LOVE ME OR LEAVE ME: DORIS DAY

I mentioned the other day, while discussing Susan Hayward, Hollywood's brief foray into a sub-genre that I think of as "musical melodramas." These films are all post-war items--the era brought with it a frankness about human frailty, compulsions and violence that wasn't earlier considered appropriate for mass entertainment--and used period settings and songs to tell semi-factual stories, usually revolving around show-biz and gangsters. The musical numbers are strictly used in source settings--i.e. characters perform the songs in nightclubs rather than bursting into song at the drop of a hat because they just can't contain themselves. "I'll Cry Tomorrow", the story of singer Lillian Roth's downfall, certainly qualifies as one of these films. So, too, does the disappointing but still worth seeing "Young Man With A Horn", starring Kirk Douglas as a self-destructive trumpet player (based on a novel which was hazily inspired by the life of jazz great Bix Beiderbecke). Jack Webb's "Pete Kelly's Blues", though not factual, fits the bill as well. (For more on this unfairly forgotten film--Webb's best work as a filmmaker--see my 9/24/07 post. Oy, that was a long time ago). Another film that qualifies is Nicholas Ray's last studio film, 1958's "Party Girl", with Cyd Charisse and Robert Taylor.

The best of all of these "musi-mellers", for my money, is "Love Me Or Leave Me", starring Doris Day and James Cagney in the semi-factual story of 1920's chanteuse Ruth Etting and her complicated and violent relationship with the gangster who helped make her a star, Martin "Moe The Gimp" Snyder. The film was directed by my favorite utterly forgotten and critically ignored director, Charles Vidor, and is a splendid example of plush big-studio trappings (it was made by MGM) for once working in service of, rather than against, a dark tale of obsessional love that doesn't really end all that happily.

The tale itself is simple: Etting, a hugely ambitious young singer, married a gangster, Moe Snyder, who helped her rise in the world of nightclubs and, eventually, records, radio and movies. Snyder, who by all accounts was quite taken with his young discovery, was appalled to discover that Ruth was...using him. A gangster with blinders on his heart? Who'd a thunk? When she fell in love with her pianist--played in the movie by Cameron Mitchell but in real life was a man named Myrl Alderman--Snyder did what any self-respecting gangster would do; he shot him. Alderman didn't die and he and Etting actually got married once Snyder and Etting got divorced. (Is it possible to live happily ever after with a woman who's gotten you shot? I wonder).

For Doris Day, LMOLM represented the first real opportunity she had to act--previously she had been the buck-toothed bandsinger chick who charmed audiences in execrable Warner Brothers fare from the late forties and early fifties like "Romance On The High Seas" and "On Moonlight Bay". I have no idea if Day's immense popularity at the time, both as a movie star and recording artist, permitted her the opportunity to choose to make "Love Me Or Leave Me"--if she initiated the project, that is, or if somebody else did and chose her for it. Her performance in the movie, though, is certainly the best of her career--much better than her Oscar winning (!) turn in "Pillow Talk" or her other "serious" role in the 1960 "Midnight Lace". (She's also quite good in HItchcock's "Man Who Knew Too Much"). Oddly, the Academy didn't even nominate her for her work in LMOLM--and it's not because they snubbed the movie in general--the writers, Daniel Fuchs and Isobel Lennart, were nominated in a category that no longer exists, "Best Story". (Odd, given that they didn't make it up). And Cagney was nominated for best actor. Oh well, trying to figure out the good old AMPAS is a thankless and hopeless pursuit this late in the game (this being the year the pretentiously awful "No Country For Old Men" seems destined to...oh, why get started?)

Charles Vidor, who I've written about before, directed three movies that stand the test of time--"Cover Girl" and "Gilda" being the other two. Yet who knows anything about him? Clearly more of a lucky pro than a frustrated visionary, Vidor nevertheless had a fine feel for the sweep of a movie, as well as for pacing and for enhancing dramatic moments with smart and evocative staging techniques. He was precisely the kind of director who needed a studio system to function under--not an independent thinker yet someone who could simultaneously follow orders and find self-expression in the product that he was assigned to. The below clip is a beautifully staged and shot showpiece, "Shaking The Blues Away" which Vidor appears to have directed himself and not fobbed off on some second unit hack.

Doris Day is alive and well. She disappeared from show-biz after the death of her husband Martin Melcher (a sordid story involving money mismanagement was attached to his death but why bring it up here?) and currently heads a wildlife preservation society and runs a hotel in Carmel, California with her son, Terry Melcher. Recently she was asked by director Peter Bogdanovich if she'd be interviewed. She graciously declined, saying that she admired his work but considered everything about her previous life of no further interest to her. How is that possible? And yet there's something terribly admirable in those few giants who, once it's over, truly throw in the towel. Cagney was like that too...until Milos Forman offered him "Ragtime"...

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS-LILLIAN ROTH

Susan Hayward's portrayal of actress/singer/alcoholic Lillian Roth in the 1955 film "I'll Cry Tomorrow" was a harrowing portrait of a woman pushed into show business by a demanding mother (wonderfully played by Jo Van Fleet) who self-implodes at the moment when she should be enjoying the peak of her fame. The movie was based on Roth's memoir (same title) which was certainly one of the first--if not THE first--tell all show-biz/drug abuse books, a genre which might not have been invented if not for Roth's courageous telling of her tale. (Do we applaud her for this? Or blame her?) When Roth appeared on Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life" in 1954 and talked openly of her struggle with the bottle and "cure" via Alcoholics Anonymous, the show received the largest amount of viewer mail in its history--the subject of addiction and treatment not yet having entered the national vocabulary. I've actually read Roth's book and its well written and terribly sad (I came across a dog-eared paperback in a house we were renting one summer in Maine and promptly stole it, along with "The Decline and Fall of the Third Reich").

Just who was this Lillian Roth, though, before she became famous for being famously portrayed by Susan Hayward? Well, in terms of analagous perfoming careers, Roth resembles nobody else today as much as Lindsey Lohan. Like Lohan, she was shoved by her demented parents in front of the cameras practically before learning to walk--her earliest screen credit is from 1915 (!) when she's five. She and her sister Anne had a vaudeville act together while growing up (doesn't Lindsey have an kept-in-the-shadows sister? Or is that Brittney?) She was a Ziegfield starlet while technically under age--she (and her mother) blithely lied when she was seventeen in order to get the gig as ingenue in Ziegfield's 1927 "Midnight Frolics". She made enough of a name for herself on Broadway to be transported out to the Astoria, Long Island Paramount Studios for a couple of quickie musical shorts. Ernst Lubitsch saw her in one and cast her in 1929's "The Love Parade" (see below clip). Paramount signed her and worked her hard over the next year and a half--eight movies including De Mille's "Madame Satan", the two-strip technicolor Dennis King rarity "The Vagabond King" and--probably her best known role--the Marx Brothers "Animal Crackers".

