Songs in the Light, Part 2

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on by

Last time, when I talked about early-sound musicals being a “precious record of an industry in turmoil,” I didn’t mention the heartbreaking truth: the record is all too incomplete. We may have a more thorough sampling of the doodles of Leonardo Da Vinci than we do of movies made during the 1920s, and reading a roster of lost films can be like listening to the mournful tolling of a funeral bell: gone … gone … gone. Before talking about some of the movies mentioned in A Song in the Dark, I want to give a rueful nod to all the movie musicals made between 1927 and 1934 that neither I nor anyone else will ever be able to see.

Just for starters, there are My Man (1928) and Honky Tonk (1929), which might have given us a record of (respectively) Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker in their primes. And The Rogue Song, starring the great Metropolitan Opera baritone Lawrence Tibbett. Tibbett, whom Barrios calls “simply one of the best voices ever captured on a soundtrack” (the Vitaphone discs for the movie survive), was nominated for an Oscar for Rogue Song, but we’ll probably never know why.

Let one particular movie stand in for all the ones we’ve lost. In his book The Hollywood Musical, Ethan Mordden awarded the title of “Most Tantalizing Lost Film” to:

What’s tantalizing is that it isn’t completely lost. Just enough has surfaced to show us why it was a blockbuster hit, raking in a then-stratospheric $4,000,000 at the box office and, like Broadway Melody, spawning a succession of follow-ups — not exactly sequels or remakes, but simply repetitions of that magic title: just as MGM gave us Broadway Melodys in 1936, ’38 and ’40, so Warner Bros. trotted out some Gold Diggers in 1933, ’35, ’37 and in Paris.

 

As for the remnants of Gold Diggers of Broadway. We have guitar-strumming troubadour Nick Lucas introducing one of the movie’s two big hit songs, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” (the other hit, “Painting the Clouds with Sunshine,”  survives only on the Vitaphone disc), and a few scattered seconds here and there. Best and most tantalizing of all, we have all but the last 60 seconds of the finale, a spectacular production number that seems to have recruited every dancer in California, including some acrobatic dancers — one girl, then two boys — whom I wish I could single out by name. Whoever you were, kids, and wherever you are, well done.

The two-strip Technicolor looks a little faded — apparently, Technicolor dyes didn’t yet have the rock-solid permanence they would attain later on, after Herbert Kalmus perfected the process — but the look of the number is still impressive.

Let me rephrase that. It looks impressive now; in 1929 it must have looked astounding.

These frames are from the preservation print. The original nitrate footage (safely squirreled away, I hope, in a climate-controlled vault) may look better; it appears that modern technology is incapable of duplicating the look of what little two-strip Technicolor survives (in 1970 I saw the only existing nitrate Tech print of 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum; no video version has come close to duplicating the delicacy of those colors).

Technicolor’s original contracts with the studios stipulated that the color negative elements would remain the sole property of Technicolor Inc., although positive prints might remain in studio hands. Then, somewhere along the line (Barrios says it was in the early 1950s), Technicolor decided that all those old reels were simply relics of an early, imperfect product — and a fire hazard to boot — so they systematically set about destroying them. I even heard once that they simply chartered a boat, chugged out past the three-mile limit, and dumped millions of feet of film history into the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know if that’s true, but the rumor alone is an emblem of the state of film preservation circa 1953. Thanks for nothing, Technicolor; your dog-in-the-manger attitude assured that any examples we have of two-strip Technicolor — like the first feature, Toll of the Sea (1922), Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926) and Eddie Cantor’s Whoopee! (1930) — have survived by pure, blind accident. 

One musical on which I understand the negative has in fact survived is Follow Thru (1930), from the DeSylva-Brown-Henderson Broadway hit that included “Button Up Your Overcoat” and “I Want to Be Bad.” Considering that two-strip Tech’s forte was in the green-to-orange-to-red range, what could be more natural than a musical set on a golf course? And the UCLA Film and Television Archive’s restoration print looks and sounds great — much better than it does in this YouTube clip of Zelma O’Neal and a troupe of angel/devils singing and dancing “I Want to Be Bad,” but it’ll give you a flavor of the fun to be had.

If you live in the vicinity of Palo Alto, Calif. and would like to see how this scene (and the rest of Follow Thru) really looks, that UCLA print will be playing at the Stanford Theatre in downtown P.A. at the end of this month (May 26-28). It’s a real crowd-pleaser and the Stanford brings it back periodically. On the bill with it will be Wake Up and Live with Alice Faye and Jack Haley; they’re both worth the trip.

