r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I decided to check out Turner Classic Movies because the news channels were doing All Hurricane Ian, All the Time, and I stumbled on a night of silent movies because yesterday was “Silent Movie Appreciation Day” and in honor of that TCM allowed their “Silent Movie Sunday” host, Jacqueline Stewart (whom I love if only because she proves you don’t have to be either white or male to be a film geek), to introduce a program of silent films of which I caugut the last one. It was a 1926 film called Beverly of Graustark and it was a co-production of MGM and William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Pictures. Given those facts, I don’t think you need two guesses as to who the female star was: Marion Davies. As I’ve noted in these pages before, Davies was a woefully underrated actress whose public image has been shaped forever, it seems, by the pathetic (in both senses) portrayal of her as the on-talent opera singer “Susan Alexander” in Citizen Kane. In real life she was a quite talented light comedienne and Hearst screwed her over (as opposed to whatever else they were doing that could be described as “screwing”) by insisting on casting her in pretentious costume dramas for which she was singularly ill-suited. When Hearst cast her in the range of what she could do effectively, she was quite good – in his book on MGM Gary Carey noted, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers” – ahd he said she was better in the 1927 film of James M. Barrie’s Quality Street than the far more highly regarded Katharine Hepburn in the 1937 sound remake. I love the story of how MGM screenwriter Frances Marion was approached by Hearst to write for Davies, and when she demurred, he told her, “You don’t understand. I am prepared to spend $1 million on each of her pictures.” “That’s just the problem!” Frances Marion told Hearst. “She’s a great light comedienne, and you’re drowning her in production values.” (When word of that got around Hollywood, according to Frances Marion’s own recollection, other writers and production people thought, “At last! One of us had the guts to tell Hearst what Marion Davies’ career problem was! The rest of us never dared!”)
Beverly of Graustark was made in 1926 but the basic story had been created in 1904 as a magazine serial by a now-forgotten writer named George Barr McCutcheon. It had already been filmed five times before 1926, including a 1914 version with Liinda Arvidson (the first Mrs. D. W. Griffith) in the lead, and the plot outline of the 1914 version on imdb.com was quite different from the film TCM showed last night: “It is 1900. Grenfell Lorry is the son of wealthy American parents. On a train in New England Lorry meets a mysterious young woman, Miss Guggenslocker, and finds himself irresistibly attracted. Soon he is following her across the ocean to Graustark, a small, remote mid-European kingdom threatened from within and without by power-hungry schemers who will stop at nothing to become its next rulers. Here, he discovers Miss Guggenslocker is actually the princess of Graustark, and the object of many of these schemes.” The 1926 version was extensively remodeled by the screenwriter, Agnes Christine Johnston (who would go on to write what’s probably Davies’ all-time best film, Show People, two years later). In her version the heroine is named Beverly Calhoun, and unbeknownst to her, her cousin Oscar (Creighton Hale) is the rightful king of Graustark. As a child, Oscar was shipped off to the U.S. by the evil General Marlanax (Roy D’Arcy, in a refreshingly unmannered performance, at least by his usual standards), who covets the throne of Graustark and isn’t going to let anybody else stand in his way. Unfortunately, just after the delegation from Graustark arrives in Washington, D.C., where the Calhouns live, Oscar goes out skiing, takes a bad fall off a cliff and ends up alive but too badly injured to move.
So Beverly disguises herself as Oscar and makes the journey incognito. Her only companion on the trip is an elderly relative (Charles Clary) who’s either her father or her uncle (it’s not clear which). When they finally reach Graustark after a journey across Europe (represented by some truly amazing vistas of mountain passes; I’m presuming the scenes were locations in the L.A. area but they aren’t that familiar from other movies), Beverly is offered a hot drink. She doesn’t take it but her relative does, and he falls asleep. Obviously the drink was drugged so it would be easier to kill the true heir to the Graustarkian throne. The coach in which they’re traveling is waylaid by a mountain-goat herder named Dantan (Antonio Moreno, the male lead), who informs Beverly and her traveling companion that all the people in her party are traitors out to kill “him,” and he disarms them by forcing them to take off their clothes (down to their underwear in this truly “pre-Code” movie). General Marlanax is shocked to see the caravan with the new “King” arrive on schedule and with the monarch still alive, and from then on the film turns into a one-joke movie as Beverly is forced again and again into situations that might “out” her as a woman. “He” is introduced by servants – all men – who have the job of undressing her, shaving her and helping her bathe. Beverly has appointed Dantan as her bodyguard but he wants to sleep at the foot of her bed to protect her against further assaults by Marlanax’s men. She persuades him to sleep in the ante-room instead and says she’ll call him if there’s any trouble.
At one point Marlanax sends a woman, Carlotta (Pauline Duval), to seduce the new king who is really beverly in disguise – only Beverly is able to talk Carlotta into lending her her gown so she can walk around the palace grounds as a woman. While dressed that way, she meets Dantan, who’s attracted to her, and the two make a date to go swimming –but both arrive late because in the meantime Dantan and Beverly, in male drag, have started a game of chess and it’s taking forever. Along the way, Johnston has pulled the gag director Rouben Mamoulian and writer Salka Viertel supposedly originated in Queen Christina seven years later of having the central male character feel sexually attracted to what he thinks is another young man even though we in the audience know she’s a woman. Dantan even tells “him” that once a man meets the “right” woman, he just knows it’s her. Marlanax spots Beverly in a one-piece bathing suit and he finally figures out her true gender. There are odd complications, including Dantan challenging Beverly to a duel because he thinks they’re both in love with the same woman, and a final scene in which Dantan fights a duel with Marlanax and is saved by the arrival of cousin Oscar, who has recovered from his skiing accident and arrived in Graustark’s capital.
The final scene was shot in two-strip Technicolor (one of the best-preserved examples from the silent era, with an overall harmonious tone reminiscent of an Old Master painting instead of the neon-bright hues of the three-strpi process that replaced it), in which Oscar is finally on the throne of Graustark, Beverly is beside him as his princess cousin, and they’re talking about how she should marry a prince to secure their family’s position as hereditary rulers of Graustark – only Oscar jokes about how his cousin isn’t into princes and prefers goat-herders instead. Naturally, as anyone who’s seen a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta could have guessed, Dantan turns up and is revealed actually to be a prince of a neighboring country, Dausenberg, so he and Beverly pair off at last and she gets her wish, expressed before she left the U.S, to marry a prince. Beverly of Graustark is not a great film – it doesn’t help that its director was Sidney Franklin, a quality filmmaker but also a relatively placid one who knew little about comedy – but it’s a highly entertaining one. Marion Davies’ FTM drag is actually quite convincing – though it doesn’t approach the absolute perfection of Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia Scarlett a decade later – and despite Franklin’s lack oif a true comic sense (or maybe because of it!), the gender role-reversals are quite appealing. It’s generally agreed that Davies did her best in silent films – when sound came in she was hitting the awkward age of the early 30’s, a tough time of transition for female actors then and now, and though she could control her chronic stutter when she was singing or speaking memorized dialogue, it still flared up now and again and made her discernibly nervous. We have Marion Davies and her unusual career clout to thank for the survival of Beverly of Graustark; unlike most stars of the period, she was allowed to keep copies of her own films, and either she or her estate donated them en masse to the Library of Congress, from which this version was preserved, digitized and supplied with a new organ score by Ben Model that worked nicely. I hope the Spreckels Organ Society would feature Beverly of Graustark on one of their silent movie nights with live organ accompaniment!
Thursday, September 29, 2022
Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood (Turner Entertainment, 2005)
r>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Beverly of Graustark TCM showed a 2005 documentary on the life and times of producer Irving Thalberg, Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood, written and directed by Robert Trachtenberg. He had the obvious problem of making a film about a person who’d died in 1936, which meant that just about everybody who’d actually known him and worked with him was also dead. Trachtenberg was able to generate a lot of archival clips of people who had known Thalberg, including Sam Marx, his story editor at MGM; Groucho Marx (no relation), who as part of the Marx Brothers was helped by Thalberg to a major comeback with A Night at the Opera in 1935 after their Paramount career had come to an ignominious end with Duck Soup ini 1933 (it’s one of those movies that was too far ahead of its time and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young people discovered it and embraced its satire of politics and the egomania that comes with it); Leatrice Joy Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and actress Leatrice Joy; Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.; Margaret Booth, MGM’s pre-eminent film editor during the Thalberg era (who kept working until the 1970’s!); and others.
This was primarily the “white legend” of Thalberg, though Trachtenberg did acknowledge some of the man’s darker schemes, including his vendetta against Erich von Stroheim, whom he fred twice (from Universal in 1923 when he was working as Carl Laemmle’s assistant, and again in 1925 at MGM),and the 1934 mock newsreels he produced at MGM to sink the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair. My husband Charles was struck by the similarities between these fake newsreels – with actors posing as homeless men coming to California to take advantage of Sinclair’s largesse and live off the money of hard-working taxpayers – and the current-day propaganda from Donald Trump and other Republicans about “caravans” of migrants allegedly crossing the border en masse to take advantage of blue-state governors and legislatures. Thalberg was born in New York City in 1895 and raised by a fiercely protective mother, Henrietta, who when he got heart disease as a young boy ruled him and allowed him to read during his convalescence. This gave him a good background in story-telling that served him when, while he was still in his teens, he talked himself into a job at Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios after meeting Laemmle during private screenings of Universal films. Laemmle offered Thalberg a job at a time when he was still legally underage and, when Thalberg recommended to Laemmle that he appoint a single executive who would head up production at the studio and who would report directly to Laemmle himself, Laemmle said, “O.K. You’re it.”
This film treated Thalberg’s firing of Stroheim from the set of The Merry-Go-Round as the key moment in Hollywood history at which power passed from the director to the producer and studio head. Trachtenberg goes a good job whirling us through the highlights of Thalberg’s career, including his stint at Universal and later his hookup with Louis B. Mayer, who ended up head of production at MGM when that company was founded by the theatre owners Loew’s, Inc. out of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer’s independent operation at Mission Road in Hollywood. Mayer and Thalberg worked under a deal by which they would share in the profits of MGM, though they frequently complained that the profits were being low-balled by the parent company, Loew’s, which could sell MGM films to its theatres at discount rates so Loew’s shareholders would get more and Mayer, Thalberg and attorney Robert Rubin, who negotiated the deal for them, would get less. Mayer was good at running the business end of the company and Thalberg was a creative producer who had a knack for picking up stars from other studios whose careers had fallen on hard times and building them back up. Among these were Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler (whom he teamed in a series of films that became highly successful despite the fact that both stars were middle-aged and not conventionally attractive), William Powell, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy and the Marx Brothers. Thalberg had little respect for directors; if he’d been alive when the auteur theory was formulated, one could readily imagine his withering scorn for it. He said often that if the script were good and the actors talented and well cast, anybody with technical precision and expertise could shoot the picture and make it good.
The film includes a clip from an MGM promotional film made in 1925 that showed some of the directors then working at MGM – and within a year or two most of them (including Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Seastrom, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton) were no longer there. Thalberg, for better or worse, perfected the studio system – it had begun in 1915 by Thomas A. Ince, who ironically built the studio at which MGM was housed during its glory years, but it was Thalbrg who set the parameters of the creative producer who also ran a studio. The film is honest about some of Thalberg’s mistakes, notably in writing off sound films as a passing fad until 1929, when he saw the writing on the wall and green-lighted the musical The Broadway Melody, the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (even though it seems stiff and ponderous today). Thalberg also invented the all-star production with his 1932 film of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel, which was plotted because all the stars were under MGM contract and they could be used to film scenes for Grand Hotel during down-time on their other films. Grand Hotel became MGM’s second Best Picture Oscar winner.
One of Thalberg’s quirks was that he was well aware of his own mortality – throughout his life he’d constantly been told that he would die young, and he did, of pneumonia at 37 – and he had a rather driven quality as if he knew he would have to cram a lot of achievement into a relatively short time. The film also mentioned Thalberg’s marriage to MGM star Norma Shearer – once Joan Crawford complained, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss” – and Thalberg’s desire for children (they had two, Irving, Jr. and Catherine) versus Shearer’s wish not to have her career derailed by an all too visible pregnancy. (She made a film while she was pregnant with one of her and Thalberg’s children, and the director used the time-honored trick of having her stand behind chairs, tables, flowerpots and anything else they could think of to conceal the fact that she was “with child.” And the documentary included a clip from Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show recounting the story of how Thalberg kept them waiting in his office all day and never showed up, so the next morning when he did it again the Marx Brothers brought in some potatoes and roasted them in Thalberg’s fireplace – buck naked. Groucho also said he and Thalberg used to argue about politics – Groucho was a Democrat and Thalberg a staunch Republican – though it was Mayer, not Thalberg, who actively cultivated the favor of politicians,which came on handy when, unbeknownst to either Mayer or Thalberg, Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck cut a deal with William Fox to merge Fox and MGM, thereby cutting both Mayer and Thalberg out. Mayer’s connections with the Herbert Hoover administration (which he had helped to elect) came in handy and he was able to get the deal killed on antitrust grounds, though it helped that the stock market crash happened around the same time and Fox’s empire, built on debt, collapsed along with the economy as a whole.
