(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
Why is Second Chorus so ungainly? Because the film was originally
conceived as a vehicle not for Fred but for Artie, whose 1938 recording
of "Begin the Beguine" was hugely popular and made him in the eyes of
many the new "King of Swing," dethroning Benny Goodman.1
But things got out of hand, as they so often do in Hollywood. One guesses
that Shaw simply couldn't act, so a plot had to be constructed around
him instead of featuring him, with a new cast imported to make it all
work. Fred got top billing, along with leading lady Paulette Goddard,
most famous as the "gamin" in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times.2 Fred's competitor for Paulette's affections is Burgess
Meredith,3 far more famous today as Mickey in the Rocky
films than for his early work.
Goddard's so sexy in this dance that, frankly, we don't miss Ginger
at all. Unfortunately, Fred and Paulette don't get together on the dance
floor again.7
Fortunately, the number (officially known as "Poor Mr. Chisholm"10) makes up for any number of faults, displaying Astaire's
fondness for taking a physical activity from real life and gradually
transforming it into dance. Fred starts out as the conductor of the
band, elegantly gesturing as the strings swoop through an out-of-tempo
introduction. His "conducting" broadens to the point that he is more
or less mimicking the music, entering into a world of pantomime, half
reality and half art. He's still bound to the music. He can only dance
when the music lets him. As the tension builds, he ultimately bursts
the bounds of reality entirely and takes control of the dance, dashing
off a brilliantly flowing tap routine with effortless nonchalance.
Black and Tan, a dramatically absurd but musically invaluable
1929 short, gives us a taste of Ellington when he first became famous,
through his nightly broadcasts from the Cotton Club. The Cotton Club
was a singular fraud, invented in the twenties to give white tourists
a taste of Harlem without having to undergo the inconvenience of actually
meeting any black people.11
Nonetheless, it allowed Ellington and many other black performers to
reach a national audience, which is almost sufficient penance for its
sins.
Boogie-Woogie Dream is similarly absurd and invaluable, and
also not quite as racist. Today, Lena Horne is so famous for being Lena
Horne that we forget what a wonderful singer she was. Viewers who are
only familiar with Horne as a frozen-faced diva are in for a surprise
when they see her as a joyous young woman, singing in the company of
boogie-woogie masters Ammons and Johnson, as well as Teddy Wilson and
his band.
Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons helped start a boogie-woogie craze when
they appeared in the great "Spirituals to Swing" concerts organized
in 1937 and 1938 by John Hammond. Both concerts are now available in
their entirety in a wonderful three-CD set available from Vanguard.
1. Shaw was an exceedingly temperamental performer, quitting music a number of times and forming and discarding five different bands. He also had five wives, including Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. He quit jazz for good in 1954 and is still alive today, recently appearing in Ken Burns' PBS documentary on jazz.
2. Properly, it should be "gamine," but Chaplin didn't know any more French than I do and was even more resistant to criticism. Goddard was a remarkable character. Before she came to Hollywood she worked as a shill for a high-stakes gambler on trans-Atlantic cruises, picking up sugar daddies and delivering them for the plucking. Her greatest accomplishment was not her film career but becoming Chaplin's third wife. (Quite possibly, they were not ever legally married, but they lived together as man and wife throughout the thirties, and Goddard got a nice settlement when they separated. She was certainly the only woman who ever got the better of Chaplin.)
3. 
Meredith and Goddard clearly liked
what they saw of each other on the set of Second Chorus, because
they got married in 1944 (it lasted four years). Meredith's career suffered
in the fifties because the House Un-American Activities Committee didn't
like his attitude, but he came back strong, in film and TV, and on Broadway
(in 1960 he won a Tony for helping to bring "A Thurber Carnival" to
the stage). As he grew older, Meredith's husky voice acquired an unctuous
tone that I personally found loathsome but which won him endless voiceover
gigs. Meredith, who won a lot of fame in the sixties as "the Penguin"
in the Batman TV series, had a definite flair for the offbeat.
In 1970 he directed and starred in The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go,
the only film to feature both Broderick Crawford and Liv Lindelind (the
first Playmate to show pubic hair — but you already knew that). In 1987
he appeared as "Don Learo" in King Lear, directed by
Jean-Luc Godard, working from a script Godard wrote with Norman Mailer.
The film also featured Godard as "Professor Pluggy," Woody Allen as
"Mr. Alien," Norman and Katherine Mailer as "themselves," and Molly
Ringwald as "Cordelia."
4. Fred's trumpet work is dubbed by Bobby Hackett, while Burgess' is done by Billy Butterfield. Both were excellent swing trumpeters.
5. Fred's performance has a definite edge to it. His Danny O'Neill is a good-natured guy who likes to have a good time but also likes to come in first. If that means giving his best friend an occasional elbow in the ribs, so be it.
6. By the late forties, it was seriously unhip to say "hep." Hepcats, who listened to swing, gave way to hipsters, who listened to modern jazz.
7. It's not clear why, but maybe she didn't like Fred's obsessive rehearsing.
8. There were lots of "jazz symphonies" in the thirties, and this one is typical, consisting of alternate swatches of saccharine strings and good jazz. Big band composers and arrangers simply did not know how to write for strings, but insisted on doing so because violins were "class." Shaw, more pretentious than most, started using violins quite early in his career, but it didn't seem to make much difference. Once the strings shut up, the band shifts to a boogie-woogie beat and things go better.
9. At the end of the film, Paulette simply pronounces Fred worthy of her: "You've changed so amazingly in the last week I've decided to make you my manager."
10. "Mr. Chisholm" is a hepcat wannabe played by Charles Butterfield who hopes to break into show business playing jazz mandolin. Fred uncharitably writes a song that ridicules the old man — "you disgrace your kin on the mandolin every time."
11. Please do not see The Cotton Club, Francis Ford Coppola's wretched film, which is even more exploitative of blacks than the real Cotton Club.
12. "Black and tans" were nightclubs that accepted both black and white customers. (The Cotton Club was not a black and tan.)
13. Miley, who was extremely unreliable, only stayed in the Ellington band a short time. Ellington used a variety of trumpeters to handle the growl trumpet lead created by Miley. As we see in the film, growl trumpet involves the use of both a regular mute and a rubber plunger held over the trumpet's bell to vary the tone. We also see growl trombone in Black and Tan, played in a long shot by "Tricky Sam" Nanton, who was a famous part of the Ellington sound for many years.
14. To further cater to white obsessions, the Cotton Club girls had to have very light skins, but not so light that they actually looked "white." It is one of the unsung triumphs of the nineties that the infamous "one drop of blood" theory has actually disappeared. Many Cotton Club girls would not be considered "black" today.
Subscribe to BLFJ