The killing pace is similar to Lohan's 2004-2006 streak which led to the "Georgia Rules" implosion and her current...issues. Barely twenty-one years of age, Lindsey--er, Lillian--took to partying hard, showing up late for work, marrying and divorcing men at an alarming rate and drinking ever more heavily. Paramount washed their hands of her in 1932 and things went south at an alarming rate. Roth spent the next two decades in and out of sanitariums, lost and forgotten--and not yet even thirty years old! (The section of her book about these years is particularly grim and fascinating and much more vivid than the movie). Her recovery was seemingly successful, though and she re-emerged in the fifties as a Broadway figure in such plays as "Funny Girl" and "I Can Get It For You Wholesale". Arthur Laurents, in his very good autobiography, recounts working with Roth in the latter show at a time when her husband--whom she met in AA--left the marriage and absconded with her funds. Hard luck girl Lillian toughed it out though--she makes an appearance in one of Richard Lamparski's chilling "Whatever Became Of " volumes, living with a roomate and a half-dozen dogs on Manhattan's West Side in the early seventies. And she actually has a screen credit (see above imdb listing) from the year before she died, 1979. ( Was there anyone else on the SAG rolls credited in 1979 who made their first film in 1915? Not even George Burns qualifies for that particular honor).

Below are two clips--the first is with Lupino Lane (a marvelous physical comedian and the Uncle of actress Ida Lupino) and is from "The Love Parade". Second is a complete seven minute Paramount short shot called "Meet The Boyfriend". It's a little hard to judge Lillian's appeal from this distance--she wasn't a vamp, though she's very appealing. And yet I'd hesitate to call her a comedienne though she skews more funny than serious. Perhaps what Lillian Roth represented at the tale end of the Jazz Age was something rare for the times--innocence and good humor found in a young woman of liberated sensibilities. Indeed she may have been the era's most wholesome jazz-baby, a girl you could bring home to mother but who also carried a hip flask.

HOTSY-TOTSY'S OF THE BOOTLEG YEARS-LILLIAN ROTH

Susan Hayward's portrayal of actress/singer/alcoholic Lillian Roth in the 1955 film "I'll Cry Tomorrow" was a harrowing portrait of a woman pushed into show business by a demanding mother (wonderfully played by Jo Van Fleet). The movie was based on Roth's memoir (same title) which was certainly one of the first--if not THE first--tell all show-biz and drug abuse books, a genre which might not have been invented if not for Roth's courageous telling of her tale. (Do we applaud her for this? Or blame her?) When Roth appeared on Ralph Edwards "This Is Your Life" in 1954 and talked openly of her struggle with the bottle and "cure" via Alcoholics Anonymous, the show received the largest amount of viewer mail in its history--the subject of addiction and treatment not yet having entered the national vocabulary. I've actually read Roth's book and its well written and terribly sad--I came across a dog-eared paperback in a house we were renting one summer in Maine and promptly stole it, along with "The Decline and Fall of the Third Reich".

Just who was this Lillian Roth, though, before she became famous for being famously portrayed by Susan Hayward? Well, in terms of analagous perfoming careers, Roth resembles nobody else today as much as Lindsey Lohan. Like Lohan, she was shoved in front of the cameras practically before learning to walk--her earliest screen credit is from 1915 (!) when she's five. She was a Ziegfield starlet while technically under age--she (and her mother) blithely lied when she was fifteen in order to get the gig (she claimed to be over eighteen). Ernst Lubitsch saw her on stage in blah and cast her in 1929's "The Love Parade". Paramount signed her and worked her hard over the next year and a half--eight movies including leads in...

Barely twenty-one years of age, Lindsey--er, Lillian--took to partying hard, showing up late for work, marrying and divorcing men at an alarming rate and drinking ever more heavily. Paramount washed their hands of her in 1932.

B-GIRLS OF THE H-BOMB ERA: SUSAN HAYWARD

Way back at the end of the last already forgotten calendar year, I was all set to write about Susan Hayward when a fresh look at her filmography reminded me of the movie "Smash-Up; The Story Of A Woman"...which made me think of the lives of Bing Crosby and wife Dixie Lee (on which the story of "Smash-Up" was based--see 12/20 post)...which sent me into Bing and fellow crooners Russ Columbo and Rudy Vallee and...such is the way this weblog functions, as a sort of formalizing of my own attention deficit issues.

So now, back to what was on my mind at the end of the year. Was five time Oscar nominated (and once winning) actress Susan Hayward a great actress? Or was she a basic studio starlet who evolved into a dark and expressive force that came to represent the dark side of the post war feminine cliche? If the definition of great screen acting is (to quote A.O Scott's New York Times appreciation of the sadly dead Heath Ledger) to indicate emotional states without overtly displaying them, then Hayward's work is perhaps too over-the-top to rate as first class; she shows you just about everything and more. But this may be missing the point (and the guy missing it, remember, is A.O Scott and not me) of what great screen acting is; movie actors who are blunt instruments tend to be the ones that live most precisely in our memories. Thus, for my money, Cagney is the greatest gangster (and even remains a gangster in comedies where he doesn't play one--like "One Two Three"), Wayne is the greatest Westerner, Cary Grant the most urbane man in the world...etc. There is nothing terribly subtle about any of them--they present a version of a story that is complete and instantly authoritative. Thus exposing the old "on the movie screen everything is enlarged so the best acting is the most minimal" point of view as the tired and useless cliche that it's become.

Susan Hayward was a blunt instrument who portrayed lonely, betrayed and desperate alcoholic/addicts to perfection and, in a sense, cornered that market (a market that didn't really exist in movies until post-war noir). I don't mean for this to sound reductive--she was enormously talented and played many other kinds of roles as well. But the damaged psyche of the lost party girl--be they high-toned and show-bizzy ("I'll Cry Tomorrow", "Smash Up") or down and dirty as they come (Barbara Grahame in "I Want To Live")---was Hayward's special thing. She knew the frenetic sense of fun that proceeded the inevitable empty dawn of remorse and conveyed the alcoholic personality--sensitive, demanding, hysterical, remorseful--with rare empathy and accuracy.

"Scratch any promiscuous hedonist and you'll find a disappointed romantic". So the saying goes. (Who said it is another question, one that I can't answer, and if anyone wishes to claim authorship by all means do so). Anyway, it is precisely these women--the floozies who could have been saved by the right man, the Bourbon-and-Soda b-girls who once upon a time dreamed of being the fairy princess--that eventually earned Hayward stardom as well as real respect after a long-ish early career in which she worked with a great many talented actors and directors but never quite seemed...to take hold. Indeed, after the Brooklyn born Hayward came to Hollywood in the late 1930's, convinced--with marvelous hubris--that she was going to win the role of Scarlett O'Hara, her unique talents seemed to have been both recognized by Hollywood and ignored--the trouble probably being in figuring out where they fit; none of her appearances in her pre-war and wartime movies are memorable, though she always landed a contract somewhere and steadily kept working. (In some ways this reminds me of Lucille Ball's career--if you erased "I Love Lucy" from the history books, Ball would scarcely be remembered for her RKO career even though she was employed non-stop there for years).

