Day 2 – Friday

A surprise hit on Friday was Two Living, One Dead (1961), a British picture so utterly obscure that it was barely released even in the UK. It didn’t show up in the States until 1963, and it wasn’t reviewed by the New York Times or Variety — and in those days, as now, Variety reviewed everything. And yet it has a solid pedigree: It was co-written and directed by Anthony Asquith, the son of Britain’s World War I prime minister whose other movies included Pygmalion (1938), The Browning Version (’51), The Importance of Being Earnest (’52), The V.I.P.s (’63) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (’64). It starred Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers (already popular stars and later best known for playing Joy and George Adamson in Born Free [’65]) and Patrick McGoohan, later of TV’s Danger Man (Secret Agent in the US) and The Prisoner.

The movie was actually a remake of two even more obscure pictures, A Dead Man Among the Living (Czechoslovakia, 1947) and 1937’s To levende og en død from Norway, home of Sigurd Christiansen, author of the 1931 novel on which all three pictures were based. The premise is simple: Two masked robbers hold up a local post office; the manager resists and is shot dead, another man winds up knocked unconscious, and the third (McGoohan) cooperates, turning over the office’s funds to the robbers and coming out of the incident unscathed. He behaves, in fact, exactly as authorities nowadays tell us anyone in that situation should do. In that time and place, however (meaning Norway in 1931, if not 1961 Britain), the man is condemned, even by the police, as a coward. His son is bullied at school, he loses his job, his marriage hits the rocks — even as his co-worker’s widow wishes her dead-hero husband had been similarly “cowardly”. This social pariah eventually strikes up a friendship with a man who turns out to have been one of the robbers — and who proves to him that he displayed the better part of valor. But is it too late for him to put his life back together?

Two Living, One Dead is a razor-sharp British noir, suspenseful, thoughtful and thought-provoking, with excellent performances. If you weren’t in Columbus for this screening, good luck ever finding it…anywhere.

There were other pleasures on the bill on Friday: Exclusive (1937), a crusading-newspaper melodrama from director Alexander Hall starring Fred MacMurray, Charlie Ruggles, Lloyd Nolan and Frances Farmer (at the height of her sadly truncated career); The Scarlet Car (1917), one of only a handful of Lon Chaney’s early pictures that has survived to the present day; another Laurel and Hardy short, Towed in a Hole (1932), in which the boys are fishmongers who decide to invest in their own fishing boat, with the usual mayhem ensuing.

But the biggest event of the day — indeed, the most eagerly awaited screening of the whole weekend — was Where’s Charley? (1952). This is arguably the greatest movie musical you can’t see, and the fact that you can’t see it is nothing less than a crime against popular culture. But more on that in a moment.

Where’s Charley? was a Broadway musical adaptation of Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt, the granddaddy (grandmama?) of all cross-dressing comedies. The show streamlined Thomas somewhat, combining Charley Wykeham and Fancourt Babberly (who is dragooned into masquerading as Charley’s aunt from Brazil, “where the nuts come from”) into one character. Playing Charley, in drag and out, was Ray Bolger, just about the greatest comic dancer America has ever produced (his performance as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, even his extended dance to “If I Only Had a Brain”, hardly begins to do justice to his talent). The show was a personal triumph for Bolger and ran 792 performances on Broadway at a time when anything over 300 qualified as a smash hit.

In 1952 Jack Warner — at the beginning of his penchant for faithfully filming Broadway musicals (The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, Gypsy, The Music Man, My Fair Lady, 1776) — transferred Where’s Charley? to the screen pretty much intact, directed by David Butler and choreographed by Michael Kidd in his movie debut. The movie was another hit, fondly remembered by all who saw it, and Ray Bolger’s own favorite of all his film appearances. Then it disappeared from public view.

The problem was Frank Loesser, whose score for Where’s Charley? was his first Broadway score and his first solo effort. He didn’t like it, certainly not in comparison to his later works: Guys and Dolls (1950), the movie Hans Christian Andersen (1952), The Most Happy Fella (1956), How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961). Loesser died in 1969, before Warner Bros.’ 20-year lease on the Where’s Charley? score expired, but he made it clear that he didn’t want the lease renewed, and his widow Jo Sullivan Loesser (who according to some reports never liked the movie much anyway) has respected his wishes to this day. (Although, as Richard Roberts observes in his program notes for this screening, neither Frank nor Jo Loesser were too embarrassed or too proud to pocket the small fortune in royalties for “Once in Love with Amy”, the show’s breakout hit.)

