Whistling in the Dark
COOK, BRUCE
On Music WHISTLING INTHEDARK BY BRUCE COOK p ¦L opular music is waiting for its McLuhan, some daring thinker who will come along and spit out a set of ideas suggesting a comprehensive theory of...
...The time is surely right for this sort of retrospective, but on all movie musicals, not just M-G-M's, which were more the biggest of the biggest than the best of the best...
...But if you want to understand the impact of Hollywood musicals on their original audiences????or if you want to recapture it????the best thing of all is to catch them on the Late Late Show...
...Nancy Goes to Rio and Rich, Young and Pretty anyone would want to remember...
...One can see clips from some of their films now????though not the classics Astaire made with Rogers ????in the just released scissors-and-paste motion picture of M-G-M musicals from 1929-58 called That's Entertainment...
...saw him through in a context that was basically wrong for him...
...A decade later, in 1949, the pair briefly revived their partnership for the not terribly successful Barkleys of Broadway, a film produced by M-G-M...
...The effect of listening to these soundtrack albums, one after another, is slightly underwhelming...
...It was how, in sock hops and later at concerts and Woodstock-sized festivals, the young of the immediate past communicated best with one another...
...The magic is still there...
...Except for this album (which also contains musical highlights of Les Girls, the weakest score Cole Porter ever wrote), I can't really recommend the series...
...They were different because they had to endure more than their fair share of grave concerns...
...As breadlines circled the corner, Americans flocked to hear that perverse paean to prosperity, "We're in the Money," with Ginger Rogers warbling in a shimmering costume of coins and a chorus of 50 long-legged blondes beating out a thundering clop-clop-clop...
...One, Cole Porter's Silk Stockings, had Astaire doing a fine Porter song?All of Me"?and a couple of tolerably good ones in duet with Janis Paige, an actress who could actually sing...
...Gene Kelly's decade was the '40s, and by the end of it both he and Astaire were under contract to M-G-M...
...Astaire started his movie career at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, more or less by accident, when he performed one number with Joan Crawford in the 1930 film Dancing Lady...
...Maybe it was simply an accident of technology, but movies began to sing almost precisely at the moment the Depression hit bottom, leaving very little to sing about...
...That music was the glue for an entire generation...
...They gave the generation its sense of personal style, setting a tone of breezy gaiety and wise-cracking confidence that became the approved manner among young men and women who pretended to some degree of sophistication...
...Astaire, especially, couldn't read a line of dialogue, much less sing a song, without instilling it with that peculiar rhythmic charge which seemed to suffuse every move he made...
...Anyone who doubts the statement obviously hasn't seen Maine yet...
...Yet they had their music, too, in particular the songs that came out of Hollywood musicals...
...as well...
...What happened to them...
...The record gives anyone with an ear to hear an excellent idea of why he meant so much to so many...
...You can get a good sense of their material from a new album excerpted from the soundtracks of those early musicals, Presenting the Golden Age of the Hollywood Musical (United Artists, UA-LA215-H...
...More startling, however, is the fact that Debbie Reynolds, who made whatever reputation she had in musicals, was really not much better...
...To take an obvious example, any self-respecting social historian of the '60s knows he must start his researches back in 1955, in Memphis, where the Sun Recording Studios began what eventually come to be known as the Rock-'n'-Roll Revolution...
...As much as anything else, American Graffiti is about the hit records heard on the soundtrack...
...As dancers, they were very different types: Kelly was far more athletic, more balletic, and consequently less rhythmic...
...Conventional wisdom has it that people flocked to Depression musicals to forget their troubles...
...And some of the period's best tunes came from a pair of studio songwriters, Harry Warren and Al Dubin...
...A ?^ s part of the general house-cleaning that resulted in That's Entertainment!, M-G-M has also released, on six double-record albums, the soundtrack recordings of 16 separate '40s and early '50s musicals (M-G-M 2 SES-49ST through 2 SES-54ST...