Hayward eventually broke through as the drunk wife in "Smash Up: The Story Of A Woman" (first Oscar nom, 1947), hit it big as a sad drunk in "My Foolish Heart" (second Oscar nom 1949), solidified her hard-luck status as singer Jane Frohman struggling to make a comeback after a plane crash in "With A Song In My Heart" (third Oscar nom, 1952) and the proceeded to go all-out dipso in her portrayal of singer Lillian Roth in "I'll Cry Tomorrow" (fourth Oscar nom, 1955). This film, along with "Love Me Or Leave Me" (the Doris Day/James Cagney biopic of singer Ruth Etting) is, I think, one of the few examples of a sub-genre that Hollywood briefly perfected before abandoning: the "musical melodrama"--a blend of backstage drama, period situations (prohibition, nightclubs etc.) old torch songs and genuinely modern explorations of troubled psyche's (Cagney's sick turn as the madly possesive Gimp Snyder in LMOLM is as disturbing as anything he ever did). Hayward's portrayal of Lillian Roth--a girl pushed onto the stage by her mother who makes it big but who collapses into an alcoholic heap before finding redemption--is a bravura turn. Great as she is, though, the film is hampered by a period-free recreation of the 1920's and some rather sanctimonious stuff involving AA and Eddie Albert as the man who helped bring Lillian/Hayward out of her spiral and "to the other side". (I might as well fully disclose my feelings about portraying AA in movies: it is pretty much always cringe-inducing, impossibly hopeful and simplistically utopian --think of "Days Of Wine And Roses" and how sensible Lee Remick seems for staying away from those meetings--and she really needs the help). Hayward is pretty much the whole show--although Richard Conte is good as her abusive lout of a husband and Jo Van Fleet is superb as her pushy mom. Indeed her best work was still in the future, with her Oscar winning portrayal of Barbara Grahame in "I Want To Live".

"I Want To Live" is still an absorbing and shockingly hard to take movie--Hayward is riveting and necessarily repugnant as B-Girl Barbara Grahme who went to the gas chamber for a murder that most people recognized even then she had not committed. The filmmaking is much better here than in "I'll Cry Tomorrow"--Robert Wise directed and pretty much pulled out every trick in his noir trainer-book as well as giving Hayward a great deal of room to delve much more deeply into the role of her lifetime then most studio-bound directors of the time might have. (I know that he doesn't get much credit in this department but Wise was a sincerely sympathetic-to-actors director--maybe he didn't talk the talk like Kazan and others of that ilk, but performers generally did unusually well under Wise's careful and always attentive direction). "I Want To Live" is also important as one of the first (not THE first as the producers proclaimed) movies to use a jazz score--in this case by the then realitively untested Johnny Mandel. This was very much in the air at the time--"Man With A Golden Arm" was in '56, "Sweet Smell Of Success" in 57 and "Anatomy Of A Murder was coming up in '59--but the soundtrack here is particularly effective. Check out the trailer clip below for some of the music and the names of the performers (I remember Art Farmer being involved but that's about it for the moment). I would love to have posted more Hayward--both from "I'll Cry Tomorrow" and "I Want To Live"--but the rest of the clips available on youtube have had embedding disabled by request. ( I have no opinion on this matter, of course though I do encourage you to search Hayward on youtube where you will find some fine work from both movies. Hell, rent some DVD's too.)

Susan Hayward died at the far too young age of fifty-seven after a devastating and prolonged battle with brain cancer. More about her personal life--and what she did professionally (nothing topped her fifties run) can be learned here.Yet whatever makes us interested in actor's personal lives for me is missing in Hayward. She was such a force--she gave you so much to see that one tends to avert ones eyes rather than drink her in--that her performances are, in fact, all one really needs. In this sense she reminds me, once again, of Cagney--a force so singular and fascinating that the behind the scenes figure never really engendered that much curiosity. Whatever she ultimately was--great actress or canny careerist who filled a necessary void with her portrayals of hard-luck cases--she was a terribly brave performer. And frankly I like the term "performer" better than actor any day...

BROADWAY MELODIES: TENTPOLE PIX OF THE DECO ERA PT. 2

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day Weekend! What better way to celebrate this national holiday than with a series of posts featuring a great white chick tap-dancer?

Below you will find one of the true delights of the MGM sausage factory. It's a "summation" number from "Broadway Melody of 1938", which attempts to recount the history of old Broadway and tie it to the new "modern" Broadway that all the hep-cats in the audience presumably knew about. The method deployed is simple and elegant: just use good old, fat old Sophie Tucker in the first half of the number to deliver a nostalgic tribute to the vanished world that she was part of--she mentions Marilyn Miller for Goddsakes and even in 1938 Marilyn Miller, freshly dead for two years, was as yesterday as they come. (I've been meaning to return to my mini-series "Hotsy-Totsy's Of the Bootleg Era" and Marilyn would be a good subject--not the least because of the lurid rumors surrounding her death but also there is some fine, charmingly decrepit early talkie footage of her on youtube from the marvelous "Sunny". But I digress. And what the hell of it?)

Anyway, pour yourself a beverage of choice and delve into almost nine minutes of MGM craft at its highest. The Sophie Tucker section is really quite charming and anyway it doesn't last forever; it soon gives way to Eleanor Powell tap-dancing her ass off. (The more I research and write about the late Mrs. Glenn Ford, the more astonished I am with how short her filmography is. She is to movie stars what Terrence Malick is to directors). Within the score you can hear remnants of Freed/Brown material--"Broadway Rhythm", "Broadway Melody", even "You Are My Lucky Star"--and you begin to get a glimpse of where the significance of this production number truly resides : as a dry-run for the movie that became, sixteen years later, "Singin' In The Rain". It's clear that Freed--who in 1952 was the head of his unit rather than merely the songwriter that he was at the time this clip was shot--showed this number to Gene Kelly, who based much of what he did in the "Broadway Ballet" on the below. More Eleanor to follow...

THE BROADWAY MELODIES: TENTPOLE PIX OF THE DECO ERA

Apropos of our quasi-in-depth treatment of "Singing In The Rain" (see posts from early January '08), I thought we'd look back at the movie that started it all--"Broadway Melody of 1929", the MGM all singing/dancing early talkie that won the first Best Picture Oscar. Then I noticed that depsite that films accessibility, nobody has bothered posting any clips from it on youtube.