After Beverly of Graustark TCM showed a 2005 documentary on the life and times of producer Irving Thalberg, Irving Thalberg: Prince of Hollywood, written and directed by Robert Trachtenberg. He had the obvious problem of making a film about a person who’d died in 1936, which meant that just about everybody who’d actually known him and worked with him was also dead. Trachtenberg was able to generate a lot of archival clips of people who had known Thalberg, including Sam Marx, his story editor at MGM; Groucho Marx (no relation), who as part of the Marx Brothers was helped by Thalberg to a major comeback with A Night at the Opera in 1935 after their Paramount career had come to an ignominious end with Duck Soup ini 1933 (it’s one of those movies that was too far ahead of its time and it didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young people discovered it and embraced its satire of politics and the egomania that comes with it); Leatrice Joy Fountain, daughter of John Gilbert and actress Leatrice Joy; Samuel Goldwyn, Jr.; Margaret Booth, MGM’s pre-eminent film editor during the Thalberg era (who kept working until the 1970’s!); and others.
This was primarily the “white legend” of Thalberg, though Trachtenberg did acknowledge some of the man’s darker schemes, including his vendetta against Erich von Stroheim, whom he fred twice (from Universal in 1923 when he was working as Carl Laemmle’s assistant, and again in 1925 at MGM),and the 1934 mock newsreels he produced at MGM to sink the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Upton Sinclair. My husband Charles was struck by the similarities between these fake newsreels – with actors posing as homeless men coming to California to take advantage of Sinclair’s largesse and live off the money of hard-working taxpayers – and the current-day propaganda from Donald Trump and other Republicans about “caravans” of migrants allegedly crossing the border en masse to take advantage of blue-state governors and legislatures. Thalberg was born in New York City in 1895 and raised by a fiercely protective mother, Henrietta, who when he got heart disease as a young boy ruled him and allowed him to read during his convalescence. This gave him a good background in story-telling that served him when, while he was still in his teens, he talked himself into a job at Carl Laemmle’s Universal Studios after meeting Laemmle during private screenings of Universal films. Laemmle offered Thalberg a job at a time when he was still legally underage and, when Thalberg recommended to Laemmle that he appoint a single executive who would head up production at the studio and who would report directly to Laemmle himself, Laemmle said, “O.K. You’re it.”
This film treated Thalberg’s firing of Stroheim from the set of The Merry-Go-Round as the key moment in Hollywood history at which power passed from the director to the producer and studio head. Trachtenberg goes a good job whirling us through the highlights of Thalberg’s career, including his stint at Universal and later his hookup with Louis B. Mayer, who ended up head of production at MGM when that company was founded by the theatre owners Loew’s, Inc. out of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Mayer’s independent operation at Mission Road in Hollywood. Mayer and Thalberg worked under a deal by which they would share in the profits of MGM, though they frequently complained that the profits were being low-balled by the parent company, Loew’s, which could sell MGM films to its theatres at discount rates so Loew’s shareholders would get more and Mayer, Thalberg and attorney Robert Rubin, who negotiated the deal for them, would get less. Mayer was good at running the business end of the company and Thalberg was a creative producer who had a knack for picking up stars from other studios whose careers had fallen on hard times and building them back up. Among these were Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler (whom he teamed in a series of films that became highly successful despite the fact that both stars were middle-aged and not conventionally attractive), William Powell, Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy and the Marx Brothers. Thalberg had little respect for directors; if he’d been alive when the auteur theory was formulated, one could readily imagine his withering scorn for it. He said often that if the script were good and the actors talented and well cast, anybody with technical precision and expertise could shoot the picture and make it good.
The film includes a clip from an MGM promotional film made in 1925 that showed some of the directors then working at MGM – and within a year or two most of them (including Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Seastrom, Maurice Tourneur and Buster Keaton) were no longer there. Thalberg, for better or worse, perfected the studio system – it had begun in 1915 by Thomas A. Ince, who ironically built the studio at which MGM was housed during its glory years, but it was Thalbrg who set the parameters of the creative producer who also ran a studio. The film is honest about some of Thalberg’s mistakes, notably in writing off sound films as a passing fad until 1929, when he saw the writing on the wall and green-lighted the musical The Broadway Melody, the first talkie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture (even though it seems stiff and ponderous today). Thalberg also invented the all-star production with his 1932 film of Vicki Baum’s novel Grand Hotel, which was plotted because all the stars were under MGM contract and they could be used to film scenes for Grand Hotel during down-time on their other films. Grand Hotel became MGM’s second Best Picture Oscar winner.
One of Thalberg’s quirks was that he was well aware of his own mortality – throughout his life he’d constantly been told that he would die young, and he did, of pneumonia at 37 – and he had a rather driven quality as if he knew he would have to cram a lot of achievement into a relatively short time. The film also mentioned Thalberg’s marriage to MGM star Norma Shearer – once Joan Crawford complained, “How can I compete with Norma? She sleeps with the boss” – and Thalberg’s desire for children (they had two, Irving, Jr. and Catherine) versus Shearer’s wish not to have her career derailed by an all too visible pregnancy. (She made a film while she was pregnant with one of her and Thalberg’s children, and the director used the time-honored trick of having her stand behind chairs, tables, flowerpots and anything else they could think of to conceal the fact that she was “with child.” And the documentary included a clip from Groucho Marx on the Dick Cavett Show recounting the story of how Thalberg kept them waiting in his office all day and never showed up, so the next morning when he did it again the Marx Brothers brought in some potatoes and roasted them in Thalberg’s fireplace – buck naked. Groucho also said he and Thalberg used to argue about politics – Groucho was a Democrat and Thalberg a staunch Republican – though it was Mayer, not Thalberg, who actively cultivated the favor of politicians,which came on handy when, unbeknownst to either Mayer or Thalberg, Loew’s president Nicholas Schenck cut a deal with William Fox to merge Fox and MGM, thereby cutting both Mayer and Thalberg out. Mayer’s connections with the Herbert Hoover administration (which he had helped to elect) came in handy and he was able to get the deal killed on antitrust grounds, though it helped that the stock market crash happened around the same time and Fox’s empire, built on debt, collapsed along with the economy as a whole.
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
Soundies, Volume 1 (Snappy Video, 2018; originals recorded 1941-1947 and early 1950's)
br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their feature films for home viewing) whipped this one into production while Lewis was at their studio appearing with Abbott and Costello and the Andrews Sisters in the 1941 comedy Hold That Ghost. The other two songs that weren’t Soundies were “telescriptions,” made in the early days of TV and meant to be used the way audio transcription discs had been used by radio stations. You could either show them one after each other to creat a 15- or 30-minute program featuring a single artist, or stick them in one at a tome to serve as filler for holes in the schedule.
The 2007 documentary Soundies: A Musical History which Charles and I had watched recently on a digital rental from Amazon.com said that Soundies disappeared surprisingly quickly after World War II ended. They explained the sudden demise of the format as being due to the disinterest of most returning veterans to go out as much as they had before they served. Instead they wanted to get married, start having families and settle down. (This was the beginning of the so-called “Baby Boom.”) They were also buying the brand-new technology of television, and they were letting the self-contained box entertain them at home without needing to go out. Soi it seems like either the same companies that had previously produced Soundies or a different bunch started making “telescriptions,” which were basically like Soundies except you watched them at home. I hadn’t anticipated having to take notes on the order in which the Soundies (and other items) on the Snappy Video Blu-Ray came on, but the order in which they were shown was wildly different from the one listed on the box.
The film opened with one of its most spectacular Soundies, Louis Armstrong playing the song “Shine” with a tap dancer named Nicodemus. I remember hearing somewhere that Nicodemus had only one leg; I have not been able to confirm that online, but it may be true because in the final scene he’s shown doing his athletic movis with his left leg while his right just drags along. A decade after Armstrong’s even wilder filming of this same song in hos 1932 band short A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (he plays the “King of Jazzmania,” into which a no-account Black man dreams himself while he falls asleep while he’s supposed to be washing his floorsl he’s dressed inan African tribal leader’s costume and there are soap suds all around to symbolize this was all happening in the head of someone who was supposed to be mopping, he returned to the song for this Soundie,filmed with a giant mockup of a trumpet in front of Armstrong’s band. The next one was one of my favorite Soundies, Gene Krupa with vocalist Anita O’Day and singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge doing “Thanks for the Boogie Ride,” their sequel to the giant hit “Let Me Off Uptown” and to my mind an even better film. The song featured various actors impersonating motorcycle cops with painted cut-outs of cars and motorcycles to illustrate the lyric, “I like riding in jalopies/Away from motorcycle coppies.”
Then came a clip of Thomas “Fats” Waller doing his huge hit, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” with several Black women in various states of undress (one interesting thing about the Soundies is they weren’t subject to the strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code the way feature films were, so they could get a lot more exually risqué) as Waller cruises them all while he plays, and finally picks one to pledge that he “ain’t misbehavin’, I’m saving my love for you.” Watching this clip, I can readily understand why the blind British-born jazz pianist George Shearing described the experience of shaking hands with Waller as “like grabbing a bunch of bananas.” The next song was Cab Calloway doing his star-making hit, “Minnie the Moocher,” with a much more musically advanced band than the one he’d recorded it with 10 years earlier; his trumpet section featured Dizzy Gillespie and Jonah Jones, and while Dizzy is just in the brass section Jones,who would become a star in his own right in the 1950’s, is featured. After that comes a Soundie of Jerry Stewart with a quite good dancer named Ceci Eames doing “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Stewart’s vocal is O.K. but he’s not Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. Then comes a really odd selection called “At Your Service,” which takes place at a drive-in restaurant when such things were still novelties, and it features another adenoidal male singer and a quite nice group of three women whose names are identified on screen as “Betty,” “Ann” and “Mary.” I’m guessing those were their names in real life as well. They’re shown harmonizing about the joys of the place they’re working at and dancing on the hoods of the cars of their customers, which if they’d tired that in real life would probably have freaked people out but in the context of a Soundie looks like the most normal thing in the world.
Then comes the Ted Lewis short, The Band Parade, directed by Reginald Le Borg, whom I recently mentioned in these pages towards the end of his rather strange career. He first worked as an assistant to avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg and theatre director Max Reinhardt in his lative Vienna, then got a job directing band shorts at Universal and ultimately graduated to feature films, though mostly retrograde horror from the dregs of Universal’s history in the genre. The Lewis film is interesting for two songs, “Me and My Shadow” with the great Black dancer Teddy Hale literally playing Lewis’s shadow (Hale caught it from the racial Thought Police, accused of playing up to white stereotypes, though his defense was that Lewis treated him like a gentleman and paid him well); and “Three Blind Mice” with a quite good female vocal trio. After that came one of the most fascinating clips, Alvino Rey and His Orchestra doing an uptempo version of “St. Louis Blues” with the Lennon Sisters swinging surprisingly hard on the vocals. You’d never guess it from th is clip that the Lennon Sosters would end up with a decades-long surety for Lawrence Welk! This is also noteworthy for Rey’s solo on the pedal steel guitar, and the camera goes in close enough to show how Rey is manipulating thos ungainly instrument to get those spacy sounds out of it. Rey was one of only two guitarists to lead a big band during the swing era; the other was Django Reinhardt, who had one in France during World War II.
Then came a country-flavored novelty by Spike Jones called “Pass the Biscuits, Morandy” – the joke is that Mirandy’s biscuits are so hard they serve as weapons for the Jones boys to defend themselves. After that comes another novelty, Barry Wood singing “Allá en el Rancho Grande” in Spanish and then in English. Ths was the title song from a Mexican musical film from 1936 starring Tito Guizar that was a hit on both sides of the border, and after the film’s U.S. release Bing Crosby picked up the song and became the first person to record it in English. There’s also a dynamite version from a 1939 live broadcast by Artie Shaw with Tony Pastor doing one of his typical comic vocals. Wood’s isnt at the level of Crosby or Shaw but it’ll do even though it’s pretty obvious that Spanish is not his native tongue. Next up is Larry Clinton’s orchestra doing “Myt Reverie,” which Clinton more or less wrote himself – I say “more or less” because he borrowed the main theme from an old piano work by Debussy, also called “Réverie.” The song features Clinton’s haunting-voiced singer, Bea Wain. Next up is another novelty, Johnny Long and His Orchestra with singer-dancers Paul Harmon and Helen Young called “When a Girl Loves a Sailor” – obviously a topical theme during America’s involvement in World War II.
After that came a fragment of “Beer Barrel Polks” by Frankie Yankovic, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s father and a star of polka music – though, alas, the clip is incomplete and cuts off just when Frankie was about to take his accordion solo. Next come some highly risqué dance numbers, including one called “My Gal Salomé” played by the David Rose Orchestra (Rose had an odd career and he’s best known today for writing the tune “The Stripper” and beint the first husband of Judy Garland); “Can Can Capers” featuring a dance company showing a lot more lingerie thant hey’d have been allowed to in a U.S. feature at the time; and “Pepetito” featuring a quote good Spanish-language vocalthat just might have been Lydia Mendoza; it looks and sounds vaguely like her and it would have been nice to know that shis El Paso-born singer, most famous for her wrenching folk song called “Mal Hombre” in which a woman recalls her titular ruin at the hands (and other parts) of the titular “bad man” and now she’s trying to warn a younger woman about him, made a Soundie. The nest two songs are the “Telescriptions,” Connie Haines (surprisingly good; she was one of those talented big-band singers who got lost in the shuffle even though during her stints with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey she had to share the bandstand with a male singer who became a far bigger star than she did, Frank Sinatra) doing a marvelous song caled “Who’s Gonna Shoe My Foot?” (I learned this from Harry Belafonte’s version on his The Many Moods of Belafonte album, but hers is just as good and I especially loved it when she sang, “I don’t need no man”) and Bobby Troup’s “Daddy.”