We can only hope that Jo Loesser and her late husband’s other heirs will relent before the original film elements to Where’s Charley? have crumbled to dust (if it’s not already too late for that). Until that day, we must content ourselves with the occasional print like the one that screened at Cinevent this year. It was not, alas, a Technicolor print, but a 16mm rental print struck off in the 1950s in the notoriously unstable Eastman process; there was still color present thanks to decades of cold storage, but it had already shifted to orange, on its inexorable march to beet-red, then lemonade-pink, before in time fading away to nothing. (I’ve been informed that, unlike these American Eastman prints, rental prints in England were struck in real Technicolor, which never fades. I imagine if one of those prints ever finds its way into the market, the owners can pretty much set their own price.) Orange color or no, this was a rare opportunity to see Where’s Charley? filmed right on the grounds of Oxford University where Brandon Thomas’s play takes place, with Michael Kidd at the beginning of his career and Ray Bolger at the height of his, recreating one of Broadway’s legendary performances. And yes, the audience all sang along with “Once in Love with Amy”.

Where’s Charley? was the highlight of the day, but the rest of the program wasn’t exactly an anticlimax. There was Professional Sweetheart (1933), Ginger Rogers’s first starring vehicle (and in that Pre-Code year, parading her in a more revealing array of lingerie than moviegoers would ever see again); and the day wound up with Man Made Monster (1941, reissued in 1953 as The Atomic Monster), a Universal variation on Frankenstein with a sympathetic performance by Lon Chaney Jr. midway between his breakout role as Lennie in Of Mice and Men (1939) and his iconic turn as The Wolf Man (’41).

On Saturday it would be cartoons, a feature from producer George Pal, and a restoration of a semi-lost Laurel and Hardy classic. But I’ll get to that next time.

To be continued…

Scroll down to see, if you haven’t seen it already, my two-part tribute to Universal Pictures’ King of Jazz (1930). This epilogue is for the benefit of Cinedrome readers who live within traveling distance of Sacramento, Calif. I’ve got big news, and the news is this:

The February 22 screening at Sacramento’s Tower Theatre is ON!

Kudos to the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society for sponsoring this screening. They’re not only bringing this brilliant restoration of a truly one-of-a-kind historic picture to Sacramento audiences, but they’re stealing a march on San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and every other city on the West Coast except Los Angeles (where KOJ screened at Cinecon in September). This is a real feather in Sacramento’s cap — and in the Jazz Society’s.

I urge anybody who can make their way to the Tower at the corner of Broadway and Land Park Drive in Sacramento by 7:00 p.m. on the 22nd of next month to nail their tickets down right away — seating is limited, and it may be a while before the inevitable Blu-ray makes its way to market. It seems that clearing the music rights to all the songs used in King of Jazz is proving quite a challenge; unlike MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount and other studios, Universal never had their own music company. And besides, in 1930 nobody foresaw the need to secure video — or even television — rights. Somehow this issue didn’t arise when Universal issued their “bastard” VHS version in the 1980s, but it’s here now: the rights have drifted off into the (possibly unknowing) hands of diverse relatives, survivors and heirs and are proving quite a can of worms to track down.

Theatrical rights, however, are another matter, of course — Universal secured those in perpetuity back in 1930, and they’ve guarded them closely ever since. (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art walked into a humiliating buzzsaw back in 1970 when they announced a screening of an incomplete print borrowed from a private collector without securing the necessary rights. Universal lowered the boom, the egg-faced Museum had to back down, and the thing only blew over when they offered to surrender the print to the Library of Congress. The hapless collector was out of luck.)

Fortunately, there’ll be no such problem at the Jazz Society’s upcoming benefit screening. They’ve secured rights, and in fact Mike Daruty, NBCUniversal’s Senior V.P. for Global Media Operations, is tentatively scheduled to join us all at the Tower and introduce the picture.

So spare no effort and do yourselves a favor: Get your ticket(s) now, either by clicking on the link above to the Jazz Society’s home page, or by clicking here to go directly to their ticket site. King of Jazz may have been a financial debacle for Universal back in the day, but believe me, of all the studio revues of the early sound era, there isn’t another one that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath. And in its newly restored form, it certainly doesn’t look like an 86-year-old movie.

I hope I’ve persuaded you; the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society is doing a tremendous public service by sponsoring this screening, and they deserve to benefit to the max from it. Meanwhile, here are another couple of links for your enjoyment and edification:

A YouTube post of My Pal Paul, a black-and-white Walter Lantz cartoon produced by Universal as a cross-promotion; and

A Vimeo clip with a three-minute trailer for the picture. Unfortunately, it’s from a 16mm print with badly faded color; trust me, the picture looks much better now (and for that matter, it sounds better too, with a cleaned-up monaural soundtrack). This link is generously provided by my friend Matías at Matías Bombal’s Hollywood.