One can't blame them. Even as stiff early talkies go, "BMof29" is a hard sit--the leading man, Charles King, is charm and charisma free and none of the numbers really take off, unlike some of the previously posted "Hollywood Revue of 1929" material. And the story--good heavens! Did it ever make any sense? Hard now to imagine what exactly hard core pro's of the time were so impressed with that they accorded it the best picture statuette--King Vidor's "Hallelujah. Lubitsch's "Love Parade" and Mamoulian's "Applause", from the same year, are all much better. But before abandoning the subject, I found something of perhaps greater value to explore; the fact that even seventy some years ago, Hollywood was shameless about repeating anything that worked. The highly successful "BMof29" spawned no less than four sequels--"BMof36", "BMof38", and "BMof 40". (By the time the fourth one arrived--in 1944--the series was out of gas and they didn't even bother with utilizing the brand name; the swan song is called "Broadway Rhythm"). Happily all--or at least the two that I've seen--are, unlike our current era's tentpole franchises, much better than the original.

Currently the only one of the sequels to the original "BMof29" available on DVD appears to be the Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell starring/Cole Porter composed "Broadway Melody of 1940." Fortunately it appears to be the best of them all (though I've heard fine things about the "BM0f36" which features Jack Benny as well as Powell). Below are two superb numbers from "BMof40"--the very famous "Begin The Beguine" tap dance featuring Astaire and Powell. And Astaire and George Murphy doing "Please Don't Monkey With Broadway". Both numbers are masterfully performed and staged in elegantly fluid long-takes and the sets are large and lavish without dwarfing the performers and overpowering the routines.

Eleanor Powell's fame came and went rather suddenly--especially given the fact that there was nothing flimsy or faddish about her talents. Charming, leggy and virtuosic in her talents, she was simply one of the most remarkable tap dancers--not "female tap dancers" you'll note--ever to burst upon the scene. Astaire himself--not noted for being generous to his dance partners--remarked about her in his autobiography that there was nothing "sissy" about Powell's tapping. She was a child of vaudeville, first gaining exposure in the Gus Edwards kiddie vaudeville act of the twenties; though now forgotten, the Edwards troupe was considered sort of a Mousekateer-like upper-rung stop for talented kids--if you made it into Gus Edwards you had "possible big time" written all over you. (Milton Berle was a Gus Edwards graduate as well.) Powell seemed to begin her screen career at the top, with MGM putting her in the BMof36 and building a number of specially devised production set-pieces around her in each of her subsequent films. Although wildly popular in the waning years of the depression, she began in the early forties to appear as something of a lavish, late deco relic from the previous era. As the Andrews Sisters years kicked in, Powell and her rather intimidating, hoity-toity persona and production numbers began, I suppose, to feel ponderous, of another more pre-warish mindset. She married actor Glenn Ford (before, it should be noted, he had become a name--she was the bigger star at the beginning of their relationship) and retired from movies altogether in 1945 to raise their son, actor Peter Ford. Good for her. A few scattered later appearences aside (as well as a nightclub act that she did with some success in the early 60's), she had the good sense to let history do the talking for her. When "That's Entertainment" was assembled in 1974, it was the below posted "Begin The Beguine" clip that attracted the most attention, leading to a rennasaince of interest in Powell. She died in the early 1980's.

Also note below the fine dancing of George Murphy, who also had something of a life after movies: he defeated Pierre Salinger for the United States Senate in 1964 and served until the early 1970's. Upon his election to the senate, the Broadway showman Jed Harris supposedly remarked, "If they wanted a hoofer in the Senate, they should have elected Astaire". Perhaps he was thinking of the below clip?

RUDY VALLEE: THE WRAP UP

I wish I could say that my story of meeting Rudy Vallee ended with him giving me his megaphone. It didn't. But still it ended in a pleasant enough way to warrant this final Rudy posting.

I did as Tommy, his friend/helper, suggested (see 1/11 post) and sent Rudy a thank you gift for letting me tour his house; a postcard, circa early 1930's, of the house itself, newly completed and advertised as the home of actress Ann Harding (she and her husband built the house and sold it to Vallee in the forties. I believe I found the postcard at Larry Edmunds on Hollywood Blvd.) Almost instantly I got a call from Tommy telling me that the boss liked the card very much. Just in case no further invitation was forthcoming I'd taken the precaution of also buying a few stills of Ann Harding showing off the house just after it had been built. I told Tommy about these as well. "Whyn't you bring 'em on by this Sunday?" he suggested, a bit conspiritorially. So my second invite to the Vallee estate was in the bag.

This time I brought a friend with me (we'd spent much of our adolescence driving around LA peeking up long driveways and trying to sneak into mansions and this seemed too good an opportunity not to invite him along). And this time I wound up having another, slightly longer chat with Rudy--he seemed to be bustling around xeroxing lots of old clippings and doing a lot of filing work while his wife entertained the guests. I remember standing in a crowded storage room with him, talking about "How To Succeed In Business"--he was, again, quite charming and if not exactly super-conversational, he seemed pleased to be distracted. Before we left, he gave me a paperback copy of his often-retitled autobiography and signed it.

Now, if I were the man I am today I would certainly have felt satisfied with these two visits and would have not pushed the so-called envelope any further. BUT I WAS SEVENTEEN. And so I came up with yet another move. My father, Frank De Felitta, had recently published a novel called "Sea Trial". I prevailed upon him to sign a copy of it so I could give it to Rudy Vallee, and keep this bizarre quasi-relationship alive. My father did so, expressing not the slightest bit of interest in meeting Rudy Vallee. Once again I called Tommy and told him I had something for the boss. He told me to come by on a weekday morning the following week.

I did. This time there were no guests. And nobody in the driveway to meet me. Somwhat nervously I rang the bell of the main house. Tommy met me and took me into the kitchen. There I was treated to the sight of Rudy Vallee, in a silk bathrobe, standing in his kitchen frying a large mess of sausages. He was quite cordial despite the informal circumstances and very pleased to have an autographed copy of a new book--he told me to thank my father. We somehow then got into a conversation revolving around books that had been made into movies; Rudy liked "Love Story". This, he told me, was a book and a movie that he could never tire of. Something about standing in Rudy Vallee's kitchen and watching the man--be-robed and half asleep-- cooking himself breakfast while talking about "Love Story", struck me as the perfect final image for the "Me and Rudy" saga. A complete story arc had been acheived--from first phone call (during which he hung up on me) to the final, informal kitchen hang. Rudy wouldn't let me have the last word in the gift exchange wars either--he dug up a recent Christmas card of his and signed it for me. It's a picture of him and his wife lying in bed, wearing pajamas, surrounded by their poodles. They're drinking Champagne and reading copies of Rudy's autobiography. "To Raymond--Sincerely Rudy and Ellie" is how he signed it. (It currently resides in a small plastic frame in my office.) And that, as they say, was that. Though he lived another four years, I never saw him again. When he died I wrote a condolence note to his wife. She didn't answer (I didn't expect her to) and I couldn't help but wonder if, upon reading it, she thought: is this that weird teenager who kept coming over and bothering Rudy?

The below clip is from "The Palm Beach Story", the movie which gave Vallee's career a second wind and proved that his real talent wasn't singing (and certainly not playing the sax) but was, instead, his marvelously dry delivery of comic dialogue, his superb underplaying and his natural comedic timing. Indeed, despite Vallee's worldwide success in the 1920's, it might honestly be the case that for Rudy Vallee, talent-wise, his life began at forty.

