Warner bros, p.9
Warner Bros, page 9
So Baby Face is amusing and naughty in a naïve, self-protective way, and it’s reasonable to invoke it as the sort of film that bumped against the nervousness of the Production Code. But its saddest defect is imposing the caution of the Code on itself, before it might have been compelled to do so.6 One lesson in this, then and now, is that it has been easier for movies to celebrate smart, ruthless and attractive figures if they are men. The dolls, the dames, the baby faces, could be sexy, bold, and wisecracking until it was time to tell their men, “I’ll do anything for you.”
That sappy tone would be changed only by the manly ego named Bette Davis.
Joan Blondell—singer, dancer, sweetheart, loyalist
10
My Forgotten Man
THERE WAS NO immediate move to call The Jazz Singer a “musical,” though it was, plainly, a melodrama with heard music and singing, as well as a movie in which this new element—musical accompaniment—existed without labor or friction. The Jazz Singer could as easily be regarded as a version of the Faust legend for Jews in show business—but it carried way beyond that hard core to what we call the general public. And why would an American movie cater only to Jews? Wasn’t Hollywood a place where certain Jewish impresarios strove to become American? But the definition of the film’s genre was confused by the overwhelming Al Jolson.
So Warner Brothers did the natural thing, and as quickly as it could. It offered the same again. For Vitaphone once more, Warners cast Jolson as Al Stone in The Singing Fool. It’s still not exactly what we’d call a musical today, according to the 1950s heyday of the genre. Rather, it’s a sob story with songs, and a warning to reckless male ambition. But the songs arise naturally because it’s another story about a singer. When the picture opens, Al Stone is a waiter in a nightclub. He looks like a waiter, granted that he has Jolson’s consuming head and eyes—and granted that the film introduces him with a coy “surprise” close-up where a table is lowered on the floor revealing Al, well aware that we’re waiting for him, in love with him. The role seems humble, but not the actor. It is his picture, and after The Jazz Singer Jolson demanded $150,000 for the job, to be paid in Warners stock.
But he does look forty-eight, which is mature for a waiter hoping for his breakthrough as a singer. Stone is loved by Grace (Betty Bronson), a brunette cigarette girl at the restaurant, but like a chump he prefers the chill blonde beauty of Molly ( Josephine Dunn), a speakeasy singer. Of course, as the film gets under way, Stone finds his chance—he sings “It All Depends on You” (he means Molly) and “There’s a Rainbow Round My Shoulder,” and soon he’s “Sittin’ on Top of the World.” As a star, he marries Molly. They have a son. Then a few years pass and Al is older, more gaunt, and a good deal less likely. In all the frenzy over Al Jolson, we have to admit how unsuited to romantic glory he was. Seen in close-up, Jolson didn’t match the small, exuberant figure dominating a stage. They were different guys.
The Singing Fool is closer to a talking picture than The Jazz Singer, and it was made in exultation as sound began to transform the business, which meant that other studios had to buy into Warners’ expertise. Apart from its songs, there are extended dialogue scenes: notably a chat between Al and his infant son (Davey Lee). But there are still silent scenes with intertitles. It’s directed by Lloyd Bacon, for the most part with a placid camera and long takes—though the film opens with a display of camera movement that serves no purpose beyond misleading the audience. The story is dire. Molly grows bored with Al; she dumps him and leaves with Sonny Boy. Al goes into free fall, not just loss of career and depression, but not shaving, and aging fast. He looks over fifty, and rather frightening. There’s one scene of him on the street, shabby in a heavy fedora that shadows his face, that could be from I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.
Of course, things pick up, though the sick son dies—Al sings “Sonny”—but the fallen Stone regains his luster and marries the patient if foolish Grace. Things are going to be all right, which seems a pity eighty years later because one can feel a tragic actor lurking in Jolson. He was too old and strange for sunny parts. His singing voice verged on hysteria. He was ready for some operatic venture—he might have carried off the lyric anger and ruined romantic in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.