“Daddy” is a song about an unashamed gold-digger, something like Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” (which actually came later), and Troup sings and plays piano with two other men on guitar and bass. They were obviously trying to be the white version of the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and Trou9p’s song “‘Get Your Kicks on’ Route 66” became one of Cole’s biggest hits. This verison of “Daddy” is marked by a great woman singer who plays the gold-digger and is regrettably unidentified; there’s a later Troup recording of the song from a 1958 album called The Feeling of Jazz, but somehow with Troup singing it alone it doesn’t pack the punch this version, with a woman in the part of the goid-=digger, does. The last two songs on the disc ware June Valli, a show singer rather than a jazz singer but still a strong, powerful voice, doing “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which like “My Reverie” is based on a theme from classical music – in this case the big theme from the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto; and a really authoritative performance of a song called “Carry My Heart Out Over You” by Rose Marie, Yes, that Rose Marie, who’s best known today largely for being one of the three people in the writers’ room of the 1960’s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show (the gimmick was that Divk Van Dyke, Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie would be playing the writers of a TV show hosted by “Alan Brady,” played by Carl Reiner, who had developed the show’s premise and headed its real-life writers’ room). But at age nine she had delivered a phenomenal performance of a torch song called “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues” in the film International House, and here as a young adult she’s equally good. Overall, this is a reasonably good collection of Soundies (plus other items), and the Armstrong, Krupa, Waller, Calloway, Haines and Rose Marie segments achieve greatness.
Last night at 9 my husband Charles and I watched a “Snappy Video” Blu-Ray disc containing a compilation of “Soundies,” the three-minute music videos shot between 1941 and 1947 to be played on a “Panoram.” The Panoram was a sort if self-contained movie projector and screen, and if you put a dime into it (twice the going rate for an audio-only jukebox in the early- to mid-1940’s) you saw and heard a shirt filmclip of a big band, a country outfit, a vocal group or some other sort of audio-visual entertainment. The Snappy Video compilation featured 20 short films, though three weren’t Soundies; one was a band short with Ted Lewis and His Orchestra playing a 10-minute program. I suspect the folks at Universal (the opening logo said “Castle Films,” which in addition to being a logo used for educational films shown in schools was also an imprint Universal used to sell three-minute bits of their feature films for home viewing) whipped this one into production while Lewis was at their studio appearing with Abbott and Costello and the Andrews Sisters in the 1941 comedy Hold That Ghost. The other two songs that weren’t Soundies were “telescriptions,” made in the early days of TV and meant to be used the way audio transcription discs had been used by radio stations. You could either show them one after each other to creat a 15- or 30-minute program featuring a single artist, or stick them in one at a tome to serve as filler for holes in the schedule.
The 2007 documentary Soundies: A Musical History which Charles and I had watched recently on a digital rental from Amazon.com said that Soundies disappeared surprisingly quickly after World War II ended. They explained the sudden demise of the format as being due to the disinterest of most returning veterans to go out as much as they had before they served. Instead they wanted to get married, start having families and settle down. (This was the beginning of the so-called “Baby Boom.”) They were also buying the brand-new technology of television, and they were letting the self-contained box entertain them at home without needing to go out. Soi it seems like either the same companies that had previously produced Soundies or a different bunch started making “telescriptions,” which were basically like Soundies except you watched them at home. I hadn’t anticipated having to take notes on the order in which the Soundies (and other items) on the Snappy Video Blu-Ray came on, but the order in which they were shown was wildly different from the one listed on the box.
The film opened with one of its most spectacular Soundies, Louis Armstrong playing the song “Shine” with a tap dancer named Nicodemus. I remember hearing somewhere that Nicodemus had only one leg; I have not been able to confirm that online, but it may be true because in the final scene he’s shown doing his athletic movis with his left leg while his right just drags along. A decade after Armstrong’s even wilder filming of this same song in hos 1932 band short A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (he plays the “King of Jazzmania,” into which a no-account Black man dreams himself while he falls asleep while he’s supposed to be washing his floorsl he’s dressed inan African tribal leader’s costume and there are soap suds all around to symbolize this was all happening in the head of someone who was supposed to be mopping, he returned to the song for this Soundie,filmed with a giant mockup of a trumpet in front of Armstrong’s band. The next one was one of my favorite Soundies, Gene Krupa with vocalist Anita O’Day and singer-trumpeter Roy Eldridge doing “Thanks for the Boogie Ride,” their sequel to the giant hit “Let Me Off Uptown” and to my mind an even better film. The song featured various actors impersonating motorcycle cops with painted cut-outs of cars and motorcycles to illustrate the lyric, “I like riding in jalopies/Away from motorcycle coppies.”
Then came a clip of Thomas “Fats” Waller doing his huge hit, “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” with several Black women in various states of undress (one interesting thing about the Soundies is they weren’t subject to the strictures of the Motion Picture Production Code the way feature films were, so they could get a lot more exually risqué) as Waller cruises them all while he plays, and finally picks one to pledge that he “ain’t misbehavin’, I’m saving my love for you.” Watching this clip, I can readily understand why the blind British-born jazz pianist George Shearing described the experience of shaking hands with Waller as “like grabbing a bunch of bananas.” The next song was Cab Calloway doing his star-making hit, “Minnie the Moocher,” with a much more musically advanced band than the one he’d recorded it with 10 years earlier; his trumpet section featured Dizzy Gillespie and Jonah Jones, and while Dizzy is just in the brass section Jones,who would become a star in his own right in the 1950’s, is featured. After that comes a Soundie of Jerry Stewart with a quite good dancer named Ceci Eames doing “What a Difference a Day Makes.” Stewart’s vocal is O.K. but he’s not Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. Then comes a really odd selection called “At Your Service,” which takes place at a drive-in restaurant when such things were still novelties, and it features another adenoidal male singer and a quite nice group of three women whose names are identified on screen as “Betty,” “Ann” and “Mary.” I’m guessing those were their names in real life as well. They’re shown harmonizing about the joys of the place they’re working at and dancing on the hoods of the cars of their customers, which if they’d tired that in real life would probably have freaked people out but in the context of a Soundie looks like the most normal thing in the world.
Then comes the Ted Lewis short, The Band Parade, directed by Reginald Le Borg, whom I recently mentioned in these pages towards the end of his rather strange career. He first worked as an assistant to avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg and theatre director Max Reinhardt in his lative Vienna, then got a job directing band shorts at Universal and ultimately graduated to feature films, though mostly retrograde horror from the dregs of Universal’s history in the genre. The Lewis film is interesting for two songs, “Me and My Shadow” with the great Black dancer Teddy Hale literally playing Lewis’s shadow (Hale caught it from the racial Thought Police, accused of playing up to white stereotypes, though his defense was that Lewis treated him like a gentleman and paid him well); and “Three Blind Mice” with a quite good female vocal trio. After that came one of the most fascinating clips, Alvino Rey and His Orchestra doing an uptempo version of “St. Louis Blues” with the Lennon Sisters swinging surprisingly hard on the vocals. You’d never guess it from th is clip that the Lennon Sosters would end up with a decades-long surety for Lawrence Welk! This is also noteworthy for Rey’s solo on the pedal steel guitar, and the camera goes in close enough to show how Rey is manipulating thos ungainly instrument to get those spacy sounds out of it. Rey was one of only two guitarists to lead a big band during the swing era; the other was Django Reinhardt, who had one in France during World War II.
Then came a country-flavored novelty by Spike Jones called “Pass the Biscuits, Morandy” – the joke is that Mirandy’s biscuits are so hard they serve as weapons for the Jones boys to defend themselves. After that comes another novelty, Barry Wood singing “Allá en el Rancho Grande” in Spanish and then in English. Ths was the title song from a Mexican musical film from 1936 starring Tito Guizar that was a hit on both sides of the border, and after the film’s U.S. release Bing Crosby picked up the song and became the first person to record it in English. There’s also a dynamite version from a 1939 live broadcast by Artie Shaw with Tony Pastor doing one of his typical comic vocals. Wood’s isnt at the level of Crosby or Shaw but it’ll do even though it’s pretty obvious that Spanish is not his native tongue. Next up is Larry Clinton’s orchestra doing “Myt Reverie,” which Clinton more or less wrote himself – I say “more or less” because he borrowed the main theme from an old piano work by Debussy, also called “Réverie.” The song features Clinton’s haunting-voiced singer, Bea Wain. Next up is another novelty, Johnny Long and His Orchestra with singer-dancers Paul Harmon and Helen Young called “When a Girl Loves a Sailor” – obviously a topical theme during America’s involvement in World War II.
After that came a fragment of “Beer Barrel Polks” by Frankie Yankovic, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s father and a star of polka music – though, alas, the clip is incomplete and cuts off just when Frankie was about to take his accordion solo. Next come some highly risqué dance numbers, including one called “My Gal Salomé” played by the David Rose Orchestra (Rose had an odd career and he’s best known today for writing the tune “The Stripper” and beint the first husband of Judy Garland); “Can Can Capers” featuring a dance company showing a lot more lingerie thant hey’d have been allowed to in a U.S. feature at the time; and “Pepetito” featuring a quote good Spanish-language vocalthat just might have been Lydia Mendoza; it looks and sounds vaguely like her and it would have been nice to know that shis El Paso-born singer, most famous for her wrenching folk song called “Mal Hombre” in which a woman recalls her titular ruin at the hands (and other parts) of the titular “bad man” and now she’s trying to warn a younger woman about him, made a Soundie. The nest two songs are the “Telescriptions,” Connie Haines (surprisingly good; she was one of those talented big-band singers who got lost in the shuffle even though during her stints with both Harry James and Tommy Dorsey she had to share the bandstand with a male singer who became a far bigger star than she did, Frank Sinatra) doing a marvelous song caled “Who’s Gonna Shoe My Foot?” (I learned this from Harry Belafonte’s version on his The Many Moods of Belafonte album, but hers is just as good and I especially loved it when she sang, “I don’t need no man”) and Bobby Troup’s “Daddy.”
“Daddy” is a song about an unashamed gold-digger, something like Eartha Kitt’s “Santa Baby” (which actually came later), and Troup sings and plays piano with two other men on guitar and bass. They were obviously trying to be the white version of the Nat “King” Cole Trio, and Trou9p’s song “‘Get Your Kicks on’ Route 66” became one of Cole’s biggest hits. This verison of “Daddy” is marked by a great woman singer who plays the gold-digger and is regrettably unidentified; there’s a later Troup recording of the song from a 1958 album called The Feeling of Jazz, but somehow with Troup singing it alone it doesn’t pack the punch this version, with a woman in the part of the goid-=digger, does. The last two songs on the disc ware June Valli, a show singer rather than a jazz singer but still a strong, powerful voice, doing “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which like “My Reverie” is based on a theme from classical music – in this case the big theme from the final movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto; and a really authoritative performance of a song called “Carry My Heart Out Over You” by Rose Marie, Yes, that Rose Marie, who’s best known today largely for being one of the three people in the writers’ room of the 1960’s TV sitcom The Dick Van Dyke Show (the gimmick was that Divk Van Dyke, Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie would be playing the writers of a TV show hosted by “Alan Brady,” played by Carl Reiner, who had developed the show’s premise and headed its real-life writers’ room). But at age nine she had delivered a phenomenal performance of a torch song called “My Bluebird’s Singing the Blues” in the film International House, and here as a young adult she’s equally good. Overall, this is a reasonably good collection of Soundies (plus other items), and the Armstrong, Krupa, Waller, Calloway, Haines and Rose Marie segments achieve greatness.
Duke Ellington Short Films, 1935-1945 (RCA Victor Centennial Collection/BMG, 1999)
br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Since the Snappy Video “Soundies” collection ran only about an hour, I followed it up with a collection of music videos by Duke Ellington from an odd compilation called The Centennial Collection, released by RCA Victor in 1999. The company decided to commemorate its 100th anniversary in business by releasing a series of discs, each by one of their most famous artists, with a CD on one side of the dual cover and a DVD on the other. The Ellington DVD consisted of the 1935 Paramount short Symphony in Black, a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, five Ellington Soundies shot in Los Angeles in 1941, and a 1945 band short featuring Ellington’s band as it existed then. On oen of the two nights during which Turner Classic Movies featured Soundies, co-host Susan Delson noted that Ellignton’s Soundies seemed more interesting visually than others’ did. I’ve long thought that about Ellington’s band shorts as well – particularly Black and Tan (1929), directed by Dudley Murphy; andA Bundle of Blues (1933) and Symphony in Black (1935), both directed by Fred Waller (who would shortly thereafter quit his job at Paramount’s shorts department to work on the process that would become Cinerama) – and believed that it was Ellington’s training as a visual artist that led him to pressure his directors to make his films visually as well as musically innovative and stimulating. In a January 1941 radio interview also included on the Centennial Collection DVD, Ellington said that he had majored in art in high school and had won a scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, but by the time he was awarded it he was already too involved in music to use it. But Ellington’s lifelong interest in visual arts is evidenced in the number of songs he wrote with the titles of colors – “Mood Indigo,” “Azure,” “Creamy Brown” and the like.
