(graphic from the Bixography Forum Web site, http://www.network54.com/Forum/27140)
I ran him [my then-partner Bob] the video of the 1930 musical The King of Jazz. I’d been telling him a lot about two-strip Technicolor, but this was the first time he’d actually seen a film shot in the process. He noticed the anomalies — that, for a process that supposedly could not reproduce blue, there sure seemed to be an awful lot of blue in the film (even the leaves on the trees seemed to be a gun-metal greyish blue, suggesting that the “blue” objects actually were green originally and look blue now because the yellow components of the dyes have faded) — and the whole process seemed biased towards orange and green (it could reproduce bright red quite well, but director John Murray Anderson and his designers seemed to be avoiding red deliberately, as an aesthetic choice). Bob, with his engineer’s low tolerance for old-fashioned technology, said the film’s color was poor but at least better than black-and-white; I found the effect pleasant and harmonious, with little or none of the garishness that affected later three-strip color films.
As for the movie itself, I still have a great deal of
affection for it. Paul Whiteman’s band, while not good enough to merit his
P.R.-awarded “King of Jazz” title (“Louis who? Duke what?” Newsweek commented ironically when it mentioned Whiteman in a
recent issue), was the best white
jazz band of the time, and many of the arrangements heard in the film are
Whiteman at his jazzy best. (Bix Beiderbecke may have missed out on being in
the film, but Joe Venuti, Eddie Lang and the Rhythm Boys vocal group — Bing
Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker — were still around to keep the jazz flame
alive.) Anderson’s direction, if not quite as imaginative as Busby Berkeley’s in the Warners classics of 1933-35,
is still stunning, and Hal Mohr’s camerawork is quite innovative in its use of
the famous “Broadway crane” for
moving-camera effects — and also in its pioneering use of wide-angle lenses so
both musician and instrument could be in focus simultaneously (creating some
interesting distortion effects).
Though The King of Jazz
was a revue with no plot — and Universal’s contract list wasn’t comparably
stellar to those of MGM, Warners and Paramount in their all-star revues — it remains a far more creative
movie than any of the competitors, not only due to Anderson’s direction but
also the screenwriting as well. Many of the gags are surprisingly racy for a
movie this old — nearly all the blackout comedy sketches between the number
rely on sexual gags, and the whole movie makes fun of the whole Victorian ethic
and the very concept of fidelity. Perhaps the funniest line in the movie —
certainly it was Bob’s favorite — came from a skit about a prospective
bridegroom, being warned by his bride-to-be’s father that, even if he was
making enough money to support her, there might be children. His response was,
“Oh, we’ve been lucky so far.” (The King of Jazz was made during that four-year period — which I call
“Hollywood’s glasnost” — of lax
Production Code enforcement between 1930 and 1934. Many of Hollywood’s best
movies came out during this period, and benefited from it: the Berkeley
musicals; the Lubitsch films with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald;
Stroheim’s last film as a director, Hello, Sister!; and the original Maltese Falcon, which had the “strip scene” from the book that
couldn’t be used in the later remakes.) — 3/25/93
=====
Charles and I drove back to Hillcrest, found Davids’ Place coffeehouse
closed for an AIDS Art Alive exhibit, then went back to his place where I ran
him the videotape of the 1930 movie The King of Jazz. It’s a movie that holds up pretty well — though the
two-strip Technicolor print has faded quite badly (last week I ran Charles the
movie Whoopee!, which he liked
considerably better, at least partially because it’s survived in considerably
better shape visually); many of the short comedy sketches are surprisingly
risqué (well, it was a “Forbidden
Hollywood”-era movie), the music was pretty good (though, like virtually all of
Whiteman’s projects, it suffered from his insistence on demonstrating that his
band could play virtually anything,
from the sickliest sentimental Victorian-era style of “My Bridal Veil” to
international music to the kind of lightly jazz-flavored dance music that was
what his band actually did well) and the production (“Entire Production Devised
and Directed by John Murray Anderson,” ran his credit) was stunning (one could
well see why Herman Rosse’s set designs won an Academy Award). It wasn’t a
movie that was all that creative
in terms of camera movement and stunning editing (Busby Berkeley’s work was
ahead of Anderson’s in the innovation department at that time, though Anderson
would out-Berkeley Berkeley in that bizarre final number he created for the
1944 Red Skelton/Esther Williams movie Bathing Beauty, which I believe was excerpted in the first That’s
Entertainment! as well), but the sheer
audacity of the conception of some of the numbers made it work. — 2/10/96
•••••
Two nights ago Charles programmed an interesting set of
movies for Christmas — including a couple I’ve written about in this space
before, the 1971 cartoon adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant and the 1967 Bob Hope Military Christmas
Special (what struck me most this time
around was the viciousness of the jokes Hope was making attacking the anti-war
protesters back home), as well as a Donald Duck cartoon from 1942 called Donald’s
Snow Fight, which was surprisingly good.