CROONER'S CORNER: A RUSS COLUMBO BIRTHDAY SALUTE

In a stunning display of no planning whatsoever leading to what might seem to be an inevitable destination, all the talk here in the past two weeks of crooners (Crosby and Vallee) has deposited us on the doorstep of the most mysterious of all cronner's birthday centennial. Russ Columbo would have turned one-hundred years old today, January 14, 2008 if he'd A) cut out the red meat, booze and cigarettes, B) had the genes required to live double the then-predicted life span and C) not screwed around with that gun that his friend Lansing Brown had in his house which accidently went off and shot him to death at the unbelivably tender age of twenty-six.

(By the way, I discovered it was Columbo's centennial while listening last night to one of the best radio shows broadcast in these United States--Rich Conaty's "Big Broadcast", which emanates from Fordham University on WFUV but which can, of course, be found here on the internet. Conaty plays strictly period records--twenties and early thirties--with a pleasant and never overwhelming amount of information offered about the music; indeed his show even feels a bit of the period--maybe it's Conaty's good-natured Joe College persona--and often times on Sunday nights while listening I find myself drifting into a pleasant, hallucinatory art deco-ish state of mind. Which I highly recommend as a drug of choice. Along with a Makers Mark Manhattan, of course).

Columbo was the "crooners crooner"--a better singer than Vallee and a more romantic presence than Bing Crosby. In some ways he looked ahead to the young Sinatra--his dapper, masculine presence makes him appear far less dated now than his contemporaries and, as you'll see in the below clip, he possesses an assuredness, a debonair calm, that almost--ALMOST--could be called hip. Or hep. (I wonder what the hip word for hep was in the early thirties). Like Sinatra, Columbo was an Italian from New Jersey (screw Sinatra--Jackie Paris was an Italian from New Jersey as well) and like Crosby he was first seen as part of a vocal trio--he can be seen in this context with Gus Arnheim's orchestra in a Vitaphone Short which is part of the extra's package on the lavish new DVD release of "The Jazz Singer". (The two discs of extras--rather than the main attraction--make owning this DVD package essential. There are those who love "The Jazz Singer" but I'm not one of them). Columbo, again like Crosby, quickly jettisoned his partners and--like Vallee--became famous overnight on radio. (By the way--I made some flippant observations about Rudy Vallee's book "Let The Chips Fall" but there is much in it that's worthwhile--specifically a chapter called "Radio's Child" where he recounts the actual birth of what we now know as the "live broadcast"). Columbo only appeared in a handful of movies before his absurd early death and the below clip is from one called "Wake Up And Dream", shot (you should pardon the expression) in late 1933.

Some things about the below clip that I like: the director Kurt Neumann (later--much later--he directed "The Fly"; and before that film was released he mysteriously committed suicide) clearly likes the theatrical setting and gives a nice sense of what it might be like to be in a theatre during a rehearsal period--the grubby informality of the on-lookers is accurate and the chorines hanging about on the steps and catwalks are a nice touch. Also the way that Columbo wins over the band, who upon hearing that he can really sing start to accompany him, is a good touch--accurate in terms of how even cynical musicians can become generous when they recognize talent in a performer.

What would have become of Russ Columbo had he not perished at the age of twenty-six? Would he, and not Crosby, have become the first multi-media celebrity? Or, like Vallee, would he have remained a creature of his period and turned up, decades later, only as a reminder of a largely forgotten past? We'll never know, of course, and Columbo's position as sacrificial crooner makes him all the more alluring. Cloaked in a shadowy glamour (there have always been the usual rumors of his death being foul-play but they never ring as true as, say, the Thelma Todd stories do), Columbo stands aloof from his contemporaries, isolated by his fate. The few appearances he made on film and a few years worth of recordings (the big hits were "Prisoner Of Love" and "You Call It Madness But I Call It Love") are all he left behind and yet seventy-five years after his death this is enough for people to be celebrating the hundredth annivesary of his birth. Which is something of a testament not only to his talent but to the power of the technology--radio and records--that he played an important role in popularizing.

LEARN TO CROON: MY DAY ON THE RUE DE VALLEE PT. 2

So there I am, standing in my parents house with a letter addressed to me from Rudy Vallee. I recall my mother coming in the room and saying--as if nothing before in her life had ever been quite so strange--"Raymond...did you get a letter from Rudy Vallee?" I opened it, preparing for another cold blast of rejection in my face, perhaps this time adding a threat to unleash his lawyers on me if I ever bothered him again.

Instead the handwritten note read in its entirety: "Dear Mr. De Felitta, Give me a call. Rudy." Then he printed his, as previously mentioned, already listed telephone number. I called and a woman answered this time, quite cheerily proclaiming: "Rudy Vallee's house!" (I believe this was his wife, Eleanor). I asked to speak to him and in short order there he was. I explained that I was the fellow who wrote to him about his house. Brusquely, but a bit more cordially this time, he said: "If you want to see the house come by Sunday, late morning." Then he hung up, sans formal goodbye.

When I pulled into the estate's driveway that Sunday morning, I found that the Vallee's had something of an open-house going on. People were playing tennis, lounging around the pool etc. and I was immediately directed toward a man named Tommy (can't remember what his last name was). Casting wise, Tommy was sort of a Bill Demarest part; he was a part-time Vallee friend/employee/guy who handles stuff...oh, let's call a spade and spade. Tommy was Rudy Vallee's stooge, some guy who he'd met in his travels and who he kept around precisely to deal with peons like myself. There was something so nice and old-fashioned about Rudy Vallee still having a stooge hanging around that I wasn't in the least bit offended that the master didn't seem to have any plans to meet me personally.

Tommy gave me a thorough tour of the house (it was really quite a place and deserves a good long description but I won't be the one to give it. Interested readers should consult the penultimate chapter of Vallee's "Let The Chips Fall", previously published as "My Time Is Your Time", subsequently published as "Rudy Vallee Kisses and Tells"...Christ, why did he keep changing the title anyway?) (Also: interested readers should know that the house, which once sprawled over a mountaintop off Mulholland Drive near Outpost Canyon and could be seen from quite far away, was purchased by Arsenio Hall after Vallee's death who promptly tore it down and didn't bother to replace it with anything).