The disc opened with Symphony n Black, and though it wasn’t as good a transfer as the one on the Kino on DVD release of the feature film New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, that featured shorts with those two great stars as bonus items, it was good enough to be watchable. I’ve written extensively about Symphony in Black on moviemagg before at
Right after Symphony in Black the disc included a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, an odd little film that celebrated the return of the record business to economic viability (the advent of radio and the Great Depression had virtually killed it, but it had come roaring back as the overall economy recovered and the announcer tells us that 25 million records were being sold in the U.S. every year, a respectable number but far smaller that what ot would becolme with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950’s) and showed footage (accompanied by stock music, not Ellington’s) of the elaborate metallurgical processing that goes into making playable pressings out of master discs. (Though the original recordings are now made on tape or digitally instead of directly to lacquer master discs, as they were in 1937, in all other respects the process is essentially the same today.) Ellington is shown rehearsing and recording his original “Daybreak Express” and a tune called “Oh Babe, Maybe Someday,” another Ellington original (words as well as music) with Ellington’s great singer, Ivie Anderson. The tunes were recorded for Variety, an imprint of Brunswick and Vocalion created by Ellington’s then-manager, Irving Mills; he sold records by the full Ellington band on a label called Master and discs featuring small groups drawn from it on the cheaper Variety label.
The next Ellington items on the disc are his five Soundies, shot in 1941 in Los Angelles where Ellington and his band members were living while they pu9t on the musical Jump for Joy! The band perfomred two songs from Jump for Joy! on Soundies – Ivie Anderson singing “I Goit It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and a duet called “Bli-Blip” with singer/dancers Marie Bruant and Paul White – and they are the only accounts of what this criminally under-documented show might lave looked like in live performance. Ellington’s other three Soundies include two of his own jazz instrumentals, “Cottontail” and “‘C’ Jam Blues” (rettiled “Hot Chocolate” and “Jam Session” for their Soundies incarnations) and “Flamingo,” a non-Ellington song (music by Ted Grouya, lyrics by Edmund Anderson) that becamne a major hit for him. In his book The Song Is You, Will Friedwald credited Billy Strayhorn’s arrangement for “Flamingo” and Axel Stordahl’s for “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded by Tommy Dorsey with his then-unknown vocalist Frank Sinatra, as fundamentally changing the parameters of writing big-band vocal arrangements – though someone else, also with a last name beginning with “S” – Eddie Sauter – had been doing that a few years earlier with his arrangements for singer Mildred Bailey in Red Norvo’s band. (Norvo and Bailey were married to each other and they were inevitably billed as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.”)
The final film on the Ellington Centennial Collection DVD was a 1945 band short from RKO (though indb.com lists it as 1943, two years earlier) directed by JKay Bonafield. Shot at the RKO Movietone Studio in New York, it’s nothing but a plain video of Ellington’s band running through a few of their greatest hits – “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “Never No Lament,” an Ellington instrumental later outfitted with lyrics as “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Given how dazzlingly inventive Ellington’s previous band shorts directed by Dudley Murphy and Fred Waller had been, this is especially disappointing. It also doesn’t help tuat “It Don’t Mean a Thing” is heard here in a vocal version by Rayy Nance, a spectacular trumpeter and violinist but not that great a singer. (A lot of trumpeters, both Black and white, oif that period attemoted to be the next Louis Armstrong. None succeeded.) IN 1945 Ellingotn made a studio recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing” featuring three women vocalists – Joya Sherrill, Kay Davis, and Marie Ellington – stunningly singing not in harmony, but in counterpoint. I remember playing that record for a friend of mine from junior college who told he he’d heard an Ellington record and thought it sounded like cocktail lounge music. “Duke ELLINGTON? COCKTAIL LOUNGE MUSIC?” I thundered, and to prove my point I played him that record and he admitted it didn’t sound ike cocktail lounge music. Incidentally, Marie Ellington was not a relative – she got that name from a brief first marriage to a Black soldier – and Duke Ellington billed her simply as “Marie” so people wouldn’t think she got the job through nepotism. Later she left the band and married Nat “King” Cole, reverting to the original spelling of h er first name – Maria – and when I read that in Duke Ellington’sautobiography, Music Is My Mistress, I thought, “No wonder Natalie Cole has such a great voice! She gets it from both sides!”
Since the Snappy Video “Soundies” collection ran only about an hour, I followed it up with a collection of music videos by Duke Ellington from an odd compilation called The Centennial Collection, released by RCA Victor in 1999. The company decided to commemorate its 100th anniversary in business by releasing a series of discs, each by one of their most famous artists, with a CD on one side of the dual cover and a DVD on the other. The Ellington DVD consisted of the 1935 Paramount short Symphony in Black, a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, five Ellington Soundies shot in Los Angeles in 1941, and a 1945 band short featuring Ellington’s band as it existed then. On oen of the two nights during which Turner Classic Movies featured Soundies, co-host Susan Delson noted that Ellignton’s Soundies seemed more interesting visually than others’ did. I’ve long thought that about Ellington’s band shorts as well – particularly Black and Tan (1929), directed by Dudley Murphy; and
The disc opened with Symphony n Black, and though it wasn’t as good a transfer as the one on the Kino on DVD release of the feature film New Orleans, with Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, that featured shorts with those two great stars as bonus items, it was good enough to be watchable. I’ve written extensively about Symphony in Black on moviemagg before at
https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/04/symphony-in-black-paramount-1935.html, and suffice it to say that it remains a vest-pocket masterpiece, important not only in its own right (though it’s still a bit silly to see the opening shot of stevedores shoveling coal off a pristine soundstage floor) but as a sort of pencil sketch for Ellington’s symphonic masterpiece of 1943, Black, Brown and Beige. It’s also especially important as the first truly great recording made by the young Billie Holiday, who’d made her recording debut with a Benny Goodman studio band in November and December 1933. On those records, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” and “Riffin’ the Scotch,” she sounds audibly nervous – and given that just before she sang “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” she had to follow Ethel Waters at the same mike obviously scared her to death (Waters’ infleunce on Billie largely remains unacknowledged, largely because they hated each other), I can readily understand her fright. By the time she recorded “Saddest Tale,” the blues song she sings in Symphony in Black, in October 1934 (some discographies give March 12, 1935, but that was the date the film was released, not when it was pre-recorded), Billie had become a full-fledged artist, a master at shading and phrasing a vocal line and already using her trademark downward glissandi – the so-called “dying falls” – to bring poingnancy and dramatic power to a song. I also suspect she was simply more comfortable with her own people than with Goodman’s white boys.
Right after Symphony in Black the disc included a 1937 short called Record Making with Duke Ellington, an odd little film that celebrated the return of the record business to economic viability (the advent of radio and the Great Depression had virtually killed it, but it had come roaring back as the overall economy recovered and the announcer tells us that 25 million records were being sold in the U.S. every year, a respectable number but far smaller that what ot would becolme with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950’s) and showed footage (accompanied by stock music, not Ellington’s) of the elaborate metallurgical processing that goes into making playable pressings out of master discs. (Though the original recordings are now made on tape or digitally instead of directly to lacquer master discs, as they were in 1937, in all other respects the process is essentially the same today.) Ellington is shown rehearsing and recording his original “Daybreak Express” and a tune called “Oh Babe, Maybe Someday,” another Ellington original (words as well as music) with Ellington’s great singer, Ivie Anderson. The tunes were recorded for Variety, an imprint of Brunswick and Vocalion created by Ellington’s then-manager, Irving Mills; he sold records by the full Ellington band on a label called Master and discs featuring small groups drawn from it on the cheaper Variety label.
The next Ellington items on the disc are his five Soundies, shot in 1941 in Los Angelles where Ellington and his band members were living while they pu9t on the musical Jump for Joy! The band perfomred two songs from Jump for Joy! on Soundies – Ivie Anderson singing “I Goit It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” and a duet called “Bli-Blip” with singer/dancers Marie Bruant and Paul White – and they are the only accounts of what this criminally under-documented show might lave looked like in live performance. Ellington’s other three Soundies include two of his own jazz instrumentals, “Cottontail” and “‘C’ Jam Blues” (rettiled “Hot Chocolate” and “Jam Session” for their Soundies incarnations) and “Flamingo,” a non-Ellington song (music by Ted Grouya, lyrics by Edmund Anderson) that becamne a major hit for him. In his book The Song Is You, Will Friedwald credited Billy Strayhorn’s arrangement for “Flamingo” and Axel Stordahl’s for “I’ll Never Smile Again,” recorded by Tommy Dorsey with his then-unknown vocalist Frank Sinatra, as fundamentally changing the parameters of writing big-band vocal arrangements – though someone else, also with a last name beginning with “S” – Eddie Sauter – had been doing that a few years earlier with his arrangements for singer Mildred Bailey in Red Norvo’s band. (Norvo and Bailey were married to each other and they were inevitably billed as “Mr. and Mrs. Swing.”)
The final film on the Ellington Centennial Collection DVD was a 1945 band short from RKO (though indb.com lists it as 1943, two years earlier) directed by JKay Bonafield. Shot at the RKO Movietone Studio in New York, it’s nothing but a plain video of Ellington’s band running through a few of their greatest hits – “Mood Indigo,” “Sophisticated Lady,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” and “Never No Lament,” an Ellington instrumental later outfitted with lyrics as “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Given how dazzlingly inventive Ellington’s previous band shorts directed by Dudley Murphy and Fred Waller had been, this is especially disappointing. It also doesn’t help tuat “It Don’t Mean a Thing” is heard here in a vocal version by Rayy Nance, a spectacular trumpeter and violinist but not that great a singer. (A lot of trumpeters, both Black and white, oif that period attemoted to be the next Louis Armstrong. None succeeded.) IN 1945 Ellingotn made a studio recording of “It Don’t Mean a Thing” featuring three women vocalists – Joya Sherrill, Kay Davis, and Marie Ellington – stunningly singing not in harmony, but in counterpoint. I remember playing that record for a friend of mine from junior college who told he he’d heard an Ellington record and thought it sounded like cocktail lounge music. “Duke ELLINGTON? COCKTAIL LOUNGE MUSIC?” I thundered, and to prove my point I played him that record and he admitted it didn’t sound ike cocktail lounge music. Incidentally, Marie Ellington was not a relative – she got that name from a brief first marriage to a Black soldier – and Duke Ellington billed her simply as “Marie” so people wouldn’t think she got the job through nepotism. Later she left the band and married Nat “King” Cole, reverting to the original spelling of h er first name – Maria – and when I read that in Duke Ellington’sautobiography, Music Is My Mistress, I thought, “No wonder Natalie Cole has such a great voice! She gets it from both sides!”
Monday, September 26, 2022
Blonde for a Day (PRC/Pathé.1946)
br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night my husband Charles and I watched the third of the five PRC films featuring the character of detective Michael Shayne, created in the late 1930’s by pulp writer Davis Dresser under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday.” (I still think Dresser should have used “Brett Halliday” as the name of his character and signed the stories “Michael Shayne,” not toe other way around.) Like the first two in the series, Murder in MLy Busienss and Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was produced by Sigmund Neyfeld and directed by Sam Newfield (they were actually brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” their last name and Sigmund didn’t). It helped that, like Murder Is My Business but unlike Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was written by Fred Myton (though for some reason his name was misspelled “Miton” on his credit: one wonders why, especially since he’d been working at PRC for years and one would have assumed they’d have known how to spell his name) and based on an original story by “Brett Halliday” himself. Of the first three PRC Shaynes, it’s the best by a pretty wide margin, partly because its story makes sense – three L.A.-area gamblers were shot on successive days and the police connect the killings to a gang led by Hank Brenner (Mauritz Hugo) who’s attempting to move into L.A. and take over the illegal gambling racket.
Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont) and his partner/girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Kathryn Adams, replacing Cheryl Walker, who played her in the first two PRC Shaynes – in fact, this movie is filled with different actors playing the same characters; Shayne’s reporter friend Tim Rourke is Paul Bryar and Shayne’s antagonist on the police force, Pete Rafferty, is the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) are in San Francisco when Rourke writes him a letter asking him to come to L.A. and investigate the murders. When Rourke himself is shot and beaten to within an inch of his life, Shayne and Phyllis agree to return to L.A. To say that Rafferty isn’t goad to see them would be a major understatement, but Shayne receives a letter from a housemate of Minerva Dickens (Cl;aire Rochelle) offering him information on the gang. Alas, when Shayne gets her address (by posing as a cop and asking the phone company for it) she turns out to be dead, and that’s just one more morder for Rafferty to pin on Shayne even though,m as Shayne reminds the over-zealous cop, he wasn’t even in town when the murders of the gamblers occurred. Shayne runs into various characters, as by far the best of the first three Hugh Beaumont Shaynes at PRC, including Walter Branson (Peter Ferguson), Rourke’s editor at the (fictitious) Los Angeles Courier who tried to get Rourke to stop printing exposés on the gambling ring (just before he was attacked,
Rourke had sneaked his latest exposé into the paper without Walter’s knowledge or consent); Branson’s wife Mabel (Sonia Sorel, the third Mrs. John Carradine and Keith Carradine’s mother), who for some reason had the hots for Rourke; Dillinghan “Dilly” Smith III (Richard Fraser, who turned in a beautifully wrought performance in Val Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, but for some reason Lewton and his director, Mark Rubson, were able to make Fraser’s restraint seem like quiet dignity and strength; in all his other films, at least the ones I’ve seen, he’s just dull); and Dilly’s wife, Helen Porter (Marjorie Hoshelle), who turns out to have been the murderess at the end. By switching the barrel of her gun every time she used it and having her blonde hair dyed black so she wouldn’t match the witnesses’ description of her (hence the film’s title, though I had thought the killer would turn out to be naturally dark-haired and the “blonde for a day” bit would just be a wig), she thought she’d evade detection. But Shayne told her that in addition to the rifling on the bullets as they’re fired each gun also leaves a distinctive striking pattern on the shell casing, so Shayne was able to identify the bullet shells as coming from Helen’s gun.
