Ode to Victory (MGM,1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ll just comment on the short film Turner Classic Movies ran immediately after Dog Day Afternoon on February 22: Ode to Victory, a strange little 11-minute shor featuring character actor Ray Teal (who later appeared as a regular cast member of the 1950’s TV Western series Bonanza, though an online reviewer on imdb.com said he was heavier in his Bonanza days than he is here) conducting an orchestra of U.S. servicemembers in a “patriotic” pastiche by Nathaniel Shilkret. After about a minute or so in which conductor Teal tells the players to stop treating their instruments like bazookas, we hear the full Shilkret piece. The work is divided intol four sections: 1) “Birth of Freedom” (the American Revolution); 2) “The Land Divided” (the Civil War); 3) “Coming of Age” (World War I, beginning with the sinking of the Lusitania): and 4) “Land of the Free” (World War II, beginning with footage of President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivering his famous “day of infamy” speech on December 8, 1941). It’s indicative of the time that generated this short that all four of the benchmarks of American history it commemorates are major wars. Of course, the segments are illustrated on screen with suitable excerpts from MGM films depicting these events – the earlier clips are probably from dramatized fiction films about these events while the ones depicting the two world wars were likely from MGM’s newsreel vaults. The strategy was the same as used in Duke Ellington’s minor masterpiece Symphony in Black (1935): we see the band playing the section of the piece, the image dissolves into the illustrative footage, then fades back onto the band for the closing of the movement. I quite liked the piece until the chorus that came in at the end and saqng a bunch of “inspirational” lyrics by Patricia Johnston that underlined ahd made mind-numbingly explicit the patriotic message that had been much more powerfully implicit in the earlier instrumental sections.

I have a great deal of respect for Nathaniel Shilkret: in the late 1920’s he was a record producer for Victor and the session he produced for Jean Goldkette’s band featuring Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer showcased the band playing the closest it ever got on records to true jazz. In 1929 Shilkret conducted the first recording of George Gershwim’s tone poem An American in Paris and it’s a stunning performance, still my all-time favorite of the piece, even though apparently Shilkret and Gershwin argued over the conductor’s tempi. In 1932 Shilkret conducted Victor’s eight experimental re-recordings of Enrico Caruso, who had died 11 years earlier and hadn’t lived long enough to make electrical recordings. Engineers at RCA Victor had the idea to overlay new electrically recorded accompaniments over Caruso’s old records, and they chose Shilkret to conduct the additions. I’ve heard four of the results and they are stunning, far better than the more recent attempts to filter out Caruso’s voice and add new orchestral accompaniments, mainly because Shilkret was a much more imaginative conductor than Gottfried Rabl, who got the assignment for the “Caruso 2000” CD’s and pretty much just followed a click track. In 1945 Shilkret worked on an even more ambitious project, the Genesis Suite, a series of musical settings from the first book of the Bible recorded by conductor Werner Janssen with Edward Arnold narrating. Shilkret composed the opening segment, “The Creation,” himself and for the rest recruited Alezandre Tansman (“Adam and Eve”), Darius Milhaud (“Cain and Abel”), Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (“Noah’s Ark”), Ernst Toch (“The Covenant”), Igor Stravinsky (“Babel,” a five-minute mini-cantata Stravinsky later re-recorded on his own, though with John Colicos, a far less imposing actor than Arnold) and Arnold Schönberg (a piece based on the words “In the beginning God” that was a postlude in the original 78 rpm album and a prelude when the piece was reissued on LP, albeit with a different narrator). Shilkret’s “Ode to Victory” sounded a bit too much like his attempt to duplicate Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans” (not a great piece of music, either, but a good deal better than “Ode to Victory”), and the whole short seemed like a real historical curio, a souvenir of the patriotic pretension that was supposed to inspire us to do our best to support the war effort.