The tour took me into the notorious Vallee Archive located in a massive building built into a hillside, on the roof of which was a championship sized tennis court. Rudy Vallee, it seems, was a saver and housed in this building was just about everything he ever did--recordings, photos, tapes, films, programs, letters--even a strange collection of Christmas cards from various show biz figures dating back to the 1930's. It was only after I'd finished there, and we were exiting that we almost accidently bumped into Rudy Vallee while leaving the building. Tommy introduced me. We shook hands and he seemed disinterested in the fact that I was probably a good bit younger then he may have guessed. I immediately launched into a spiel on how great he was in "Unfaithfully Yours", half expecting him to throw up his hands in disgust at my mention of something "nostalgic". Instead he was quite flattered and we spent a pleasant few minutes talking about Preston Sturges, with Vallee insisting that "The Palm Beach Story" (which he was also in) was a much better movie. (This was certainly the prevailing wisdom of the day--since TPBS was a hit and UY was not. Now I suspect the latter to be the more beloved. Though choosing any one Preston Sturges movie over another is really a bit pointless).

On my way out I thanked Tommy and told him that, while I was grateful for the tour, I had really come to meet the legend of the house. Tommy completely understood and gave me a somewhat awestruck speech about how much Vallee had done in his life, who he was historically and how amazing it was that he was still walking the earth. I remember him calling Vallee a "monument". Then he said, "Send him something. A gift or something saying thanks. He likes that. I'll make sure to get you back in." Which I took to mean that Tommy understood I wanted a little more face time. So I did as Tommy suggested. And I'll tell that tale in the next and final Rudy post.

Below is a beautifully staged production number from "Sweet Music", featuring Rudy and Ann Dvorak. This was shot in 1935 and, although Vallee was a major radio star at the time, this did nothing to enhance his screen career which arrived DOA courtesy of his disastrous 1929 debut in "The Vagabond Lover". It should have, though--Rudy is in fine form below and the film, which I've never seen, looks mighty stylish.

LEARN TO CROON: MY DAY ON THE RUE DE VALLEE PT. 1

Does anyone remember the huge fuss made in newspapers around the world in the early 1970's when the scandal broke that a faded star of yesteryear-- singer Rudy Vallee--desired to change the name of the street he lived on (Pyramid Place in the Hollywood Hills) to Rue De Vallee? A Congressman or somesuch who was in hot water at the time sought to shift the focus away from his current misdeeds by vigorously claiming that Vallees' ego-driven desire to commemorate himself via a street being named after him would cost taxpayers millions of dollars. When the storm broke, poor Rudy Vallee got more press than he'd had in years--all of it negatively directed toward him. Alas Vallee's "karma", if you will, led him into this nest of snakes--he'd been difficult and testy and quite seriously rude to people for many years prior. Furthermore, Vallee had ambivalent feelings about his youthful fame and aging ignominy--I suspect more than a few people were confused by the crotchety, aging celebrity's odd habit of complaining bitterly about not being properly remembered and then, IN HIS VERY NEXT BREATH, telling fans not to bother him with their silly questions. Gracious, Rudy Vallee wasn't. Or at least not in a typical sense; for if one can get used to the hair-trigger temperment shifts of any star (and God knows I've worked with a few and had to deal with it)...(and God knows also that, whatever else he was by the 1970's, Rudy Vallee was still a STAR) one can see that Rudy wasn't really all that difficult to understand or deal with. He just needed a little love.

I refer to him familiarly since I had an exceedingly odd but very interesting encounter with the by then 81 year old crooner in 1982. Here's what happened: growing up in Hollywood, I became interested in who, from the "Golden Age", might still be around and accessible. (George Burns was around but heavily protected by management. Others could only be glimpsed at the Hillcrest Country Club or similar environs). One day, somehow, I found out that Rudy Vallee was listed in the phone book. The phone book! Imagine? If you'd put Franklin D. Roosevelt's name in its place I couldn't have been more surprised. The very sight of his name--it even looks like it exists in its period, the late twenties--thrilled me. And of course the fact that he was listed meant, obviously, that he was welcoming people to reach out to him. I wasted no time (I was sixteen) in doing so. I called. He picked up the phone. His voice was gravelly and yet I could tell by the accent that it was him. "Mr. Vallee?", I squeaked. "Yes!", he barked. "You don't know me" (always a lame beginning) "but I'm very interested in nostalgia..." Bad word choice I guess. Suddenly the gravelly old voice on the other end responded: "Oh you are? Well I'm certainly not!" And the bastard hung up on me.

Score: one Rudy, zip Raymond. But I couldn't let this go. I had just read his hysterically pompous (and highly indiscreet) autobiography "Let The Chips Fall" and I was fascinated that this man from an era so long dead and gone (and the twenties, I'm sure some will agree, feel even further away than other era's that pre-date it--the twenties somehow feel like they maybe never really happened)--this man who literally invented "crooning" and was the first coast to coast radio star was alive. And well. And accessible by phone. Even if he was a jerk who hung up on fans.

I should also mention that Rudy Vallee lived in an elaborate old Hollywood mansion off of Mulholland Drive, not far from where I grew up. He was literally around the corner. I decided to write him a letter, choosing not to mention his career (or our unfortunate prior phone conversation) at all. Using his obsessions, as they are laid out, in "Let The Chips Fall" as my guide I knew of three to pick from: 1) Women, 2) Drinking and 3) His house. Since I did not yet know what I know now about the first two, I decided to tell him that I admired his house and wished to see it. (This had the happy fortune of also being true) The letter went out in the next post and only a few days later, getting home from school (I was in eleventh grade at the time) I discovered a letter with a familiar return address waiting for me. (If I'm not mistaken it even had some sort of "My Time Is Your Time" logo or stamp on it). Rudy Vallee had written back to me. I opened the letter. And guess what he wrote back?

You'll have to wait for the next post to find out the enthralling finish to this story. You see, I've become quite interested in traffic stats on this site and I've decided to see if a cliffhanger like this will raise the number of page loads in any significant way. Movies Til Dawn hearby signs off, leaving you with a not very impressive appearence by Vallee in the 1929 Ziegfield picture "Glorifying The American Girl". But I'll be back...

"SINGIN' IN THE RAIN": THE BEGINNINGS

Obviously anyone reading this knows that "Singin' In The Rain"--the movie--is about the talking picture revolution that swept Hollywood in 1929. Furthermore I would bet that most of you reading are aware that the project came about as a result of producer Arthur Freed's desire to re-invigorate his old song catalogue--Freed was a popular tunesmith of the 1920's and early thirties along with his partner Nacio Herb Brown before becoming a producer at Metro. Betty Comden and Adolph Green's assignment was to simply cook up a way in which to jam ten or so Freed/Brown antiquities from twenty-five years earlier into a workable musical storyline. As they sardonically comment in an essay they wrote for the MGM Script Library introduction to the screenplay of "Singin' In The Rain" (and which is reprinted in the liner notes of the soundtrack CD) "...several possible stories suggested themselves. For instance, "The Wedding Of The Painted Doll" could well have been the basis for a story about a painted doll who got married." As you can tell, the assignment was a gloomy one for the writers--until the eureka notion came along of setting the whole thing in the exact period in which the songs were written. More importantly, Freed and Brown's songs were, for the most part, written for the earliest MGM musical films--"Broadway Melody of 1929" (which became the first talkie to win the best picture Oscar) and "Hollywood Revue Of 1929" as well. These films were at the vanguard of coming of sound era and thus it made a certain poetic sense to create a new story around them that involved the early talkie craze--the very reason the songs came into existence to begin with. Thus, the screenplay of "Singin' In The Rain" not only didn't remove the songs from their niche, it managed to solidify their position in it.