Blond for a Daywas the best of the first three PRC Shaynes by a wide margin, not only because the story made sense (though if Myton bothered to explain Helen Porter’s motive, both Charles and I missed it) and visually it looks much better than the two earlier films in the series. Though PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh was the cinematographer, as he’d been on the previous episodes, his work here is much more convincingly noir than his work on the previous two PrC Shaynes. The film even ooks more handsomely produced than the first two, and I suspect at least part of that is due to PRC’s decision this time around to use the “half-set” technique. If you’re going to light a scene so half the room is in shadow throughout the scene, you can save money on set construction by building only the hair of the set that will actually be visible. A lot olf the great films noir used this technique – including pioneering efforts like the 1940 film Stranger in the Third Floor, made by RKO’s “B” unit – and surely a budget-conscious studio like PRC would use it whenever they felt they could get away with it.
Last night my husband Charles and I watched the third of the five PRC films featuring the character of detective Michael Shayne, created in the late 1930’s by pulp writer Davis Dresser under the pseudonym “Brett Halliday.” (I still think Dresser should have used “Brett Halliday” as the name of his character and signed the stories “Michael Shayne,” not toe other way around.) Like the first two in the series, Murder in MLy Busienss and Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was produced by Sigmund Neyfeld and directed by Sam Newfield (they were actually brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” their last name and Sigmund didn’t). It helped that, like Murder Is My Business but unlike Larceny in Her Heart, Blonde for a Day was written by Fred Myton (though for some reason his name was misspelled “Miton” on his credit: one wonders why, especially since he’d been working at PRC for years and one would have assumed they’d have known how to spell his name) and based on an original story by “Brett Halliday” himself. Of the first three PRC Shaynes, it’s the best by a pretty wide margin, partly because its story makes sense – three L.A.-area gamblers were shot on successive days and the police connect the killings to a gang led by Hank Brenner (Mauritz Hugo) who’s attempting to move into L.A. and take over the illegal gambling racket.
Michael Shayne (Hugh Beaumont) and his partner/girlfriend Phyllis Hamilton (Kathryn Adams, replacing Cheryl Walker, who played her in the first two PRC Shaynes – in fact, this movie is filled with different actors playing the same characters; Shayne’s reporter friend Tim Rourke is Paul Bryar and Shayne’s antagonist on the police force, Pete Rafferty, is the marvelous character actor Cy Kendall) are in San Francisco when Rourke writes him a letter asking him to come to L.A. and investigate the murders. When Rourke himself is shot and beaten to within an inch of his life, Shayne and Phyllis agree to return to L.A. To say that Rafferty isn’t goad to see them would be a major understatement, but Shayne receives a letter from a housemate of Minerva Dickens (Cl;aire Rochelle) offering him information on the gang. Alas, when Shayne gets her address (by posing as a cop and asking the phone company for it) she turns out to be dead, and that’s just one more morder for Rafferty to pin on Shayne even though,m as Shayne reminds the over-zealous cop, he wasn’t even in town when the murders of the gamblers occurred. Shayne runs into various characters, as by far the best of the first three Hugh Beaumont Shaynes at PRC, including Walter Branson (Peter Ferguson), Rourke’s editor at the (fictitious) Los Angeles Courier who tried to get Rourke to stop printing exposés on the gambling ring (just before he was attacked,
Rourke had sneaked his latest exposé into the paper without Walter’s knowledge or consent); Branson’s wife Mabel (Sonia Sorel, the third Mrs. John Carradine and Keith Carradine’s mother), who for some reason had the hots for Rourke; Dillinghan “Dilly” Smith III (Richard Fraser, who turned in a beautifully wrought performance in Val Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, but for some reason Lewton and his director, Mark Rubson, were able to make Fraser’s restraint seem like quiet dignity and strength; in all his other films, at least the ones I’ve seen, he’s just dull); and Dilly’s wife, Helen Porter (Marjorie Hoshelle), who turns out to have been the murderess at the end. By switching the barrel of her gun every time she used it and having her blonde hair dyed black so she wouldn’t match the witnesses’ description of her (hence the film’s title, though I had thought the killer would turn out to be naturally dark-haired and the “blonde for a day” bit would just be a wig), she thought she’d evade detection. But Shayne told her that in addition to the rifling on the bullets as they’re fired each gun also leaves a distinctive striking pattern on the shell casing, so Shayne was able to identify the bullet shells as coming from Helen’s gun.
Blond for a Daywas the best of the first three PRC Shaynes by a wide margin, not only because the story made sense (though if Myton bothered to explain Helen Porter’s motive, both Charles and I missed it) and visually it looks much better than the two earlier films in the series. Though PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh was the cinematographer, as he’d been on the previous episodes, his work here is much more convincingly noir than his work on the previous two PrC Shaynes. The film even ooks more handsomely produced than the first two, and I suspect at least part of that is due to PRC’s decision this time around to use the “half-set” technique. If you’re going to light a scene so half the room is in shadow throughout the scene, you can save money on set construction by building only the hair of the set that will actually be visible. A lot olf the great films noir used this technique – including pioneering efforts like the 1940 film Stranger in the Third Floor, made by RKO’s “B” unit – and surely a budget-conscious studio like PRC would use it whenever they felt they could get away with it.
Sunday, September 25, 2022
Revenge for My Mother (Shadowboxer LLC, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night my husband Charles came home from work early so we could have dinner together, and I had seen a program of three Lifetime movies, none of which I had seen before, that I wanted to watch from 6 p.m. to midnight. They were called Revenge for My Mother, Dying for a Crown and Hall Pass Nightmare, and they were all quite formulaic and strongly reminiscent of stories Lifetime had done before. Revenge for My Mother was produced by Shadowboxer Films and the Johnson Produciton Group and directed by Doug Campbell, a familiar name on Lifetime credits – though the writer, Barbara Arsenault, has no other credits on imdb.com. It deals with Audrey Bates (Sami Nye), a woman who’s been living with partner Matt Conroy (Jason Tobias, the kind of lanky, sandy-haired actor Lifetime likes to cast as the innocent put-upon husband) for 10 years without marrying him. Audrey has built a flourishing business called Stroller Moms, which teaches yoga to women who’ve recently had babies – as you might expect, the class sessions are ringed with strollers containing the babies the students have just given birth to – and Matt has been running the business end until now. But the business has grown so much that he can’t handle it and still pursue his aspirations for novel writing, so Audrey decides to hore an assistant. Unfortunately, the assistant she hires is Brooklyn Hart (Taylor Joree Scorse), who in the opening scenes of the movie we saw just getting released from prison after serving a year and a half. Director Campbell gives us a good view of her heavily tattooed back as she doffs the orange jumpsuit and puts on normal street clothes.
She’s met there by her father, Gavin S. Wolf (Bobby Marchesso), who takes her home to his place but lays down the law to her: he’s not going to support her. She can live rent-free at his place but she needs to find a job to pay for food and all her other expenses. Brooklyn looks online and sees Audrey’s ad looking for an executive assistant, only the moment her dad looks at Audrey’s Web site he has a heart attack. On his deathbed he reveals to his daughter that her mother did not die of breast cancer, as he’d previously told her; instead she was killed when she was run over by a car – and the driver was, you guessed it, Audrey Bates. Brooklyn takes her dad to the emergency room, where she’s told they can save his life with an operation, only his arteries were even more blocked than the doctors thought they were at first, and he dies. The successive shocks of learning her mom was the victim of vehicular manslaughter, that Audrey used her family’s connections to draw six months’ probation and community service instead of jail time, and losing her father so suddenly totally unhinge Brooklyn and lead her to vow revenge. She hatches a plan to destroy Audrey’s life systematically, and the first step in her plan is not to seduce Matt (as I had figured she would, given that’s how most previous Lifetime movies on this subject have worked), but to make it look like Matt is after her. She even pulls the old trick of hitting herself in the head with a door and then telling the cops that Matt beat her up when she wouldn’t have sex with him.
Matt duly gets arrested for the nonexistent “crime” and spends the rest of the movie in jail awaiting trial. Then Brooklyn orders a pair of stiletto-heeled shoes and “accidentally” stabs Audrey in the foot with one, causing her to call off his classes temporarily – only Brooklyn puts out a series of e-mails making it seem like she’s closed the business permanently. Audrey’s lifelong friend Jane Miller (Janet Carter) figures out Brooklyn’s plot and realizes who she really is – the daughter of the woman Audrey killed all those years ago – but, though she’s not Black (though Barbara Arsenault gives at least hints that she’s a Lesbian when Jane expresses her distaste for men in general), she ends up fulfilling the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Learns of the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Jane attempts to call Audrey to warn her against Brooklyn, but Audrey never gets the calls because Brooklyn has locked her phone in a secure file drawer and taken the key herself. Brooklyn clobbers Jane with the box containing her dad’s ashes (offhand it’s the first time I can recall seeing cremains as a murder weapon) and then goes after the most prized possession in Audrey’s life: Zoë, the baby girl she and Matt (ya remember Matt?) had together. Brooklyn leaves half-empty bottles of cheap booze and packs of cigarettes (the brand Audrey used to smoke before she quit on Matt’s request) and sets fire to the baby stroller containing Zoë.
At first we think she’s killed the baby – even for a Lifetime movie, that’s pretty weird and strong – while Audrey was too drugged out (courtesy of the rohypnol with which Brooklyn has been spiking her smoothies) to stop her. Later, though, it turns out Zoë is alive after all – Brooklyn left her in Audrey’s living room – though a nasty officer from Child Protective Services named Rebecca Peters (Anzu Lawson) shows up with a court order to take Zoë and put her in foster care. Brooklyn steals Audrey’s car and kidnaps Zoë from the foster mother, and then lures Audrey to the park where she taught her yoga classes and tells Audrey either deliberately to take an overdose of sleeping pills, which will kill her amd make it look like suicide, or she will use her switchblade knife to murder Zoë while she makes Audrey watch. Fortunately Audrey is able to get the upper hand, though there’s a preposterous chase scene in which Audrey is not only running away from Brooklyn (whose real name, we’ve learned, is Elizabeth Ann Wolf – maybe Barbara Arsenault deliberately took the name from Warren G. Harding’s illegitimate daughter, but more likely not) but running after Zoë to catch her runaway baby carriage before it rolls into the street and a car hits her. The movie ends happily, with Audrey and Matt reconciled, Zoë safe at home with both her parents, and the Stroller Moms business rebuilt. Revenge for My Mother was an O.K. Lifetime movie, serviceable and with a few intriguing diversions from the usual formulae, but it’s not all that interesting and Arsenault wasn’t able to give Brooklyn the moral complexity Christine Conradt has given her Lifetiem villainesses.
Dying for a Crown ( Sunshine Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The next up was Dying for a Crown, ballyhooed as a “Premiere” but to my mind strongly reminiscent of the 2019 Lifetime movie Homekilling Queen and even earlier efforts on the network, since when I wrote about Homekilling Queen and another Lifetime movie aired the same night, Psycho Stripper, I complained, “The sheer predictability of both the titles and the plots they accompany is beginning to wear me down — I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want to watch Lifetime movies.” The film begins with mother Lydia Campbell (Jennifer Titus) driving her daughter Elsie, nicknamed “Elle” (Catharine Daddario) all the way across the country to start her senior year of high school at Troy High in Pensacola, Florida. (The imdb.com page gives the school’s name as “Broyhill” and its location as Los Angeles, but either the original draft of Victoria Rose’s script was set in L.A. and she later moved it to Florida, probably because the Florida-based Sunshine Films was the production company, or Broyhill was the school from which the Campbells are fleeing.) At first we assume they’re just another relatively innocent mother and daughter doing a routine relocation, but we soon learn that Lydia has won a job as vice-principal of Troy under false pretenses (we learn this when the woman who hired her, Alice Evans, played by Laura W. Johnson, can’t find her letter of recommendation in her otherwise excellent job application) and she intends to use her position to install her daughter as both captain of the school’s tennis team and its homecoming queen.
Elle has major competition for both titles – the tennis team is led by Stephanie (Amelia Still) and the odds-on favorite for homecoming queen is Kate Wheeler (Molly Hargrave) – and Elle also accounts a tough Black teacher named Steve Lee (Jevon White) who makes it clear that if Elle continues to miss homework assignments he’ll have her grades downgraded and get her thrown off the tennis team. Lydia is master-planning Elle’s ascent up the social ladder, and one thing she’s doing is using her access to the school’s master computer to tweak her daughter’s grades, so they’re better than they would be under her own merits. As part of Lydia’s master plan to make Elle popular in school even though no one knows her, she sets Elle up with Parker (Andre Haskett) because he’s the star of the school’s basketball team, even though Ben (James Arthur Douglas), who’s taller, beefier and white instead of Black, had a crush on Elle and, since he’s the student body president, one would think he’d be almost as good pickings for Elle as the Black basketball star. (I guess it’s a step forward in race relations that Victoria Rose could assume that dating a Black man would give Elle points in the school’s social pecking order instead of dooming her to outcast status the way it would have 30 years ago.) Lydia also goes out of her way to eliminate her daughter’s chief competitors by planting drugs in their school lockers (she has the master key that opens all of them), and when principal Alice Evans learns that Lydia has imposed a three-week suspension on Kate for drugs when it is well known around the school that Kate never uses, Lydia runs her over with her car. Alice survives but ends up in the hospital, where Lydia goes to smother her with a pillow but fortunately a nurse enters the room in time to stop her, though not in time to see what Lydia was planning to do. Instead Lydia pretends she was merely fluffing the pillow and complaining with crocodile tears that the pillows are so stiff that even if you don’t have a sore neck when you enter the hospital, you’ll surely have one when you leave.