The Singing Fool, though not much seen today, can be said to have been more important than The Jazz Singer, which was actually hard to see because so few theatres had the technology for it. A year later, with sound systems spreading, The Singing Fool drew huge audiences eager to catch up—and Jolson uses his catchphrase, “You ain’t heard nothing yet,” several times.1 On a budget of less than $400,000, the film grossed more than $5 million, a million more than The Jazz Singer.
Two days after The Singing Fool opened, on September 21, 1928, Jolson married Ruby Keeler. She was still only eighteen, from Nova Scotia, though she had been a spectacular tap dancer at Tex Guinan’s clubs since her early teens. He was forty-two (he said; others said plus four), married and divorced twice already. Jolson saw Keeler playing on stage in Show Girl and—apparently—joined in with her, singing from his seat (who needed scriptwriters?). The audience was dazzled, and Al was co-opted into the show. No, I don’t believe it, either.
As innocent as this showbiz life could leave her, Ruby was overwhelmed by the huge star and his burning eyes. When Jack Warner approached Jolson—about putting Ruby in 42nd Street—Jolson assumed he was being offered a part; when he realized it was Ruby Warner was after, Al required a $10,000 finder’s fee. He didn’t want to play with her (because of looking too old), but he hated watching her kissing other guys—like Dick Powell. So he fretted and acted as her manager. It sounds like a marriage (it ended in 1940) that deserves its own film—if only someone had had the wit and nerve to let the two stars play themselves. Instead, they were put in films where that real life was coyly alluded to (but evaded).
As an inescapable father figure to the Warners musical, Jolson was overbearing, interfering, and, finally, outdated. He would linger at the studio until the mid-thirties, but he was notably absent from what are now thought of as the great Warners musicals of 1932–33. Maybe he seemed too tied to the sentimental celebration of Jewish tradition. Only a few years after The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool, the studio wanted to make clear that it was “young and healthy” and available to everyone. The underground story by which Hollywood Jews separated themselves from their own cultural tradition is as complex and revealing as the way Warners would discover the chance of making a fortune on stories about people who held up banks. The studio had mixed feelings about Jolson. In 1946, when The Jolson Story was set up, with Al singing the songs (at sixty) and doing “Swanee” in long shot, Warners let the project be done at Columbia. Larry Parks played Jolson, and Evelyn Keyes was his wife, though Ruby Keeler refused to let her name be used in the film.2
The musical was floundering in the early 1930s. It hadn’t really been opened up yet in that there were no films in which song and dance carried a plot. Harry Warner let it be known that he couldn’t give them away. But then, according to the man himself, Darryl Zanuck persevered and saw the chance of a new kind of musical, as typified by 42nd Street. Its novelty lay in what we call the “back-stage” narrative format. Maybe the public loved song and dance sequences. In just a few years they went to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for those “numbers,” and they were indifferent to the alleged storylines that set them up. But there was a terror of literal-mindedness in those who made musicals: how would people feel comfortable with the bizarre and irrational way that characters suddenly broke into song? This dilemma is at the heart of those breakthrough musicals from 1933.
So, if you care to believe this, Zanuck thought he would try a musical, without letting either Harry or Jack Warner realize what he was doing.3 This is fanciful enough to come from another musical. There was a novel, by Bradford Ropes, who had been a dancer, and Zanuck bought the screen rights: it was the story of a group of people trying to mount a musical in the worst days of the Depression. There was an impresario, Julian Marsh, who was going frantic and risking his own health by doing this. There was a self-important woman star in the show, and there were the brash American kids. At the last minute the stuffy star, Dorothy Brock, breaks an ankle and wow! The kid understudy, Peggy Sawyer, goes on and she is a sensation. Which is very tidy because she’s falling in love with the cheeky male lead, Billy Lawler. Have you heard this story before?
Early thoughts of Richard Barthelmess and Warren William were set aside, and Warner Baxter was cast as Julian. He’s rather good; he seems to feel he’s playing a character and is required to act, and he never sings; it happens that he looks like a hefty Darryl Zanuck. Bebe Daniels was Dorothy, Ruby Keeler was Peggy, and Dick Powell was Billy.