Below I've posted the first screen appearence of the song "Singin' In The Rain"--as introduced by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards in MGM's "Hollywood Revue of 1929". Never heard of Cliff Edwards? He was a major record and radio figure of the late twenties and early thirties and later the voice of "Jiminy Cricket" in Disney's "Pinnochio" (and thus the man who introduced "When You Wish Upon A Star"). Edwards was largely responsible for the ukelele fad of the 1920's and was, for a good many years, quite famous and beloved. Alas his star burned fast and his money burned even faster. Drink, drugs and divorces left him indigent. (This last sentence reminds me of my favorite line in Woody Allen's "Deconstructing Harry": "I blew everything I had on hookers, shrinks and lawyers.") Upon Edward's death in 1971, he was discovered by the Disney Company to have died in a welfare hospital in Hollywood. (They'd apparently been picking up his medical bills for the previous few years and helping him along). The body was to be donated to science, as with most unclaimed remains. Apparently Disney threw in for a proper funeral for the forgotten former star. (Which doesn't, to be perfectly honest, sound very Disney-esque--their corporate reputation has always been a brutal one--but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.) All very sad--especially given the fact that Edwards introduced two staples of the American Popular Songbook, songs that have both lived long past the times they were written during and which many kids still actually know, without having the faintest idea where they sprang from.

Technically, in the below clip, we're in the cinematic stone age with the cameras recording the not very well staged dance scene from a distance, implacably staring at the action and resolutely remaining as uninvolved and unenergized as possible. It's a little astonishing how mediocre the level of dance performance was here--and yet this was deemed acceptable for a big movie musical. (I don't think the chrous girls here would have cut it a couple of years down the line when Busby Berkeley got into business.) The Strobe effect toward the end, though, is reasonably mod-ish for the time and, along with Edwards, the three girl singers are quite pleasant as well; they're the Brox Sisters, one of whom later married the composer Jimmy Van Heusen--who wrote many hits for Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Which could lead us--if we're not careful--into one of those six degrees of seperation games with "Singin' At The Rain" at the center; how are Crosby and Sinatra and Gene Kelly and Jiminy Cricket all connected being the lead-off question?

SINGIN' IN THE RAIN PT.2--THE MYSTERY OF JIMMY THOMPSON

The second most easily overlooked number in "Singin' In The Rain" is, without a doubt, the "Beautiful Girl" fashion show. Unlike "Moses Supposes", though, this number probably could actually be removed without any real damage to the film. Still, though, it has a charm of it's own--the fashion show is silly and the commentary is intentionally unwitty in a very clever Comden-Green take on how those badly written commentaries that thought they were being clever actually sounded. And it features the mysterious Jimmy Thompson as the Rudy Vallee-esque lead singer and fashion show commentator.

Who the hell was/is Jimmy Thompson? His IMDB credits suggest some sort of relationship with Gene Kelly--his first credit is in the Kelly/Garland vehicle "Summer Stock" and, aside from "Singing In The Rain" his next biggest credit is in the deplorable Kelly/Minnelli version of "Brigadoon." He has a handful of other MGM credits which suggests that he may have been under contract and the liner notes in the "Singin' In The Rain" CD refer to him as Kelly's "protege." Did his opportunites vanish as Kelly's stock at MGM sunk after "Brigadoon" and "Invitation To The Dance"? Perhaps he and Kelly had a falling out? The internet is unhelpful on anything other than the above short-list of credits. In 1971 he turns up in a movie called "U-Turn" playing the "old ferry driver". How old could he have been? He appears no more than thirty in the below clip which would have made him fifty at the time of his last credit. To a forty-three year old like myself, fifty is a little soon to be playing a role like "old ferry driver". Anyone with any Jimmy Thompson-iana is cordially invited to fill in this gap in my cinematic education. If there is some sort of record for the most watched actor who appeared in the least amount of films, Jimmy Thompson must be right up there at the top of the list.

"Beautiful Girl" is also worth noting as being one of several pastiche numbers in "Singin' In The Rain"--"Fit As A Fiddle" is another as is the "All I Do Is Dream Of You" where Debbie Reynolds jumps out of the cake (also below posted). It's interesting to note that the film uses these pastiche numbers sparingly--in an effort to evoke the era rather than define the reality of the story. When the movie takes the songs seriously as "book" material, it treats them as full-tilt up to date 1952 orchestral pieces. Thus other twenties tunes like "Good Morning" and "You Are My Lucky Star" and even "Broadway Melody" sound entirely up-to-date and somehow don't clash at all with the campier treatments accorded the others. Clearly a decision on Kelly and Donen's part (and Arthur Freed's? Lennie Hayton's?) which helped keep the film from feeling campy (a la "Thoroughly Modern Millie") but nonetheless firmly rooted it in the 1920's.

"SINGIN' IN THE RAIN": BACKSTAGE AT A BACKSTAGE STORY

Allow me to plug a very nice CD of the soundtrack of the movie "Singin' In The Rain." It's nothing new--it was actually produced ten years ago--but I found it while on a buying spree at the Virgin Megastore in West Hollywood (everything is 30 percent off seeing how they "lost their lease" which is, I imagine, code for: "why rent space when we can sell all this crap on line?"). It contains not only all the musical numbers from the film but all (or most of) the background cues (with titles like: "Dignity" and "Have Lunch With Me"). Furthermore it has a few fascinating extras--an alternate main title theme (instead of using "You Are My Lucky Star" it concentrates on "Singing In The Rain" proper), a rehearsal version of "Beautiful Girl" being sung by Gene Kelly and Jimmie Thompson accompanied by Lennie (Mr. Lena Horne) Hayton on the piano...and finally, a complete version of Kelly singing "All I Do Is Dream Of You" which was cut from the finished film.

When you divorce the image from the soundtrack of an iconic film like "Singin' In The Rain" a couple of strange things happen. For one, I found that I could envision a great deal more of the movie--shot by shot--than I would have imagined. In fact, it was almost impossible not to picture what was happening on screen while listening to the soundtrack. (I have a similar experience when listening to recordings of Fred Astaire dancing--I can see him). Another somewhat more profound realization sets in after a period of "image deprivation": you begin to grapple with the reality of the backbreaking labor involved in the assembly of a movie like this. The MGM Studio Orchestra--sixty or so top LA musicians of the day--are sitting there reading charts of elaborate arrangements written by a number of different guys who were, in the rarefied world of orchestrators, tops in their field in their day although unknown, by and large, to anyone but musicians; names like Bob Franklyn (he did the "Beautiful Girl" and "Singing In The Rain" arrangements), Wally Heglin ("Good Morning" and the "All I Do Is Dream Of You" at the party where Reynolds meets Kelly), Conrad Salinger ("Make 'Em Laugh" and the massive "Broadway Melody" ballet, along with Lennie Hayton). These guys were probably pulling all-nighters trying to bang these endless and byzantine charts out and one can only imagine the recording sessions themselves as being fraught with comments, concerns and on the spot rewrites. The liner notes of the CD provide an interesting explaination of how the recordings for the musical numbers in MGM movies were actually accomplished. What the hell. I'll quote it:

"Until the mid-1950's MGM musical performances were recorded through several microphones placed strategically throughout the scoring stage each creating discrete recordings called "angles" that captured the vocals as well as the different sections of the orchestra. Each "angle" was then edited, using portions of many different takes of each song or score piece. Finally the edited vocal and orchestral angles were mixed to monaural composite tracks, called "comps" for final use in the film."