Dying for a Crown was directed by Damien Romay, who was born January 19, 1978 in Buenos Aires, and like Victoria Rose, most of the items on Romay’s list of previous credits seem more Hallmark Channel than Lifetime (though the last two months of every year Lifetime shifts its schedule to incredibly sappy Christmas movies in the Hallmark model and calls it “It’s a Wonderful Lifetime,” which seems to me like a major insult to Frank Capra and his writers). Romay and Rose even steal the marvelous worm-turning ending of Homekilling Queen in which both the bad girls, mother and daughter, are arrested on the night of what’s supposed to be Elle’s big triumph, her coronation as homecoming queen. They twist the knife in a bit by having a foot, whose owner is carefully unseen, step on the cheap white plastic crown used in the ceremony, which fell off Elle’s head when she was taken into custody. The explanation Rose provides for Lydis’s obsession is that years before she was her school’s homecoming queen, and she was dating the big man on campus – only she dumped him to marry Elle’s father, who turned out to be a no-account failure while the guy she’s dumped for him became one of America’s biggest real-estate tycoons and married a trophy wife whom, Lydia says bitterly, spends her days drinking martinis and having plastic surgery. Like Revenge for My Mother, Dying for a Crown is a decently done Lifetime movie but one that sticks close to the formulae and hardly offers anything new.
Hall Pass Nightmare (Hybrid LLC, Mayor Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Lifetime’s third movie of the night was something called Hall Pass Nightmare, and since it immediately followed a movie set in high school I assumed the title was a reference to hall passes students get if they needed to use the bathroom during a class. Instead it’s a reference to organized extra-relational activities indulged in by youngish married women who, with their husbands’ permission, can have one extra-marital fling a year with a man of their choice. The central characters are Carrie Palmer (Andrea Bowen), her husband Justin (Gil Gerard, tall and heavy-set instead of lanky like most actors who play innocent husbands in Lifetime), and Dante Jones (Matt Magnusson), a former rock star who 20 years ago led a major band called Icarus. Now he tours as a solo artist, playing acoustic guitar and singing, and his long-suffering manager Quinn (Alan Pietruszewski) is trying to explain to him that he no longer has the drawing power for stadium tours, and he needs either to go out with oter artists on the bill or to re-form Icarus for a reunion tour. Dante, whose real name is Thomas Murphy, rejects both those alternatives out of hand. While out of town on a medical convention – both Carrie and Justin work in health care, he as a salesperson for medical devices and she as some sort of insurance consultant – Carrie hears her friends and co-workers Lexi (April Nelson) and Beth (Ciarra Carter) talking about this “hall pass” stuff.
Lexi is single and determined to stay that way, but Beth’s husband gave her a “hall pass” already and she encourages Carrie to go for it with Dante Jones, who by sheer coincidence (or authorial fiat by Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, longtime Lifetime hands; Schenck and Sullivan get co-credit for the “original” story and Sullivan alone for the script) is staying at the same hotel. Dante picks up Carrie at the hotel bar and persuades her to come up to his room, where he starts making out with her. It gets as far as mutual kissing before Carrie’s wedding rnig falls off her finger, though instead of signaling her willingness to go through with a trick with the hot rock star she’s had a crush on since she was in high school and his band Icarus was at the peak of its popularity, it actually symbolizes a timely reminder that she has a husband back home even though they haven’t had sex together in months. (Their mutual excuse is they’re both so busy they’re too tired to muster up the energy when they get home.) For some reason Dante has formed an intense crush on her and decided she is the one, the only woman who truly understands him and the woman he needs to be with. Later we learn that he went through this sort of thing before with a woman named Brenda (Kacy Owens), whom he also obsessed over and stalked until he made her life totally miserable. Showing the kinds of super-powers typical of Lifetime villains, Dante literally breaks into Carrie’s home (he picks her locks) and seems to have bugged her place so he knows exactly what she’s doing moment by moment.
Two-thirds of the way through the movie Carrie files a complaint with the police – Schenck and Sullivan seem to have inserted this sequence mainly to answer the question a lot of Lifetime viewers have about their movies, which is why the put-upon heroines never go to the police – only Dante is able to snow the police in general and Black woman detective Lee (Maya Goodwin) in particular that he ends up with a restraining order against her. My husband Charles gave the film, and in particular its casting directors, Dean E. Fronk and Donald Paul Pemrick, for finding an actor to play Dante who was still quite attractive but looked like someone who would have been considerably hotter a decade or so ago. The film ends ambiguously with a scene in which Carrie is taking a bath in a candle-ringed tub (bathing in a candle-surrounded tub has become an odd movie cliché at least since the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version of A Star Is Born in 1976) when Dante surreptitiously enters her home and it looks like she’s going to be a sitting duck for him. Only she manages to get out of the bathtub in time and confront him with a golf club, finally knocking him down a flight of stairs – the film started with a prologue in which he’s wearing a ski mask and chasing her through her kitchen with a knife, but if such a scene materialized during the climax I missed it – and the end shows Carrie and Justin, who left her but luckily came back as a badly needed reinforcement during the final confrontation, reconciling and going off in a vacation together from which they intend to return with a baby on the way.
Dante’s fate remains unspecified; we don’t know whether he’s killed in the fall, he’s arrested or he escapes in case Schenck, Sullivan and director Maria Sokoloff (mostly an actress, though she has five other directorial credits on imdb.com even though most of them are for TV-movies or shorts) want to bring him back for a sequel. Like the other two movies on Lifetime’s schedule last night, Hall Pass Nightmare is a formula piece with little or nothing to distinguish it from the common run of Lifetime movies, though it was at least entertaining and Matt Magnusson was hot enough he was fun to watch on, shall we say, aesthetic grounds alone.
Saturday, September 24, 2022
Badlands (Pressman-Williams Productions, Jill Jakes Productions, Warner Bros., 1972)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Turner Classic Movies were airing a couple of films I was interested in, including one neither my husband Charles nor I had ever seen before: Terrence Malick’s first film, Badlands (the copyright date is 1972, though imdb.com listed it as from 1973). Badlands was based on a notorious story of two spree killers, Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate, who hooked up in Nebraska in late 1957 and went on a killing spree that started with him shooting her mother and stepfather and clubbing to death her two-year-old baby half-sister. They terrorized the southern Midwest for two months before the police finally arrested them in Wyoming. At the time they got together the real Charles Starkweather was 18 and Caril Fugate was just 13. From the bare facts writer-director-producer Terrence Malick concocted an oddly pastoral story about Kit Carruthers (Martin Sheen) and his girlfriend Holly (Sissy Spacek), whom he meets while making his runs as a garbageman (also a job the real Charles Starkweather held) in South Dakota. Holly was born in Texas but her father (Warren Oates) moved them to South Dakota after Holly’s mother died and made a living as a sign painter – and Malick gets the most he can out of the irony between the vivid quality of the scenes he’s painting for his signs and the drab existence he and his daughter are actually leading. Dad forbids the 25-year-old Kit from seeing his 15-year-old daughter, and Kit responds by killing him and then setting fire to his house.
In a chilling scene he makes a record at one of those record-your-own-voice booths that survived in my childhood at the Playland Amusement Park in San Francisco, announcing that he and Holly have decided to kill themselves because the world is so terrible and they can’t see any future for themselves in it. Not surprisingly, he has no intention of killing either himself or Holly; he leaves the record on repeat in hopes that it will survive the fire and lead the police and prosecutors to assume he and Holly are dead and therefore beyond the reach of the law. Then Kit and Holly get into Kit’s car – a low-riding black sedan of uncertain make which practically becomes a character itself – and for the next few weeks they set up camp in the wilderness, rigging up an elaborate set of traps to fight back in case either police or private bounty hunters come along and try to take them in. Kit shoots two bounty hunters in the back, explaining to Holly that the cops at least have a job to do while the bounty hunters are just doing it for the money. (So are the cops, when you stop to think about it.) Kit and Holly go on the ron and hole up in the home of a rich man who lives alone except for a live-in maid who’s deaf and can’t speak, and – unlike the real Charles Starkweather, who occupied the home of a rich man and ultimately killed both him and his maid – the fictional Kit and Holly let him live and just steal his Cadillac car. Earlier Kit has killed a gas-station attendant whom he feared was going to turn him in – the real Charles Starkweather got into an argument with a service-station attendant and shot him even before killing Fugate’s mother and stepfather, but one can tell why Malick wanted to make Holly’s dad Kit’s first victim. (At the same time I give him pouts for not having Holly’s dad molest her, which would have made him seem much too sympathetic.)
Kit and Holly are finally arrested by the police, and Kit is taken into custody and ultimately executed, while Holly is spared the death penalty but is sentenced to life in prison. (The real Caril Fugate served 17 years and was finally released on parole in 1976.) Finally catching up to this film after hearing about it for 50 years, what struck me most about it was the sheer contrast between the ugliness of Kit’s and Holly’s actions and the pastoral beauty of the countryside in which they take place. It’s true that a lot of movies have made that point, deliberately setting horrific scenes in stunningly beautiful locations, but few had done this as relentlessly as Badlands. Another is the intriguing use if oioykar usic of the time (1957-58), including two songs in particular, Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” and Nat “King” Cole’s “A Blossom Fell” (to which Kit ahd Holly dance in a nighttime scene, ironic since the lyrics are about jealousy and loss: “The dream has ended, for true love died/The night a blossom fell and touched two lips that lied”).
One person who was obviously impressed by Badlands was Bruce Springsteen, who began his 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town with a song called “Badlands” (as he had begun his immediately previous album, Born to Run, with “Thunder Road,” another song named after a classic film: a 1958 independent production starring Robert Mitchum as a moonshiner) and four years later started his solo album Nebraska with a song of that title about the real Charles Starkweather. One noteworthy aspect of Badlands is the extent to which Martin Sheen’s character reminds one of James Dean; not only does Malick shoot Sheen in Dean’s classic poses, but he works into the dialogue at both the beginning and the end references to how much the character resembles Dean. At the beginning the comparison is made by Sissy Spacek as Holly, and at the end it’s done by one of the cops who arrest him. (There’s also a moment of symbolic castration as one of the cops takes off Kit’s cowboy hat and throws it out the car window.) And I was also struck by the weird way Sissy Spacek’s role anticipates her performance as country-music star Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter eight years later; though Doolittle Lynn wasn’t a killer, he was a man of unsavory reputation who came along and pulled Loretta away from her family and their grinding poverty into a life filled with the promise of adventure. Spacek’s character here is even drawn as musical; though we don’t actually get to hear her, we see her with both a piano and a clarinet, and dad has decided to buy her music lessons in hopes she’ll be so busy practicing she won’t have time to see Kit.
TCM showed Badlands under rather odd auspices: they’re doing a series of features called “TCM Looks at America” in which regular host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve referred to elsewhere as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) is joined by immigrants who recall particular American films they saw in their home countries and which made an impression on them that shaped their expectatioins of what they would find when they actually got here. Mankiewicz’s co-host for Badlands was Abdi Iflim from Somalia, who recalled that during his childhood he would watch so many American films in group showings at VCR-equipped private homes that he would memorize the dialogue he’d learned by ear. He talked so much like an American movie character he got the nickname “Abdi American.” Abdi’s main recollection of Badlands was how much the locations (the film was set in South Dakota but actually shot in Colorado) reminded him of Somalia, particularly the patina of dust over everything that gives the film an overall desert coloration. In the past I’ve been harsh on films that have an overall brown tonality – I’ve even joked that if you’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum anyway, why not just shoot it in black-and-white? – but for Badlands the overall brown tonality actually works because it becomes a symbol of how trapped the characters are in that environment and how they ache for something to happen to them, even if that means committing senseless murders.
To Kill a Mockingbird (Pakula-Mu9lligan Productions, Brentwood Productions, Universal-International, 1962)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Badlands Turner Classic Movies showed another great American film under the rubric of movies that shaped the consciousness of an American immigrant and shaped their expectations of what life would be like in the United States. The film was the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, based on the novel by Harper Lee, who was born (in 1928) and raised ini Monroeville, Alabama. In 1960 she moved to New York City and there began the first draft of her book, which was called Go Set a Watchman and was set in the 1950’s. Every publisher she submitted it to rejected it, but one book editor at Lippincott liked the passage in which Jean Louise Finch, nicknamed “Scout,” reminisced about her childhood in the 1930’s in the middle of the Great Depression. The editor suggested that Lee expand this flashback scene into an entire novel, which became To Kill a Mockingbird (whose working title was Go See a Mockingbird). Lee ultimately allowed Goi Set a Watchman to be published in July 2016, a year and a half before her death, and it aroused controversy because the central character of both books, attorney Atticus Finch (Scout’s father), was revealed in Go Set a Watchman as the sort of Southern moderate who believed that Black Americans were not ready for full racial equality and needed to “prove” their worthiness to live among whites before racial segregation could be ended. Readers of To Kill a Mockingbird and viewers of the film, in which he was unforgettably played by Gregory Peck (for whom it was a personal project), no doubt saw it as an allegory of the African-American civil rights movement, since the basic plot concerns Atticus Finch accepting an appointment to serve as defense counsel for Tom Robinson (Brock Peters), a young Black man accused of raping white woman Mayelle Violet Ewell (Collin Wilcox).