If John Murray Anderson had been on board from the get-go, and if production had begun promptly once Paul Whiteman was signed in October 1928, King of Jazz might have caught the crest of the studio-revue wave as talkies came in, instead of sinking in the undertow as the wave rolled out. At the very least, the picture’s astronomical costs would have been only a fraction of what they were — even with Technicolor and Herman Rosse’s spectacular sets (which won him an Oscar for 1929-30). That in turn would have made King of Jazz‘s profit threshold a lot lower; in all likelihood, the picture would have cost less and earned more. But such was not to be. King of Jazz’s big splash turned into a belly-flop, and it sank like a rock.

And that might have been the end of it, had it not been for something that almost nobody in 1930 foresaw: Bing Crosby became a star. In King of Jazz he got only seventh billing — and at that, not even by name, but as one of the Rhythm Boys (with Al Rinker and Harry Barris), the scat-singing piano and vocal trio that toured as members of Whiteman’s band. If anybody had been making predictions at the time, they probably would have picked Harry Barris as the one who was going places. But instead it was Bing, first on records, then radio, finally in movies with 1932’s The Big Broadcast at Paramount (where they wasted no time putting him under contract). He wasn’t yet the national institution he would become (and remain to his dying day), but he was definitely hot, and his popularity was a factor in Universal’s decision to reissue King of Jazz in June 1933. (Another factor was the return of musicals to audience favor in the wake of 42nd Street, Footlight Parade and Gold Diggers of 1933 over at Warner Bros.)

This reissue was a substantially different movie from the one audiences saw (or more often, didn’t see) in 1930. The order of the sequences was changed and the running time slashed from 104 minutes to 65. Production numbers were shortened, at least one whole song eliminated (“I’d Like to Do Things for You”, sung by pert little Jeanie Lang to Paul Whiteman, then reprised by William Kent and Grace Hayes, then again by the dance act Nell O’Day and the Tommy Atkins Sextet). All but one of the comedy blackouts were cut, while three that had been shot in 1930 but never used were added. Bing’s appearances with the Rhythm Boys were all retained, of course, and he was given star billing in a new set of opening credits.

Also substantially different had been the foreign market versions of King of Jazz that had played overseas during 1930 and ’31. The United Kingdom got the same picture as the U.S., but foreign language versions dispensed with all the comedy blackouts and added new introductions for the musical selections, shot with native-speaking hosts in Spanish, Czech, Hungarian (one of the hosts here was the as-yet-unknown Bela Lugosi), Swedish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French and Japanese.

So let’s recap: By the end of 1933, there had been a total of some 11 distinctly different versions of King of Jazz (or El Rey del Jazz, Král jazzu, Der Jazzkönig, La Féerie du Jazz, Kingu Obu Jazu, etc.) playing somewhere on the globe at one time or another. This confusing plethora of source material would present quite a challenge 80-plus years later, when NBCUniversal undertook to restore the picture in 2015.

But first would come decades of obscurity — partly because, while movie musicals managed to regain favor with audiences, revues never did, and partly because Technicolor’s perfecting of their three-strip process in 1934 rendered King of Jazz‘s two-strip Tech obsolete (and, in the eyes of the Technicolor Corp., a bit of an embarrassment). King of Jazz was never released on 16mm for non-theatrical markets, nor was it in any of the packages released to television — the customary routes for movies to find their way into the underground world of film collecting. Among movie buffs the picture gained the status of wistful legend, a movie that few could remember seeing, nobody could even guess at where or how to find, and only trivia connoisseurs had ever even heard of. By 1954, it was commonly assumed that nothing survived but the picture’s trailer.

Then in the 1960s bits and pieces began surfacing here and there, snippets unearthed at various archives and distribution centers. There was even a “reconstruction” in 1965 that managed to combine a mute copy of the image from the French La Féerie du Jazz with soundtrack discs from the Czech Král jazzu. That was no doubt a strange animal indeed — but it was the only King of Jazz anybody knew about.

That is, until a nearly-complete nitrate print surfaced in the late ’60s, a print whose origins are still a little cloudy. One story, probably apocryphal, claimed that it was found among Benito Mussolini’s effects after his execution in 1945, and it was known in some quarters as “the Mussolini print”. But that’s hardly likely; if Mussolini had anything, it surely would have been Il re de jazz.

In 1968, British broadcaster and film collector Philip Jenkinson gained access to this “Mussolini” print and made his own dupe negative from it, which he used to strike 16mm prints for discreet trading among collectors. As additional footage became available (and Jenkinson did have his connections), this version grew from 88 to 95 minutes by 1975.