It gives you a headache just thinking about it.

What I'm getting at is the INDUSTRY involved in piecing this movie together--and the fact that the final result would remain pretty much a mystery, due to the filmmaking process itself, until the very end of the process. This was due to the organic nature by which the process of the creation of the film unfolded; first the choreographer (in this case Kelly) had to devise a dance routine. This necessarily trial and error process would be done along with a pianist/arranger--in this case either Lennie Hayton or Conrad Salinger--working out the dance arrangement along with Kelly. The piano track would be recorded for playback purposes on set--perhaps it was during this time that the orchestrators came in and started actually creating the full score. (Though, on second thought, I doubt it. They probably waited until the final cut of the film was arrived at so as not to have to unnecessarily rewrite the orchestrations due to cuts in the numbers). Furthermore, although the movie was shot in color the dailies (or the "rushes" as they were then called) were projected in black and white. So for most of the shooting period of "Singing In the Rain", the creators were watching some of the most famous production numbers ever filmed for the first time...in black and white silence. Nerve wracking as this must have been it also allowed for a triumphant moment that anybody whose work in film predates the use of video and computers (I'm dating myself here) remembers well: the FIRST ANSWER PRINT, where the formerly sloppy film suddenly bursts from the screen, polished like a gem with colors ablazing. Only at the mix, however, would the full effect of the soundtrack--with those lush orchestral backgrounds--finally be slotted into place, the last piece of the puzzle.

With so much to choose from in "Singing In The Rain" it's almost impossible to pick one number to post. (One of the extraordinary things about the film is that each number manages to top the previous one so that I occasionally forget about the very existence of a specific number until the next time I see the film). To me the one that most frequently gets lost amongst the glitter that surrounds it is the breathless "Moses Supposes". So here 'tis...

"KING OF JAZZ"--PRETTY GOOD FOR A WHITE MAN

Happy New Year. As I was saying before we were so rudely interrupted by the end of year holiday weekend: "King Of Jazz", a Universal musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman's orchestra from 1930, has little to do with jazz but contains some remarkable imagery and a handful of gem-like musical performances (see the Crosby post 12/26 with the Rhythm Boys) and is, one way or another, essential viewing for anyone interested in what the state of the art of music and cinema was during the 1920's and early 30's. It might be viewed, in fact, as something of a companion piece to Paul Fejos' remarkable "Broadway" (see my 9/12 and 9/13 posts) shot earlier in 1929 (or perhaps late '28) and using some of the same over the top camera work, sets and effects. Some sources cite Fejos as an uncredited co-director on "King Of Jazz"--this could very well be the case as the credited director, the stage impresario John Murray Andersen, had never before made a movie (and never would again) and it would stand to reason that the camera-savvy Fejos might have been thought by Universal to be necessary as a form of "insurance". Additionally both films were made for Universal in the two-color technicolor process, of which more in a few paragraphs.

Fortunately, "King Of Jazz" has been more or less available over the years--unlike so many of the era's similar pictures which were sloppily treated, oftentimes flat-out discarded and are now considered "lost" ("Gold Diggers of Broadway" being the holy grail of these films; only a piece of the final remarkable reel of this film is extant). Unfortunately when "King Of Jazz" was originally released it was a commercial disappointment and, in the ensuing years, a number of sketches and musical numbers were edited out of it in preparation for a re-issue that eventually happened in 1934. It is this cut that has, for the most part, been in circulation over the years though the full print is extant. (An enterprising youtuber has posted the entire film in ten or so parts--I've yet to watch this version to see if it's the uncut one). The cut material included some songs that were dropped because they apparently offended the standards of the Production Code which had imposed itself in the years between the films making and its reissue and others because they already appeared dated just a few years after the film was made. Though the truth is I can't imagine a frame of "King Of Jazz"--which is a very 1920's production in conception, taste and pacing--not appearing quite seriously outdated to a 1934 audience. There is, after all, a somewhat staggering difference between a musical of the 1929/1930 era and the rejuvenated musicals which began pouring out of Warner Brothers just two to three years later. The pace of the dialogue and the better acting aside, the songs were integrated--for the most part--and the shooting techniques were markedly more sophisticated. (Just try watching, say, "Rio Rita" from 1929 next to, say, "Forty Second Street" from just three years hence and you'll think they were made in different centuries). I'm not sure what the 1934 audience thought of "King Of Jazz" but I'll bet my spot on the breadline that they wished they were watching "Dames" or "Dancing Lady".

Below I've posted the quite remarkable "Rhapsody In Blue" sequence from "King Of Jazz". It is abridged I believe--it runs under ten minutes and most recordings of the Rhapsody are double that--but I can't quite hear what's been cut. Is it possible they just play it faster? It features Roy Bargy playing the piano part--and quite a good job of it he does--but the real star is the giant prop piano that appears to be made out of marzipan. Again, these oversize props were a staple of the period (see my Laurel&Hardy Xmas day posting of the complete "Brats") and I can't imagine what the soundstages of these movies must have actually looked like. The "Rhapsody" prop piano is large enough to hold the entire Whiteman orchestra under it's lid--and this doesn't appear to be an in-camera superimposition.

"King Of Jazz" also features several important firsts--it was, apparently, the first musical to use pre-recorded music and have the musicians mime to play-back. This was due to Whiteman's insistance that the quality of the recording had to be better than what was currently the standard in musicals--for some reason this entirely reasonable and correct idea was a major source of friction between him and Universal and, of course, once he won the battle everyone immediately saw how silly and unnecssarily limiting it was recording the music the old way, live on the set. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the film was shot in the early two strip technicolor process--using only red and green filters. This led to some pretty strange effects which time has not helped--the film currently has a sickly green tone to it that looks something like a Ted Turner colorization attempt gone sour. Read this link if you want to know more about the travails of the technicolor process.I can barely understand it, much less summarize it for you. I've also posted a sequence in which Whiteman introduces the band--on view are the legendary Joe Venuti (violin) and Eddie Lange, a great and innovative jazz guitarist who died--the victim of a botched tonsillectomy--only three years after being captured here forever on celluloid.