Mayelle’s father Bob (James Anderson) leads a lynch mob to kill Tom before he can even be tried, but Atticus Finch stands heroically against the would-be lynchers and talks them out of it by reminding the members of the mob of the various favors he’s done for them over the years. The case proceeds to trial based largely on the testimony of the Ewells, including Mayelle’s account of how she was allegedly strangled by the sex-mad Tom – who, it turns out, actually couldn’t have attacked her the way she says he did because his left arm was injured in an accident at a cotton gin when he was 12 and since then it’s been almost totally useless. I first saw To Kill a Mockingbird when it was first in theatres at the Sequoia in Mill Valley when I was 10, and all I remembered was the horrific scene of Scout Finch (Mary Badham) and her older brother Jem (Phillip Alford) fleeing for their lives after a Hallowe’en party at school in which the kids were supposed to dress in costumes representing the various farm products of Monroeville, Alabama, where the film is set (and where the location work was done in Harper Lee’s own home town). I remembered Scout’s preposterous costuming as a ham, in which she’s forced to head home because she somehow lost her dress at the party and has nothing else but her underwear and the ham suit.
Since then I’ve seen To Kill a Mockingbird at least twice – including once before with my husband Charles when I showed him a videotape I’d recorded off a previous TCML screening – and this time around it seemed awfully didactic at first but I soon got into it and it worked its familiar magic on me. Harper Lee’s story, expertly adapted for the screen by writer Horton Foote (himself a Southerner, born March 14, 1916 in Wharton, Texas), works best when it subtly contrasts the childhood innocence of Scout, Jem and their friend Dill Harris (John Magna) with the momentous racial issues confronted by their father. When Atticus takes the appointment from his friend Judge Taylor (veteran character actor Paul Fix), the unspoken assumption is he’s supposed to mount just a token defense so the uppity Black man can be safely railroaded in a proceeding with the barest appearance of justice. When Atticus insists on mounting a proper defense, he gets called a “nigger-lover” (we’ve become so used to not hearing the “‘N’-word” that it’s a shock to have it on the soundtrack, bright as day, at least twice). He puts Tom Robinson on the stand and from his account, it actually sounds more like Mayelle was trying to rape him. Despite Atticus’s best efforts, including a moving closing argument, the jury finds Tom Robinson guilty after only a couple of hours – and it turns out he’s not even allowed to live long enough to be placed in a proper jail so Atticus can mount an appeal. Instead he’s shot down “while attempting to escape” – obviously the whites in the town have managed to lynch him after all – ahd Atticus has the unpleasant task of telling his family that he’s dead.
What struck me most about this film today is the extent to which, even though To Kill a Mockingbird is not a horror film, director Robert Mulligan, working on the Universal lot where so many great horror films were made in the 1930’s and 1940’s, fills the film with many scenes reflecting the Gothic atmosphere of the studio’s great horror classics. Much of the film’s first half takes place at night as Scout, Jem and Dill make their way through the shadow-drenched town streets and the woods that surround it, especially the home of “the meanest man in town,” Mr. Brouckoff – oops, I mean Mr. Radley (whom we never actually see), though the descriptions of his house reminded me an awful lot of Meet Me in St. Louis – who has reportedly locked his crazy son Boo (Robert Duvall, in his first film) in a basement until he got sick from the mold on the walls. Boo turns out to be a deus ex machina who saves the Finch kids from the attempt by Bob Ewell to murder them by stabbing Bob to death – whereupon the sheriff, Heck Tate (Frank Overton), who turns out ot be a good guy after all despite his testimony against Tom Robinson at the trial, announces his report will say that Bob Ewell accidentally stabbed himself with his kwn knife because prosecutirng Boo, whose furst name is Arthur, for an assault \that was obviously justifiable would be like, you guessed it, killing a mockingbird.
To Kill a Mockingbird holds up surprisingly well – indeed, with racism once again ascendant in this country’s politics it seems more cruelly relevant than ever given the lies and hatreds being stoked by Donald Trump and his acolytes – and the quiet dignity and strength of Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch won him a well-deserved Academy Award. This film was shown on TCM under the same rubric as Badlands, with the co-host being Nepalese immigrant Sashim Barakuti, who’s made her living in the non-profit sector both in Nepal and since she arrived here. She does most of her work with an organization helping fellow Nepalese immigrants adjust to life in the U.S., and while it would have been more interesting if a Black immigrant would have co-hosted this, she came across as both intelligent and caring, the sort of person whom you’d love to have over for dinner – especially if she provided the recipe for the meal.
Friday, September 23, 2022
Law and Order: Organized Crime, Lawand Order: Special Victims Unit, Law and Order: "Gimme Shelter" (3-part crossover event) (Dick Wolf Prudictions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 22, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Dick Wolf’s three Law and Order franchise shows returned to the air after their summer hiatus for a three-part story, “Gimme Shelter,” that crossed over all three shows and did so in reverse order: Law and Order: Organized Crime, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the original Law and Order. “Gimme Shelter” begins with a prologue in Ukraine during an attack on a civilian home as part of Russia’s war – oops, I mean “special military operation” – there. A teenage girl miraculously escapes the murder of the rest of her family by Russian “special military operators,” only to get herself killed when she’s taken in by the U.S. four months later. Her name was Ava Marchenko (Alexandra Azezova) and within her first two months in the U.S. was abducted by human traffickers and turned out into “the life” of a prostitute. She ended up on a mega-yacht owned by a Russian bigwig named Rublev who is supposedly a friend of Vladimir Putin and has immense power to do just about anything he wants anywhere he wants. The 15-year-old Ava was working the yacht with her 14-year-old friend Nicole Merrick (Jaci Calderon), who ended up in “the life” after her mother died suddenly, she was placed with an aunt with whom she feuded, and then she was put in a foster home where she was abused until she ran away again and ended up in the clutches of a human trafficker, Sam Ellis (Stephanie Gunn), who like most female traffickers started out as a victim herself.
Ava and Nicole were assigned to service Rublev and his second-in-command, Mark Sirenko (Beau Knapp), and when Rublev caught Ava video-recording them on her phone, he sent Sirenko to track her down and kill her. The New York Police Department became aware of this when detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) was having lunch with his daughter when he saw Ava running and getting hit by a passing car. He tried to render first aid and signal a passing ambulance to pick her up, but before he could do this Sirenko came up and quickly and efficiently put two bullets in her back. Cosgrove is determined to work the case even though it happened in a different precinct and he has to contend with rival detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), who just transferred from narcotics and is working his first homicide. They are able to trace the killing to Sirenko, only then they run afoul of the Organized Crime unit in general and Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in particular. Stabler is concerned because Sirenko is running a drug ring that has just got into making and selling fentanyl, and he’s recruited a confidential informant named Vince (Andrew Yackel, an actor and artist from Pittsburgh who’s had an interesting career in both fields despite his youth) to infiltrate Sirenko’s gang.
The police are able to track down Nicole, who first refuses to give them any information until Special Victims Unit Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who’s been doing this sort of thing lionger than the characters she’s dealing with have been alive) shows her pimp Sam being interrogated and disclaiming all knowledge of Nicole. With Sam’s supposed “love” for her shown to be so much B.S., Nicole agrees to provide the information the cops want as long as she won’t have to testify in court. Benson puts her in a safe house but the Russian gangsters are able to trace her because she smuggled in a cell phone despite Benson’s attempt to confiscate all her devices, and by sending her a message on Snapchat (the infamous app that erases everything sent on it in a day or two) and getting a reply from her, the Russians are able to send a hit squad and try to kill her. Nicole escapes at least physically unscathed, but Detective Amanda Rollinis (Kelli Giddish) is shot and sustains a life-threatening injury. The cops arrest both Rublev and Sirenko and also recover Ava’s phone on which the incriminating message is contained. They were also able to stop a terrorist attack on a NATO conference in New York which Sirenko staged on Rublev’s orders – apparently Sirenko was an apolitical crook but Rublev wanted to blow up a NATO meeting to show Russia’s power and the futility of the West trying to resist it.
The bad guys got the security codes to get in by blackmailing a guard at the venue – they set him up with a 15-year-old girl and she told him she was 18, only they videotaped him having sex with her and threatened to report him to the authorities for child molestation unless he cooperated. Stabler’s confidential informant Vince is killed midway through when Sirenko gets tired of the way Vince is pushing him for information about where they’re going to explode the bomb. (That’s a real pity because I was hoping Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners were preparing this very interesting character for a spinoff show of his own.) Eventually the cops are able to evacuate the hotel in time to save the lives of all the NATO delegates and most of the hotel’s staff and other guests, though they later find the bodies of three people who didn’t get out in time. In part three, district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and his prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), are faced with the task of prosecuting both Rublev and Sirenko. They’ve recovered Ava’s phone on which Rublev was recorded boasting about the bomb attack, but without Ava around to authenticate it, a judge in the case rules the recording inadmissible. The prosecutors try to get Nicole to testify, but much to their irritation Benson has shipped her off to her last living relative in Ontario, Canada and refuses to bring her back to New York.
So with no alternative, the prosecutors cut a deal with Sirenko and allow him to plead guilty to second-degree murder, while Rublev tries to cut his own deal with the U.S. State Department to give them evidence against high-ranking Russian oligarchs in exchange for complete immunity. Eventually Rublev is himself gunned down by yet another Russian hit squad, while Sirenko gets a relatively light sentence because of the deal the D.A.’s office cut with him while Rublev was still alive. This composite story is essentially a compendium of Law and Order’s Greatest Hits, with themes they’ve gone to again and again – including the impunity of privileged people and the barriers to testimony often posed by the U.S. Constitution and its due-process requirements. The director is old Law and Order “hand” Jean de Segonzac (and he’s credited with all three episodes – on previous occasions Dick Wolf and his producers have assigned different directors to shoot each episode, but this time they went with de Segonzac for all three) and the writers are Rick Eid, also an old Law and Order “hand,” and Gwen Sigan, a name new to me. It was a well-done re-entry to the world of Law and Order, though it also got a bit oppressive stretched out over three hours and the finale was especially despairing> one of the bad guys is silenced forever by his cronies and the other gets what amounts to a slap on the wrist for the enormity of his crimes. Not what we want to hear right now when, despite the smackdowns he just got from the New York Attorney General’s office and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, it’s still hard to believe that Donald Trump will ever face accountability for his crimes!
Thursday, September 22, 2022
The U.S. and the Holocaust, part 3: "The Homeless, Tempest-Tossed" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2022)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night KPBS aired the third and final episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Sarah Botstein mega-documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, though my comments on the previous episode aired on Tuesday failed to mention one of the most fascinating figures in the history of America’s maddening slowness to respond to the Holocaust: Charles A. Lindbergh. Until the late 1930’s Lindbergh was one of the most beloved celebrities in America, best known for his pioneering 1927 nonstop flight from New York to Paris and the tragic kidnapping and murder of his infant son, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., in 1932. Then in 1935 Lindbergh visited Germany on the personal invitation of Hermann Göring, second-in-command of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s personal choice to head Germany’s rebuilt air force, the Luftwaffe (which literally means “air weapon”). He came away convinced that, in the words more recently used on Star Trek: The Next Generation, “resistance is futile.” Lindbergh was sure that Germany would win the world war they were obviously preparing for, and as he toured toe country giving speeches both live and on the radio he became bolder and started sounding as if he thought not only that Germany would win the next world war, but it should win. Lindbergh was chosen as the principal spokesperson for the America First Committee, a nationwide organization formed to keep the U.S. from entering World War II, and the script by Geoffrey C. Ward (Ken Burns’ usual collaborator) claims it was the largest anti-war movement in U.S. history. (Having been at a lot of the big anti-Viet Nam war demonstrations and rallies in the 1960’s, I find that very hard to believe.)
Lindbergh gave his climactic speech on September 11, 1942 (a date which will live in infamy, and not just because of the events of 2001!) at Des Moines, Iowa in which he said, “"The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish [sic] and the Roosevelt Administration." In a passage that raised “yes, but-ism” to an art form, he said of the Jews, “No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way, for they will be among the first to feel its consequences.” Lindbergh also said of the American Jews, “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” I first heard of Lindbergh’s Des Moines speech in Philip Roth’s counter-factual history novel The Plot Against America, in which Lindbergh wins the 1940 Presidential election and aligns the U.S. with the Axis in the war, and he published the Des Moines speech as an appendix to show that the real Lindbergh had been just as foul an apologist for the Nazis as Roth’s fictional one.
There were plenty of heroes and villains in part three, too, including Gerhard Riegner, who interviewed Jews who had fled the Nazis and made it to neutral Switzerland in 1941 and 1942. Riegner assembled their accounts into a report to the U.S. government that was the first intimation most American officials had that the Nazi policy of the Jews had hardened from persecution to outright elimination. Riegner’s repurts found their way th the Department of the Treasury, whose head during the war was Henry Morgenthau, the first Jewish-American ever appointed to a Presidential Cabinet in the U.S. A 30-year-old official named John Pehle, whose parents were immigrants and whose father had migrated from Germany, saw the reports and became determined to do whatever he could to enable Jews to escape the Holocaust and find refuge in America. Eventually he became head of the War Refugee Board, founded by an executive order of President Roosevelt in January 1944. Pehle had to wait for months for the State Department to clear his request to spend American funds in occupied countries, and he ran into a months-long roadblock from Roosevelt’s immigration commissioner, Breckenridge Long, whom we already met in part two (given that he was named after a Confederate war hero, it’s no surprise that he was a racist who did everything he could to keep Jewish refugees out of the U.S.).