Finally, long story short — again, pick up James Layton and David Pierce’s book for the full fascinating story — Universal licensed King of Jazz for selected festival screenings, and they made preservation elements from the original nitrate camera negative, which miraculously survived in the studio’s vault (albeit only in the 65 min. reissue version; cuts had been made in the original negative and all the trims discarded). The picture was released to cable TV in March 1983, and on VHS cassette later that year.

It’s this VHS version that has been in circulation for 33 years (never available on DVD except in various bootlegs), and on which my own fondness for King of Jazz has always rested. (The picture here, and the shot of the Russell Markert Girls in Part 1, are frame-caps from it.) Now I learn that this was (in Layton and Pierce’s words) “a bastardized version…a mishmash of the 1930 and 1933 releases compiled to create the longest possible cut.” And at that, it still runs only 91 minutes.

Worse, the Universal home video department, in a (possibly) well-intended but (definitely) misguided effort to make the color more natural-looking to modern audiences, tinkered with the two-strip Tech — e.g., cranking up the blue, a color to which the process was blind. You can see it in this picture.

(As an aside, this kind of thing was common in those early days of home video, though it never sparked the outrage that attended the colorizing of black-and-white movies, since people had nothing to compare it to. Case in point: Warner Bros.’ Mystery of the Wax Museum. That one was long believed lost until a 35mm nitrate print surfaced in 1969 — by some reports, in Jack L. Warner’s private collection. I saw that print projected in a Midnight Halloween screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1970. The palette was limited, of course, but the color was delicately gorgeous, a far cry from the pallid, harsh, high-contrast image on every video release I’ve ever seen. Those releases all derive from the print I saw, the only one in existence, and I’m here to tell you they’re all absolutely wrong.)

The source material used for that VHS release of King of Jazz was highly variable, and some of it was pretty badly battered, with high contrast and washed-out color. In restoring the picture, NBCUniversal reviewed 16 different surviving picture elements of varying lengths, ultimately using four of them and coordinating with a complete 104 minute copy of the original soundtrack. I was going to scan some of the images from the restoration (as published in Layton and Pierce’s book) and post them here with frame-caps from the VHS for comparison, but there’s an even more dramatic demonstration available at the Two-Strip Technicolor site on Tumblr. Click on the link to see before-and-after crossfades from the VHS to the digital restoration (including the image immediately above).

Seen today — and I speak, of course, from familiarity with the “bastardized” VHS release — King of Jazz remains an embarrassment of riches. Some, admittedly, are richer than others, while some are chiefly of historical interest as examples of the kind of comedy and novelty performances that died with vaudeville. Several of the more impressive set pieces — for example, “My Bridal Veil”, a pageant of wedding attire from different historical eras from the 1550s to the 1920s, and “Rhapsody in Blue” itself — are film versions of shows John Murray Anderson staged for Paramount Publix Theatres. As such, they are of keen interest to those of us who know about such prologues only from what we can see in Footlight Parade. To see these extravaganzas in the flesh must really have been a knockout; to see them now in Technicolor is a real trip in the time machine.

It must be said that the movie gives short shrift to the African American contribution to the birth and development of true jazz — a contribution that was, of course, commanding, overwhelming and absolutely dominant. In the picture’s spectacular finale, “The Melting Pot of Music”, the roots of American popular music are traced to influences from England, Italy, Scotland, Germany, Ireland, Spain, Russia, and France. Conspicuous by their absence are elements from anywhere other than the continent of Europe — nothing from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean or Native America. But King of Jazz is a product of its time, and it never pretends to be an analytical documentary. It’s best that we judge not, lest we be judged and found wanting 90 years hence. Within the limits of its day and time, King of Jazz is a sumptuous spectacle and an impressive achievement.

Made even more impressive, one trusts and evidence suggests, in the new digital restoration so lovingly chronicled in King of Jazz: Paul Whiteman’s Technicolor Revue. As restored, the picture now runs 99 minutes; a few minutes, alas, seem irretrievably lost. Selected screenings are being scheduled worldwide, and a Blu-ray release must surely be on the table at some point. If you happen to be within driving distance of Cinedrome’s home in Sacramento, California, you may be in luck: A screening is tentatively scheduled (awaiting signing of contracts) for February 22, 2017 at Sacramento’s Tower Theatre, as a benefit for the Sacramento Traditional Jazz Society. Personally, I’m counting the days; I can hardly wait to finally see this movie I’ve always liked so much. (UPDATE 12/3/16: The February 22 screening at the Tower Theatre is now confirmed. There will be one showing only, and tickets should become available around January 1. Watch this space for further details. — jl)