The conventional wisdom of the history of animated film holds that by the early
1940’s artistic leadership in animation had passed from Disney to the Warner
Bros. cartoon department, with such unforgettable characters as Bugs Bunny,
Daffy Duck and my all-time favorite, the Road Runner (there was an online poll
on imdb.com to name the cartoon villain you feel most sorry for, and my choice would
certainly be Wile E. Coyote; like George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which fellow cartoonists tend to regard as the
greatest comic strip ever created, the Road Runner cartoons were set in the
American Southwest and took advantage of its awesome geographic features) — but
Donald’s Snow Hunt, featuring an
all-out battle in the snow between Donald Duck and his three nephews, Huey,
Dewey and Louie (all four of the duck characters were voiced by the same
person, Clarence Nash, whose 1934 radio broadcast reading “Mary Had a Little
Lamb” in the voice of a girl duck had attracted Walt Disney’s attention and led
Disney to sign him, though in working out the character Disney decided that
Nash’s duck voice would work better for a male than a female) that was quite
well staged and had a lot of truly inventive gags, including one in which
Donald wears a “winter coat” that is almost perfectly conical (is this where the makers of A Christmas Story got their gag about the almost totally spherical
winter garment Ralphie’s parents send him to school in?) and another in which
Huey, Dewey and Louie fire a well-placed shot at Donald’s fortress, split it
into ice logs and the ice forms bars around him like a prison. But our
“feature” for Christmas night was a movie I was startled to find online given
that the reports I’d read about it — mainly that UCLA was in the middle of a
full restoration but it was taking so long I was wondering whether I’d able to
see the film again in my lifetime — King of Jazz (I noted that the opening credit didn’t feature the
definite article, and neither did a Variety cover from January 1929 announcing that Paul
Whiteman and his orchestra were going out by train from New York to Los Angeles
to make the film), Universal’s amazing 1930 musical revue built around Paul
Whiteman and, as his credit reads, “Devised and Directed by John Murray
Anderson.” I first saw King of Jazz
when MCA Home Video released a tape of it in the early 1980’s — I got the Beta
version but later dubbed it to VHS alongside the other great full-color musical from 1930, Sam Goldwyn’s Whoopee — and I didn’t quite know what to make of it: it
seemed to be split between numbers that had the lumbering, ponderous effect of
other contemporary musicals and numbers that were attempting to break free of
the restrictions of the stage-bound films of the day.