Even after Roosevelt founded the War Refugee Board and put Pehle in charge of it, there was an interesting contradiction between the bribes Pehle and other War Refugee Board officials had to pay to corrupt border guards in Nazi-occupied countries and the U.S.’s official policy against paying bribes. Pehle solved it by what would now be called a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, going ahead and paying bribes when he needed to in order to get people out of harm’s way. The show also discussed the ideological conflict between the most prominent Jewish political leader in America, Rabbi Stephen Wise, and Peter Bergson, who formed a more militant rival Jewish organization to agitate for a more aggressive response to Nazi persecution. (In a sense, Bergson was Malcolm X to Wise’s Martin Luther King, Jr.) Though the third part of the series takes place after the U.S. had definitively entered the war against fascism, resistance to rescuing Jewish refugees and bringing them to the U.S. remained great, as fear of competition for scarce American jobs (at a time when there was a labor shortage caused by the war!) combined with long-standing anti-Semitic attitudes in the U.S. to keep most people opposed to letting large numbers of Jewish refugees into the U.S. There were also interviews with Holocaust survivors, including Eva Geiringer, who matter-of-factly described the tortures to which she was subnected in the camps. Geiringer’s father and brothers all died in the Holocaust, but her mother survived and ultimately married Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father: a moving tale of love between a Holocaust widow and a Holocaust widower.
The film touched on the stories of Raoul Wallenberg from Sweden and a lesser-known diplomat, Karl Lutz from Switzerland, who made major efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust – though the show didn’t mention Wallenberg’s still mysterious disappearance after the war. The best evidence is that he was kidnapped by Soviet authorities when they invaded Hungary in early 1945 and held for two years before finally being put to death by the Soviets. One of the most significant points made by the program is that the sheer scope of the Nazis’ crimes ironically made it more difficult to get people to believe they were happening; even people who were aware of the Holocaust when it was going on (and there were surprisingly few) grossly underestimated its death toll. And the series ended, as Ken Burns had promised it would when he appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show September 19, with an epilogue detailing instances of anti-Semitism and racism in general today. It showed the familiar footage of the Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” rally on August 11 and 12, 2017; Dylann Roof’s massacre of African-American parishoners at a Baptist church in Charleston, South Carolina on July 17, 2015; and the mass murder of Jewish worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue (including, with grim irony, several Holocaust survivors) by a white supremacist on October 27, 2018. Though the show didn’t include any footage of then-President Donald Trump, including his infamous comment that “there were good people on both sides – on both sides” in Charlottesville, they did show footage of teh Charlotttesville white supremacists marching and chanting, “Jews will not replace us!” – a traditional rallying cry of European white supremacists at least since the 1920’s.
One surprising thing hs that Burns, Novick and Botstein chose to show only domestic parallels to the Nazis and not foreign ones – which struck me especially as I watched Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba being interviewed by Stephen Colbert September 21. It was impossible to escape the grim irony that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, who claimed to have started his “special military operation” (i.e, war) against Ukraine to “de-Nazify” it, time and time again has resorted to Hitler’s playbook. Not only have the Ukrainian soldiers who have retaken parts of their country formerly occupied by Russia hae fond mass graves where Russian soldiers had buried Ukrainians they had massacred willy-nilly, they are staging the kinds of phony “plebiscites” Hitler and Nazis did when they invaded and took over Austria in 1938. A recent report on the CNN Web site, https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/22/europe/russia-protests-partial-mobilization-ukraine-intl-hnk/index.html, reports that the Russian government is responding to national anti-war protests by not only arresting the protesters but drafting them into the Russian army. And they’re having the same sorts of manpower problems that Hitler had in the later stages of the war, when he started enlisting both the very young and the very old into his army. Putin has announced that he’s not only calling up 300,000 reservists but he’s expanding the military age to 60 and barring any males under age 65 from leaving the country. For those of us who thought the human race would get a break from psychopathic world leaders of major countries after the deaths of Hitler, Stalin and Mao, we already have Vladimir Putin and soon we may again have Donald Trump!
11 "Soundies" (Kino Lorber Films, Library of Congress, Turner Classic Movies, 2022, from original films from 1940-1947)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Turner Classic Movies ran the second half of its two-night tribute to “Soundies,” the miniature three-minute films produced between 1940 and 1947 to be shown on a machine called a “Panoram,” essentially a video jukebox. The “Panorams” were set up in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and other places of public entertainment where audio jukeboxes were commonly set up. The Panoram consisted of a 16 mm projector, a series of mirrors that bounced the image onto a ground-glass screen, and a continuous loop of eight films spliced together and running continuously, sort of like an eight-track audio tape cartridge (which wouldn’t exist for another two decades). You put a dime in the Panoram (twice the price to play an audio jukebox then), and you got to see a three-minute film before a metal strip on the film told the machine to stop until you or someone else inserted another dime. One difference between audio jukeboxes and Soundie Panorams was that you couldn’t select the song you were going to see and hear: you got whatever was next up on the endless-loop reel. I watched the first two of the three groups of Soundies TCM showed last night. I skipped the third one so I could watch the third and final episode of the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick-Sarah Botstein documentary mini-series The U.S. and the Holocaust – which was especially ironic because it was the set that most directly related to World War II. The World War II-related Soundies included Doris Day’s “Is It Love or Is It Conscription?” and four songs with no cast or crew information listed on TCM’s Web site: “G. I. Jive” (a great hit for Louis Jordan, though I don’t know whether it was Jordan’s own performance or someone else’s), “Love’s Gonna Be Rationed,” “Take It Off” and “When Hitler Kicks the Bucket.”
The two groups of Soundies I did get to see last night included three spectacular songs by Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: “Bli-Blip,” “Cottontail” (renamed “Hot Chocolate” for the Soundie) and “‘C’ Jam Blues” (renamed “Jam Session” for the Soundie). “Bli-Blip” and another song Ellington filmed for a Soundie, “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good),” were written by Ellington and lyricist Paul Francis Webster for a remarkable 1941 musical revue called Jump for Joy! which he premiered in Los Angeles. Ellington’s plan was to record the major songs from his show and promote them in his live appearances as he worked his way across the country from L.A., to his home base in New York, then use the popular demand for them to get funding to produce his musical on Broadway. Alas, he ran afoul of one of the senseless economic battles that plagued the music business during the war years: the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP), to which Ellington belonged, had unilaterally doubled the royalty rate it demanded from radio stations to play ASCAP songs. The radio stations and the giant networks refused to pay the new rates, and instead formed their own music licensing arm, Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI). Since most of the composers of the so-called “Great American Songbook” were ASCAP members, radio stations and BMI looked for talent that the people running ASCAP had considered beneath them – and found it in Black rhythm-and-blues and white country music.
Between that, the government tax on dance floors that drove a lot of the venues where the big swing bands had performed out of business, and the strike the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) called against the record companies that lasted from 1942 to 1944, these pointless economic conflicts sped the end of the big-band era and the domination of pop music by solo singers. So Ellington was unable to play the songs he’d written for Jump for Joy! on the radio, and since he couldn’t play standards either he was forced to rely on two composers who weren’t affiliated with ASCAP – his son, Mercer Ellington, and his newly hired arranger and co-composer Billy Strayhorn – for new material to broadcast. So the Soundies Ellington shot in L.A. of “Bli-Blip” and “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good” are historically invaluable as the only evidence we have of just what Ellington’s mega-musical looked like. The loss is especially sad because Ellington had deliberately intended Jump for Joy! as a once-and-for-all destruction of just about all the racist stereotypes that had dominated the4 portrayal of African-Americans in popular entertainment and culture. Most of is socially conscious songs, including one called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now,” went unrecorded, but the title song was cut by Ellington in two versions (one sung by his male vocalist, Herb Jeffries; and one by his female vocalist, the woefully underrated Ivie Anderson), and its affirmative lyrics lay bare Ellington’s ideological intent for his musical as an expression of racial pride:
Fare thee well, land of cotton,
Cotton lisle is out of style,
Honey chile, jump for joy!
Don’t you grieve, Little Eve,
All the hounds, I do believe,
Have been killed, ain’t ya thrilled?
Jump for joy!
Have you seen pastures groovy?
“Green Pastures” was just a Technicolor movie.
When you stomp up to Heaven and you meet Old St. Pete,
Tell that boy to jump for joy:
Step right in, give Pete some skin, and jump for joy!
(Actually, The Green Pastures – based on Marc Connelly’s hit Broadway play which featured Black actors re-enacting scenes from the Bible in Black dialect – was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1936 in black-and-white.)
Most of what I know about Jump for Joy! came from the 1988 reconstruction for the Smithsonian Institution, compiled by music historian Patricia Willard, who not only assembled as many of the original recordings as she could find, working from Soundies soundtracks and broadcast transcription discs as well as studio recordings and, in one case – a comedy routine by Wonderful Smith [that’s really his name!] in which he’s supposedly on the phone to President Roosevelt – from the soundtrack to a Monogram service comedy called Top Sergeant Mulligan. (Monogram had originally asked Smith to sell them the rights to the routine so their great Black comedian Mantan Moreland could play it, but Smith insisted that the only way he’d sell tmen the rights is if they let him perform it himself.) In addition to the three by Ellington, last night’s 11 Soundies on TCM included Count Basie playing a full-band version of “Air Mail Special” (originally written in 1941 by Benny Goodman, Jimmy Mundy and pioneering jazz electric guitarist Charlie Christian for a Goodman small band), Jimmy Dorsey with singer Helen O’Connell performing “Au Reet” (a white band paying tribute to a great – and fictional – Black musician in Harlem), Louis Jordan doing an instrumental called “Jordan Jive” with some spectacular acrobatic dancing on screen and Jordan’s alto sax clearly audible on the soundtrack even though he’s not shown playing on the film, Larry Clinton’s great instrumental “The Dipsy-Doodle” (though my favorite version of the song by far is by Chick Webb’s band with the young Ella Fitzgerald singing infectiously) and a not-bad performance by Lawrence Welk doing a song called “Doin’ Ya Good.”
There’s a nice semi-jazz tenor sax solo as well as Welk’s own accordion and a typically adenoidal vocal, but what makes Welk’s clip remarkable is that the band includes several women. It’s a sad commentary on the sexism of the jazz world that, despite the existence of quite a few excellent female players, the big swing bands mostly remained resolutely male throughout the war even though one would have thought the bandleaders would have seen that women offered a solution to the problem of so many male performers getting drafted. (Instead they resorted to hiring men who were, as the saying went, “:either too young or too old”; Stan Getz got his first major gig with Jack Teagarden’s band when he was just 13.) Woody Herman had hired a women trumpeter, Billie Young, in 1940 (before the U.S. entered the war), but she only lasted six months. One of the problems was how to dress her: band musicians usually wore matching outfits and Herman had a female version, a top and skirt matching the male members’ suit jackets and slacks, tailored especially for her. I give Lawrence Welk a lot of credit for being more progressive about gender roles than a lot of the great swing leaders whose music I much prefer to his!
The first two Soundies on TCM’s program last night were by vocal groups: “Swing for Sale” by the Charioteers and “Cool Song” by the King’s Men. One thing I hadn’t known before last night is that the 1942-44 AFM ban on union musicians making records applied to Soundies as well. That shouldn’t have been much of a surprise, since the main issue in the strike (which was officially called a “ban” rather than a “strike” because Congress had in 1942 passed a law making most strikes illegal for the duration, but it amounted to the same thing) was the way restaurants, nightclubs and bars that had formerly hired live musicians now were installing either record players or jukeboxes instead. The AFM recording ban did not apply to the major Hollywood studios – AFM musicians could still record for feature-film soundtracks – but it did to the Soundies producers. So the Soundies producers (there were quite a few of them, including RCM Productions – which made Ellington’s Soundies – and Minoco Distribution) were forced to rely on vocal groups,
just as the record companies briefly experimented with having their star singers record backed by choruses (since singers were part of a different union,as were solo instrumentalists like the young pianist Liberace, who got to make his film debut in a Soundie of “Tiger Rag”). Heard today, the chorally backed records of singers like Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Dick Haymes and Sarah Vaughan sound preposterous, but at the time it was a stopgap so record companies could put new songs before the public without risking the ire of the AFM and its notoriously dictatorial president, James C. Petrillo. (The “C” stood for “Caesar,” and a lot of jokesters wagged about how appropriate his middle name was.) Last night’s hosts, Dave Karger and Susan Delson (who wrote a book about Soundies with the lengthy title Soundies and the Changing Image of Black Americans on Screen: One Dime at a Time that has been short-listed for the 2022 Ralph J. Gleason Award – who knew that the veteran jazz and rock critic for the San Francisco Chronicle who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and who was a friend of my mother’s had a book award named for him?), faulted some of the Soundies for their dated racial attitudes – including Paul White’s odd eye-rolling and tongue-flapping even in the context of a show by Duke Ellington intended to denounce such racist stereotypes – but they also admitted that at least some of their criticism was applying modern-day standards to historic material.
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