Powell was a kid from Mountain View, Arkansas, who had gone from the church choir to making records, and from there to a contract with Warners when they bought out his recording label, Vocalion. He was nice looking; he had a pleasant light voice—though he disliked singing. He could carry a line, and he was in his twenties, with a grin that suggested a naughty mind. He matched Zanuck’s instinct that movie musicals were for kids who had never seen a stage show. On screen, Dick Powell was the spirit of the Warners musical—once you overlooked the girls. But Dick had that sly, know-all manner that said to the audience, “Do you realize I’m up here with all these half-dressed girls—which is like half-undressed—and you’re not? No wonder I’m grinning!” That grin was vital at Warner Brothers, and it was the human behavior in which Jack Warner himself was closest to the enterprise.
Then there were the gifted songwriters, Harry Warren and Al Dubin. Together, they wrote “Forty-Second Street,” “You’re Getting to Be a Habit with Me,” “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” and “Young and Healthy.” Chances are you can recall those songs as I list them, and if you go back to see the movie, the tunes will last in your head for days. They’re not great or heartfelt songs, but they’re cute and winning. For the most part the Warner Brothers musical ducked sincerity or intensity—the very qualities that had made The Jazz Singer old-fashioned. But you can believe that the mischievous Powell has just thought of them and they are songs that move—the Warners musical never rested; scenes slid into other scenes before boredom had a chance to gather; and motion on screen was always as important as the chance of emotion.
But none of these elements would have meant much without the “gaze” of the films, and there we have the genius of Busby Berkeley, who was officially the choreographer on dance sequences, but who gradually took over whole films and supplanted official directors, like Lloyd Bacon or Mervyn LeRoy. William Berkeley Enos was born in Los Angeles in 1895, and he was one of the greatest talents Warners had.4 He was a demon, and not always a nice guy. He went through wives the way his camera tracked through the legs of chorus girls. He was the driver in an automobile smash-up in 1935 that killed a couple of people, and he was acquitted after two hung juries. Even the good-natured Joan Blondell admitted that he was like a general with his army. Almost before anyone noticed, “Buzz” had these vast sets with a camera high aloft, and masses of girls, pianos, and . . . waterfalls. Blondell told a story about the shoot for the “By a Waterfall” number in Footlight Parade, when a couple of girls went into the water and were never found again.5 She was kidding, of course, and these musicals kidded everything. But there was not a director in Hollywood who had such rigorous control of what was happening—and Berkeley was not even credited as a director yet. The system appreciated his technology before grasping its meaning. In addition, he never asked auditioning girls to dance—he just looked at them and kept the prettiest girls up front in the ensembles.
By 1935, in the range of cinema there were two directors, or auteurs, who had presided over the choreography of human groups with similar vision and ruthless authority—I am thinking of Sergei Eisenstein in the Soviet Union and Leni Riefenstahl with Triumph of the Will. Am I saying Berkeley was totalitarian or fascist? He was a creator on film, and just as Riefenstahl idealized the uniformed male figure, so Busby Berkeley was mad for the female losing her clothes. Which do we prefer? People still smile at the geometric formations Buzz organized, the girls in the pool opening and closing their legs, fellating the water, blooming Os. It’s as if the erotic extravaganza is still too much, or too daring to be talked about. But this is the orgy of pre-Code cinema far more than the suggestiveness in a film like Baby Face. In the “Honeymoon Hotel” number from Footlight Parade, the sense of imminent abandon is not just lubriciously present—it is flagrant, mocking of propriety, and blithely filthy. This glorification of the American girl is entrancing and delirious but alarming. The girls are slaves; the camera is our vizier. In the figure of the lewd homunculus ogling it all—played by the nine-year-old Billy Barty—we are at a point where harem slapstick is becoming a portent of pornography. You realize how close the entertainment movie was to scrapping the orderly dreams America’s happiness project was discussing. In just a few years, the pious sentimentality of Jolson’s inauguration had become a pleasure dome of sexual ferment.