Others of these early Tech musicals survive in black and white, thanks to their sale to television in the late ’40s and early ’50s; b&w prints were struck off for broadcast and are now all that survives of them. I call these movies “half-lost,” but in fact it may be more than half. Case in point: On with the Show! (’29), an early backstage-clone of Metro’s Broadway Melody, and Warner Bros.’ first all-talking Technicolor musical. Harried producer Sam Hardy tries to hold his show together long enough to limp into New York for (hopefully) success on Broadway; along the way he contends with impatient creditors, bickering stars (Arthur Lake and Joe E. Brown), a temperamental leading lady (Betty Compson) and her sleazeball Lothario boyfriend (Wheeler Oakman) — and on top of all that, somebody robs the box office. The movie has its pleasures, including a persuasive backstage atmosphere, an engaging score, nifty comic dancing by Brown, and the great Ethel Waters (playing herself) introducing “Am I Blue?” and “Birmingham Bertha.” Liabilities too, chief among them shaky sound recording that renders much of the choral singing unintelligible, and befuddled little Sally O’Neil as the hat-check girl who becomes a star when the leading lady walks out. (Poor O’Neil had a winsome kewpie-doll face that made her a natural for silents, but a glass-scratching Noo Joizey twang that doomed her in talkies, starting here.)

 

 

How bad would those liabilities look today if we could see On with the Show! (a big $2.4-million hit) the way audiences did in 1929? No telling, but here’s a clue: on the left is a frame from a 30-second snippet of nitrate Technicolor footage that surfaced in 2005; beneath it is the same moment from the surviving b&w version, as it looked when broadcast on Turner Classic Movies in July 2009.

The color frame, remember, is nitrate stock, so there’s none of the color loss you’ll see in those frames from Gold Diggers or the Zelma O’Neal clip from Follow Thru. A glance from one frame to the other gives an inkling of what posterity lost when Technicolor decided its early work wasn’t worth bothering with. Of course, the glass is half full, too: if Warner Bros. hadn’t decided it was worth copying in b&w and selling to TV, we wouldn’t have On with the Show! at all.

I see I’m running a little long here, so I’ll close with another YouTube clip. I mentioned the “sublime pleasure” of Jeanette MacDonald singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in Monte Carlo. Well, here it is. Jeanette plays a runaway bride leaving her boring blueblooded twit of a fiance at the altar; she boards the train for Monaco convinced there must be something better than what she’s running away from. The clip is a ten-minute excerpt from Monte Carlo, but the money scene is the first 2 min. 36 sec. Between the driving locomotive rhythm and the soaring melody, there’s simply no getting this song out of your head. (UPDATE 9/1/16: Alas, that clip has gone dead now. Too bad, you don’t know what you’re missing; you’ll just have to track down Monte Carlo to find out. Meanwhile, if it surfaces again on YouTube I’ll include it here.)

Still more to say about these early musicals; I hope you’ll come back for Part 3.

Songs in the Light, Part 1

Jim Lane's Cinedrome Posted on by

Richard Barrios’s A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film has been one of the indispensible movie books ever since it came out in 1995. Now there’s a second edition and, no surprise, it’s just as indispensible as the first. Maybe more.

Barrios’s thesis was a bold one in ’95. Those early musicals, he said, weren’t simply the clumsy relics that time and advancing technique had made so embarrassing to look at today. (This may be the worst film ever to win a Best Picture Oscar sneered the L.A. Times, belittling The Broadway Melody several generations after the fact.) On the contrary, Barrios contended — and he proved his point beyond arguing — that they’re the precious record of an industry in turmoil, groping and struggling to invent a genre that had simply never existed before — and which in time would be viewed as the jewel in the crown of Golden Age Hollywood. And doing it all, moreover, not behind locked doors in secret trial-and-error experiments, but “in nearly full view of a vast, enthusiastic, and finally exasperated mass audience.” What is worth remembering about those early talkie-singie-dancies isn’t how primitive, naive and maladroit they look to us now, but how they electrified audiences at the time, and how much they still seem to get right — even if serendipity deserves the credit as often as deliberate intent.