Certainly it’s a film of
major historical importance: it marked the screen debut of Bing Crosby and was
shot entirely in the two-strip Technicolor process, which as I’ve pointed out
in these pages before at its best had a painterly elegance that’s often more
watchable than the shrieking, overly vibrant hues of the three-strip process
that replaced it. Two-strip Technicolor had a major weakness — it could not
photograph blue — though in surviving two-strip films there are some sequences
that look blue because the yellow
chemicals in the green dyes have faded over the years while the blue ones have
survived or faded less — as witness the Irish tenor who sings “Killarney” in
the final sequence, “The Melting Pot of Music.” His coat looks teal, and it
seems likely given the usual iconography of Hollywood that everything from Ireland is green, the coat was probably a
bright, vivid green in the original release. Well, the more times I’ve seen King
of Jazz — in the 1990’s, when I ran my VHS
dub of the Beta tape for Charles; and now Christmas night — I’ve liked it
better and better, and the person who really made this film great was its director, John Murray
Anderson. King of Jazz was a
troubled production — the date on the Variety cover that showed Paul Whiteman and his “boys” on
their way to the coast to make it was January 2, 1929 and the movie was
released April 20, 1930 — and much of the reason for that was a huge
fish-out-of-water disconnect between Whiteman’s tightly disciplined way of
running his band and the movie industry’s more devil-may-care attitude towards
things. Whiteman took himself and his band out to California on a train called
the “Old Gold Special” (Old Gold Cigarettes was the sponsor of his weekly CBS
radio show) and expected Universal to be like a nightclub, ballroom or concert
hall: everything would be ready for him and all he and his boys would have to
do was set up and play. When he got to Universal, ready to hit the soundstages
and begin filming, he was told that no one had yet written a script for the
film — which made Whiteman furious.
He said it would be like having a band on stage, ready to play, having to
apologize to the audience because no one had brought music. Universal’s writers
suggested various ideas for a script, including a Whiteman biopic with Whiteman
playing himself and a romantic love story in which Whiteman and Ruth Etting
would be the leads — and Whiteman was well aware that his overall bulk, as well
as his lack of acting experience, would make it difficult if not impossible for
the audience to accept him as a romantic lead.
Whiteman was also having
difficulties with the sound engineers, who had suddenly become the divas of Hollywood now that talking pictures were a reality;
unless a strong director stood up to them, sound men were taking over virtually
every movie made, insisting that the actors speak s-l-o-w-l-y and
d-i-s-t-i-n-c-t-l-y and … pause for at least a beat between hearing their cue
line and speaking their own. (This is what accounts for the existence of films
like the 1929 Fox production Behind That Curtain, which will make clear just why some critics wrote
that silent movies were actually more naturalistic than sound ones.)
Universal’s sound engineers had the Whiteman band play through their entire
repertoire for hours on end, supposedly doing “tests,” and they thought
Whiteman would be as awed by them and uninclined to resist as all the Hollywood
actors were. Whiteman, who had been one of America’s top-selling recording
artists for nine years and probably knew more about sound recording than all
the self-appointed “experts” in Hollywood combined, first complained and then,
when that didn’t do any good, went through the indignities and probably
rationalized, “At least we’re getting paid for this.” The Whiteman musicians
lived in L.A. for six months, consuming a lot of bootleg alcohol and getting
themselves into so many scrapes with the law that ultimately they started
removing the cloth spare-tire covers with Whiteman’s famous potato-head
caricature on them because the L.A. cops were targeting cars so equipped for special enforcement. Finally,
in August 1929, Whiteman, worried that the band was getting stale since its
members weren’t playing for live audiences, accepted an offer from a New York
nightclub and told Universal president Carl Laemmle and his “suits” that they
weren’t coming back until the Universal executives approved a finished script
and were actually ready to make the film. In the meantime Whiteman lost the
greatest musician who ever worked for him, Bix Beiderbecke, whose alcohol abuse
finally caught up with him and weakened him to the point where he could barely
get through a show, much less make a movie.
Universal also lost the director
they had originally assigned to the film, the Hungarian-born Paul Fejos (whose
name is listed on imdb.com in its Hungarian form, Pál Fejös — though in Hungary
it would have been Fejös Pál!), when he had a nervous breakdown while shooting
a film called La Marseillaise (it
was eventually finished, retitled Captain of the Guards, by John S. Robertson, whose most famous credit today
is probably John Barrymore’s 1920 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) and spent most of the rest of his life working as
an anthropologist and combining those two careers by making nature
documentaries in Asia. At this point the Universal executives decided that King
of Jazz would be a revue — a term usually
meaning a stage musical without a plot, one that simply alternated songs,
dances and comedy sketches, but which in 1929 was being pursued by Hollywood.