The conflict was giddy, and Hollywood realized that a Production Code was in the offing. That would impose many dumb restrictions (and stimulate prurient imaginations), but the factory was telling itself to be careful. Looking at Convention City, Jack Warner wrote to Hal Wallis: “We must put brassieres on Joan Blondell and make her cover up her breasts, otherwise we’re going to have these pictures stopped in a lot of places. I believe in showing their forms but, for Lord’s sake, don’t let those bulbs stick out.”6 A year later, Convention City was banned and prints were destroyed. It is now said to be lost. Blondell admitted it was “the raunchiest thing there has ever been.”7
Audiences born sixty years after 1933 “know” these numbers or their mood. They are emblems of the early thirties, of Warner Brothers, and the “innocent fun” of that era. We have glimpsed them on Turner Classic Movies, or streaming somewhere, and Berkeley had an instinct about what streaming meant long before that technology came into being. The daring of these films is more liberated (and disconcerting) than the violence in the gangster films. Cagney is the lead character in Footlight Parade, a punchy guy searching for a way of making promotional “prologues” for the new medium. That is the excuse for enormous set-piece numbers, including “By a Waterfall,” which required a glass-sided pool, twenty feet by forty feet, and twenty thousand gallons of water a minute—all in flagrant defiance of hard times.
There is one sequence from these films that surpasses all others. It appears suddenly in Gold Diggers of 1933, and you realize that this searing depth might have been there all along. We seem to be watching a show on stage: the curtain goes up on a bare street set; a hobo picks up a discarded cigarette end, but before he can smoke it a woman appears—she is a prostitute, in a low-cut clingy blouse and no bra, she is Joan Blondell; she lights a full cigarette from the end and gives it to the guy. Then she leans against a lamp post and recites the words to the Warren/Dubin song “Remember My Forgotten Man.” It is as if the sentiments expressed are too much for singing alone. The woman gets a rich close-up in the process and we attend to the words—about how a man who loved her was sent away.
There is a transition. The camera tilts up and to the side and we find another woman in a window who starts to sing the song—she is Etta Moten, black, and not credited on the film. The song carries on and is shown over windows of a Dorothea Lange–like nursing mother, and then an older woman who may have lost a son or a husband.
There is another transition, and the song becomes rousing now, like a march, as soldiers make a parade before going off to war with streamers in the air and a rejoicing crowd. But then the soldiers are on their own, at night, marching to some combat front in a forbidding rain.
And then this valiant column becomes a tattered troop after battle, wounded, bloodied, limping, diminished, demoralized, and that much older. The whole sequence is a pageant for regret, and a kind of betrayal. It will come back to Blondell again, singing her heart out and explaining why she has become a streetwalker:
And once he used to love me
I was happy then
He used to take care of me
Won’t you bring him back again?
’Cause ever since the world began
A woman’s got to have a man
Forgetting him, you see
Means you’re forgetting me
Like my forgotten man.
Audiences today may wince at “A woman’s got to have a man,” for Warners in 1933 was a chauvinist operation. But in 2017, how many American movies address underprivilege with this blazing eloquence?
Gold Diggers of 1933 is credited to Mervyn LeRoy, but I’m sure this scene was envisaged and done by Busby Berkeley. It is among the best ever made at Warner Brothers. When Zanuck and Jack Warner saw the sequence—in the early spring of 1933, just before Zanuck quit Warners—they agreed that it was the proper climax to the film and they moved it to the end of the picture. The ease with which the apparent stage show slips over into the panorama of the Great War is breathtaking, and it points to a kind of ambition over which the musical has always been very nervous. As well as a musical achievement, this is a six-minute epic of political statement. If you intercut it with some of the glorifying parades from Triumph of the Will, you would have a pageant of the 1930s, as well as a forecast of what was to come. You have to admit, whether it was intended or understood at the time, there was a spirit at Warners ready to confront such things, a spirit that leaves so much of Hollywood looking frivolous and escapist. That remembering woman could be on an American stamp. Seen today, she reminds us how far memory, or history, may be a lost cause.
Gold Diggers of 1933 was a triumph ($2.2 million revenue on a budget of $433,000). It inaugurated a run of Gold Digger films. That world was in a terrible crisis: the banks shut down and Hitler came to power in the same year. And here was a movie made in Burbank by many hands, but a marker in our history, aware that sometimes the whole of life could be expressed in a few moments from one routine picture.