...For the most part, the productions included were totally forgettable????indeed, there was little about Two Weeks with Love, I Love Melvin...
...Frequently, contract players were stuck into musicals without regard to their singing (or dancing) abilities, and therefore one should not be surprised to discover that Van Johnson, Peter Lawford and Ann Sothern could barely carry a tune...
...The few genuinely worthwhile moments in this collection come from the album with two musicals that starred Fred Astaire (M-G-M 2 SES-51ST...
...As usual, conventional wisdom has it only about half-right...
...and even Gene Kelly, whose hoarse, throaty voice I once found highly appealing????he was the only man in movies who could sing through a grin????no longer sounds very good to me...
...The other...
...Astaire had only one serious challenger in his field, and that, of course, was Gene Kelly...
...The reason, I think, is that when you listen to the records you can't see the grin, or all those cute little boop-boop-a-doop gyrations that made Debbie a favorite of some...
...the company that seemed to have everybody ("More stars than there are in heaven," L. B. Mayer used to say...
...The raw data are certainly available????plenty of evidence that in 20th-century America, and perhaps elsewhere, there has been no more potent force for communicating attitudes, stimulating responses and giving a sense of group identity to people who might otherwise have very little in common...
...They are still worth seeing...
...Still, a few of the pictures in the collection were at least box office hits at the time????brigadoon, Les Girls, and two film biographies, Words and Music (Rodgers and Hart) and Deep in My Heart (Sig-mund Romberg...
...Yet to a remarkable degree he modeled his movie persona on Astaire's????And his singing style, such as it was...
...His jaunty self-confidence, the essence of Astaire...
...I say this not simply because of the nostalgia boom ????Although nothing feeds nostalgia like music????but because the movie musical is apparently dead as a form...
...That music had the same outlaw quality rock had, and it spawned a similar kind of rebellion among the people who became the grandfathers and grandmothers of the rock-'n'-rollers...
...But what about the anomalous generation in between????the conservative fathers and mothers...
...in a sense, the dialogue is background to the music...
...The prototypes of the style, whose influence was felt for a couple of decades, were two magic people????fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers...
...Movie musicals depended for their effect on the impact of sound and sight: Faces, movements and costumes contributed nearly as much as the songs that were sung, or the people who sang them...
...For a true sense of M-G-M's musicals, That's Entertainment...
...For along with escapism the '30s musicals filled another need, probably a deeper one...
...The Depression and World War II made them different...
...On Music WHISTLING INTHEDARK BY BRUCE COOK p ¦L opular music is waiting for its McLuhan, some daring thinker who will come along and spit out a set of ideas suggesting a comprehensive theory of music as a transmitter of values...
...The problem wasn't that some sinister Hegelian reaction set in...
...As a singer, he was unique...
...The movie was The Gold Diggers of 1933, and it made everything all right????At least for 94 minutes...
...Just as rock was the cultural currency of the '60s, so jazz was the coin of the '20s, providing a previous generation with its feeling of identity, its sense of uniqueness...
...One of the most oddly satisfying vocal albums of the '50s, now out of print, presented Astaire singing Cole Porter songs with backgrounds supplied by some of Norman Granz' jazz artists...
...The Barkleys of Broadway, featured him on the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away From Me" ????And in the number's three minutes, he packed all the charm and magic he possessed a decade earlier, when he sang the same song to Ginger Rogers in Shall We Dance...
...Astaire had returned to his original studio, and was churning out musicals (Silk Stockings, Daddy Long Legs, Royal Wedding) at the rate of two or three a year...
...Warner Brothers produced a whole series of such films, with lavish, bizarre, sometimes even screwy production numbers directed by Busby Berkeley...
...But the real Astaire, the male half of the famous dancing team, worked under contract to RKO, where all the classic Astaire-Rogers pictures were made within a relatively short space of time, from Flying Down to Rio in 1933 to The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle in 1939...
...is better...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 13