MGM made Hollywood Revue of 1929,
Warner Bros. made The Show of Shows,
Fox made Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 and Paramount made Paramount on Parade. Alas, by the time King of Jazz actually made it before the cameras, movie audiences
were in open revolt against musicals in general and revues in particular. MGM
abandoned their second revue production, The March of Time, in mid-shoot (they ultimately commissioned Moss
Hart to write a screenplay that could link the March of Time footage to a plot, and in 1933 released Broadway
to Hollywood, a multi-generational story of
showbiz performers which in the end contained only about two minutes of the March
of Time footage, though some of the numbers
got released as shorts like The Devil’s Cabaret). Universal plunged ahead with King of
Jazz and hired the director who probably
knew more about how to do a stage revue than anyone else in the business: John
Murray Anderson, who had directed most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage but had never made a movie before. Anderson
plunged in with both feet, designing spectacular numbers and getting
Universal’s art director, Herman Rosse, to build some of the hugest, most
over-the-top sets ever designed for a musical. (Rosse won the Academy Award for
art direction for this film; as Charles pointed out, he was probably the first
Oscar winner ever for a film made entirely in color.)
King of Jazz is basically a revue that purports to take us inside
“Paul Whiteman’s Scrap Book,” a 10-foot tall prop that taxes the ability of the
film’s M.C., Charles Irwin, to turn its pages. Whiteman brings his entire band
inside a little satchel — though double-exposure photography the band appears
as miniature people while Whiteman and Irwin show them off on top of a piano
(for some reason showing people in radically different scales in the same scene
was an effect that was quite popular then) — and though some of the shots of
choristers on the big sets have the best-seat-in-the-theatre placement of most
musicals this early (which frequently made the dancers look like ants on a
wedding cake), Anderson also shoots three-quarter shots, vast panoramas,
moving-camera shots (he had access to the famous “Broadway crane” designed and built by Paul Fejos and
cinematographer Hal Mohr for the 1928 film Broadway and used by Universal for years) and even a couple
of Busby Berkeley-style overhead kaleidoscope shots, including one showing off
Whiteman’s violin section playing Fritz Kreisler’s “Caprice Viennois.” By
coincidence, Berkeley was also in Hollywood at the time making his first film, another all-color musical, Sam Goldwyn’s adaptation of
Ziegfeld’s hit Whoopee, starring
Eddie Cantor — and he and Anderson were both pushing the bounds of what had
previously been done in musical films. So the two most creative musicals made
in Hollywood in 1930, King of Jazz
and Whoopee, both had Ziegfeld
connections. It also seems likely that Berkeley saw King of Jazz because he did strikingly similar numbers later on:
the Manhattan landscapes shown as part of the “Happy Feet” song were duplicated
in Berkeley’s ground-breaking 1933 film 42nd Street (the blockbuster hit that marked the comeback of
musicals as a genre after
audiences had got tired of them in the early 1930’s) and the “Bench in the
Park” number, featuring Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys (the other two were
Harry Barris and Al Rinker, Mildred Bailey’s considerably slimmer brother) and
a group called the Brox Sisters, who weren’t at the level of the Boswell Sisters
musically but still impress, was quite closely copied by Berkeley for “Pettin’
in the Park” in Gold Diggers of 1933. “Happy Feet” even begins with an animated sequence of empty shoes
dancing by themselves, an idea Fred Astaire recycled almost two decades later
for his last film with Ginger Rogers, The Barkleys of Broadway.
