly. Robinson said Temple was the best student he ever had, which is an even more amazing compliment when you realize he also taught Sammy Davis, Jr.)

In previous comments about Wonder Bar I’ve noted that – unlike singers such as Eddie Cantor, who sang in blackface exactly the same as they did in whiteface – Jolson rethought his style when he sang in blackface, slowing his vibrato, singing more from the chest and emulating the style of the greatest Black singers of the time. I’m bothered by a lot of the condemnation of blackface as a kind of reflexive attempt at “woke” anti-racism even though some of the agenda behind these performances was quite openly racist (can you say The Birth of a Nation, in which D. W. Griffith cast white actors in blackface to depict Black characters as the slavering, bestial monsters of his racist imagination?), and I think it’s important to draw a line between performers who used blackface to exploit racial (and racist) stereotypes, and ones (in which category I would put both Jolson and Astaire) who were doing blackface as a conscious homage to African-American culture even if the homage seems rather twisted in the racial politics of today.