 

Barrios says musicals were inevitable once sound came in, because they were the only thing silent movies couldn’t do. No doubt he’s exactly right; even Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and La Boheme had been successfully filmed in the silent era; who’s to say that couldn’t have continued indefinitely? But say — what if it was the other way around? What if it was musicals that made sound inevitable? Seems to me that’s at least as valid a point as vice versa. Barrios doesn’t come right out and say so, and he may not have meant to imply it, but it occurred to me that maybe the popularity of musicals — at least for those crucial first two-or-three years, before they became a drug on the market and had to be resuscitated by Busby Berkeley at Warner Bros. and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers at RKO — maybe that very popularity, at this delicate point when studios were teetering, trying to decide if sound was permanent or a passing fad, is the reason sound came in to stay. Surely it couldn’t have been because of Lights of New York (“Take him…for…a ride!“).

So did sound usher in musicals, or did musicals usher in sound? Chicken, egg. I don’t know; I guess you could argue either side of that one. The point is, I didn’t even think to frame the question before A Song in the Dark came along. That’s what makes it one of the indispensible books: it was a paradigm-shifter in 1995, and it still is. Once you’ve read it, you simply can’t look at those 1927-34 musicals the same way again. I’m grateful to Barrios for giving me a firm context for The Broadway Melody and saving me from making a public comment that’s as … well, let’s say “as lacking in nuance” … as the one quoted above from the L.A. Times.

Reading the second edition of ASITD, I get the distinct impression that it’s a substantially different book from the first one. (Alas, I lent out my first edition in 2004 and never got it back, so I can’t readily compare them side by side.) It’s an odd feeling, revisiting a book I remembered as just about perfect, and finding it distinctly different — yet, still, just about perfect.

Whatever changes Barrios has made in his text, one thing’s definitely different this time around: I’ve been able to see a lot more of the movies he writes about. Back in ’95, I had (at least) vols. 1-3 of George Feltenstein’s Dawn of Sound laserdisc collections, so I could check out Broadway Melody, Hollywood Revue of 1929, Sally (with Queen of Broadway Marilyn Miller), and King Vidor’s pioneering all-black Hallelujah!; I could even confirm that Golden Dawn is every inch the ghastly cringe-making fiasco Barrios said it was (and that’ll be enought of that, thank you!). And in the clips and excerpts, I saw enough of delightful Dorothy McNulty galvanizing the gang into “The Varsity Drag” in 1930’s Good News to make me wish they’d release the whole movie — or what survives of it — on its own (are you listening, Warner Archive?).

Otherwise, pickings could be pretty slim. Take the case of Rouben Mamoulian’s masterpiece Love Me Tonight. “Let it be stated plainly:” Barrios said, then and now, “Love Me Tonight is a wonderful film, one of the two or three greatest musicals ever made.” Hooray and amen! No joke and no exaggeration. But if you

wanted to see it in 1995, you’d better have a collector friend who owned a print, or a connection at one of the big film archives. Fortunately for me, I had the former, so I knew whereof Barrios spoke. By 2001, I had managed to get my hands on a decent 16mm reduction print of my own. Then, two years later, Kino Video made my print obsolete by (finally!) issuing a sparkling new DVD transfer. It was worth the wait, but for a movie as delightful, as flawless, and as historically important as Love Me Tonight, it’s a pity we had to wait at all.

In 1997, Universal, owners of the pre-1948 Paramount library, issued The Lubitsch Touch, a laserdisc box set that included, for appetites whetted by Barrios’s first edition, several of director Ernst Lubitsch’s seminal early-sound musicals, long out of circulation: The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, One Hour with You, The Smiling Lieutenant. As good as it is to read Barrios on Jeanette MacDonald singing “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in Monte Carlo, there’s no substitute for the sublime pleasure of the real thing. Ideally, we should have both; we can now, but we couldn’t in 1995.

What with Turner Classic Movies, Netflix, the Warner Archive and the Universal Vault, I’ve been able to season my reading of Barrios’s second edition by seeing movies I could only have dreamed of fifteen years ago: Chasing Rainbows, It’s a Great Life, Flying High, Love in the Rough, So This Is College, Sunny, So Long Letty, Rio Rita (1929), Lord Byron of Broadway, On with the Show!, Sweet Kitty Bellairs. Even The Great Gabbo is waiting impatiently at the top of my Netflix queue. (Frankly, I’m rather dreading that one — overtly obnoxious, Barrios says — but hey, if I can take Golden Dawn I can take anything.) In fact, the seasoning goes both ways: reading about the movies enhances the experience of seeing them, while seeing them deepens my admiration for how well Barrios writes about them.

In Part 2, I’ll talk about some of these movies.