King of Jazz shows off the wide range of Whiteman’s musical interests, from a salon
piece called “My Bridal Veil” (a middle-aged but still attractive woman
clutches her bridal veil and flashes back, Proust-style, to memories of her
wedding day, and the number ends with the bride descending a giant staircase,
her attendants flanking her and all three women wearing gowns whose trains seem
to trail off into eternity, much like Carmen Miranda’s bahiana hat in Berkeley’s 1943 film The Gang’s All
Here) to the piece most closely associated
with Whiteman, George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It’s presented here with an introduction in which
Irwin says that jazz originated in Africa — “to the beat of a voodoo drum” —
and then we get a scene of either one voodoo dancer and his shadow or two
dancers “shadowing” each other to a drum beat before an actor wielding a
clarinet pantomimes to the famous opening of the Rhapsody (Gershwin originally wrote the phrase as a 17-note
scalar progression, but Ross Gorman, featured clarinetist with the Whiteman
band when it premiered the piece in 1924, decided to play it as a glissando, Gershwin altered the score accordingly and it’s
bedeviled numerous clarinetists ever since — including Benny Goodman, who
flubbed it on a 1942 broadcast with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony) and
we get chorus boys in top hats, white ties and tails marching out of the wings
for a night on the town. We also get a giant piano. so large eight people can
sit at it, though obviously they’re not actually playing it — just pantomiming
a piano performance on those giant keys, unstrikable by any human. Number after
number showcases Anderson’s staging skills and the talents of the cast he assembled,
including seemingly impossibly acrobatic dancers of both genders (I
particularly like the “My Ragamuffin Romeo” number, in which, in a way
anticipating Universal’s production of Frankenstein the next year, a lonely rag dealer assembles himself
a girlfriend from rags; she turns out to be Marion Stattler, an amazingly
limber and accomplished contortionist dancer; Charles called the number
“Raggedy Ann Meets Raggedy Apache”),
one of whom, Paul Small, impersonates Whiteman and does a dance number until Whiteman
himself “outs” him by pulling off his reproduction of the Whiteman moustache.
The huge finale, a song called “Song of the Dawn” (sung by Universal leading
man John Boles, one of the few people featured in the film who wasn’t a part of Whiteman’s organization) staged to look
like Boles is a Third World peasant leader about to stage a revolution, segues
into “The Melting Pot of Music,” in which Paul Whiteman is presented as a sort
of mad scientist stirring a huge cauldron in which just about every sort of
white European music is blended into that “exciting new rhythm — Jazz!” There’s no intimation here that Black people had
anything to do with creating jazz (though there was that earlier reference to
the voodoo dances that supposedly inspired the Rhapsody in Blue), and some online commentators have questioned that
as well as the whole idea of Whiteman being crowned “King of Jazz” in the first
place (by his publicist, Mary Margaret McBride, who also quoted Whiteman as
saying he had “made a lady out of jazz,” as if that were a good thing), but “The Melting Pot of Music” is yet
another number that soars on the sheer audacity of Anderson’s directorial
conception; at its end, Whiteman stirs the cauldron, concentric rings emerge
from it like the ones with which the robot in Metropolis got turned into the “false Maria” (Brigitte Helm),
and out of it all, in yet another sequence anticipating the next decade and
Universal’s involvement in horror films, the Whiteman band emerges for a
reprise of “Song of the Dawn.”
Incidentally, Whiteman originally intended the
vocal lead in “Song of the Dawn” for Bing Crosby, but he got into trouble — he
took a girl out one night, drank too much and got involved in an auto accident
in which she was killed. He pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter and, probably
due to pressure from Whiteman and/or Universal, was given only a one-month
sentence — but he was essentially work-furloughed, taken to Universal under
police escort to do his work on King of Jazz during the day and then transported back to jail at
night. During all this Whiteman reassigned “Song of the Dawn” to Boles — though
Bing still sang the song on the Columbia record Whiteman made to promote the
film, and the comparison shows that Boles was actually the better singer for that
song. It calls for a stentorian, quasi-operatic delivery on the order of Nelson
Eddy’s, and Bing, despite his enormous talents, never could sing that way. (For some reason, Bing never got over his
bitterness over losing “Song of the Dawn.” He was still complaining about it in
an interview he did with Barbara Walters in 1977, just months before he died!)
So Bing was featured only as part of the Rhythm Boys — though, unlike a lot of
other legendary stars who seem to be groping towards a character in their first
films, Bing seems already fully formed; when he interrupts the Rhythm Boys’
performance of “Mississippi Mud” with a speech about how in an expensive movie
like this “we’ve got to get out of the mud, and reach for the finer things,” he
says it in the rising and falling inflections he used his entire career to
endow even the most prosaic speech with musical qualities.
There are some low
points in King of Jazz — mostly
the novelty sequences like “Oh, How I’d Like to Own a Fish Store,” “Has Anyone
Here Seen Nellie” (an homage to
the earliest days of the nickelodeons in which the projectionist leads the
audience in a sing-a-long) and a dreary novelty number in which Willie Hall,
ordinarily a Whiteman trombonist, plays “Silent Night” (so there was a Christmas connection to this movie after all!) and
“‘Pop’ Goes the Weasel” on violin and “Stars and Stripes Forever” on bicycle
pump — but the dazzling high points, number after number that offers one
impressive vista after another and is quite creatively staged for 1930, as well
as some raunchy gags in the comedy sequences that mark this film as definitely
a product of the so-called “pre-Code” Hollywood glasnost, make King of Jazz a film for the ages. Samples of the raunchy
dialogue: in one skit a man and a woman receive word that their marriage is not
legally valid, and the man says, “That makes me a bachelor!” The woman says,
“That makes me a spinster,” and their baby — played by Paul Whiteman (complete
with moustache) in an oversized cradle — whines towards the camera, “Well, look
at what that makes me!” Another
one: a young man is meeting with his girlfriend’s father to ask for permission
to marry her. Dad questions whether the man has enough money to support a wife,
and the boy assures him that he makes $65 a week and that should be enough to
support her. Yes, says the father, but there may be children later on. The boy
says they’ve decided not to have any, and when Dad asks them how they’re
managing that, the boy says,
“Well, we’ve been lucky so far.”
King of Jazz is considered, at least by one of the imdb.com
“Trivia” posters, to be the film that killed off musicals for the next two
years because it was such a big flop (though at least part of that might be a Zeitgeist problem; it’s clearly a film conceived in the
freewheeling 1920’s and released in the Depression-era 1930’s — albeit Richard
Barrios claims in his book on early musicals that King of Jazz was reissued in 1933 and did better then than it had
in 1930), but seen today it’s an extraordinary movie and makes it seem
inconceivable that John Murray Anderson never again made a feature film. He got
just two more movie assignments: staging the final water ballet in Esther
Williams’ 1944 film Bathing Beauty
(the first of the big color extravaganzae starring the Olympic champion
swimmer) and doing some circus-performing scenes for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1953
movie The Greatest Show on Earth.
(He also ran an acting school with Robert Milton that trained at least two
legendary stars, Bette Davis and Lucille Ball.) But he remains so little known
that his Bathing Beauty number is
frequently misattributed to Busby Berkeley, who did do similar choreographies with Williams on some of
her later films. I’ve long felt it was a cultural crime that Anderson wasn’t
hired to direct MGM’s 1936 biopic The Great Ziegfeld — instead MGM gave the directorial assignment to one
of their house hacks, Robert Z. Leonard — because as the director of many of
the Follies Anderson knew
Ziegfeld (personally and
artistically), while King of Jazz
had proven he could direct a movie. A John Murray Anderson-directed Great
Ziegfeld might have been a masterpiece
instead of the slow, ponderous bore, redeemed only by the acting of William
Powell and Myrna Loy, it actually is! — 12/27/15
