The latest Oscar trivia question from Turner Classic Movies (read it here) inspired me to start another poll. Of the top five songs in movie history, as chosen in 2004 by the American Film Institute, which is your favorite?
The AFI's Top Five, in reverse order:
5. "White Christmas"—Holiday Inn (1942)
4. "Moon River"—Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
3. "Singin' In The Rain"—Singin' In The Rain (1952)
2. "As Time Goes By"—Casablanca (1942)
1. "Over The Rainbow"—The Wizard of Oz (1939)
I often tell you that there are no wrong answers, but in this case there really are no wrong answers.
One of the unexpected benefits of watching a sackful of early Chaplin movies is that, lacking music scores, their distributor seems to have laid a bunch of "Jelly Roll" Morton tunes on top of them—I guess Chaplin and Morton were more or less contemporaries, and the songs seem to fit the spirit of the thing. Not to mention they're great.
Now, I have to admit that, coming into this, my knowledge of "Jelly Roll" Morton was largely limited to the Auburn marching band's traditional end-of-the-third-quarter rendition of "Tiger Rag." Of course, there's no YouTube video of Jelly Roll performing "Tiger Rag"—in fact, it's not clear now that he even wrote it—but I did find a video of Louis Armstrong performing "Tiger Rag" on stage in Copenhagen on October 21, 1933.
And click here to listen to an absolutely insane version by the legendary jazz pianist, Art Tatum.
This was supposed to be my post on the Katie-Bar-The-Door Nominees of 1932-33, but rather than leave you without anything to chew on while I'm finishing that mammoth essay, I'm jumping ahead in my notes and letting you vote on the "Best Original Song Of 1932-33."
Yes, you get to tell the Monkey where to put it when he hands out the award for best song of 1932-33. And you just know you've been waiting for the chance.
In choosing, you'll have to decide what you think we should mean by "best" when we talk about "best song"—is it a song so successful everybody knows it ("Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf"); a beautiful standard recorded by anybody worth talking about ("Isn't It Romantic"); the memorable wedding of sound and imagery ("We're in the Money" and "Remember My Forgotten Man"); or a pivotal moment in film history ("42nd Street").
The nominees:
"Forty-Second Street" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (42nd Street)
"The Gold Diggers Song (We're In The Money)" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933)
"Isn't It Romantic" music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart (Love Me Tonight)
"Remember My Forgotten Man" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933)
Normally somewhere around here I'd pass along my pick for the year's best musical performance in a movie—not necessarily an original song or even the best song, but the most effective use of a song.
Well, the fact is by 1932, the Hollywood musical was dead and except for Ernst Lubitsch's operetta One Hour With You, songs were pretty much limited to shorts and cartoons, foreign films such as À Nous La Liberté and that's about it. In the early days of sound, the less creative minds hanging around Hollywood's studios—which is to say, most of the producers, directors, writers, and practically all of the guys who signed the checks—had no real idea what to do with the new sound technology so they just kept recycling The Jazz Singer, which is to say, a song here and a song there, even in movies where songs had no business being.
As it turned out, audiences weren't nearly as stupid as Holly- wood thought they were and by 1930, they were sick of it, so much so that studios started cutting songs out of movies, even from movies like, oh, musicals that were supposed to have songs. Jonas Nordin over at the blog "All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!" has written in detail about this anti-musical backlash and has included some pretty interesting clips to back up the discussion. (I suggest you drop in there and take a look.)
Which is to say, choices for best musical interlude of 1931-32 are few and far between.
Fortunately, there was one musical performance that stands out from the year, at least in my mind, even if the guy singing the song, Maurice Chevalier, isn't even in the movie. Given some of my readers' aversion to Chevalier (words like "frightening" and "demented" have been bandied about), perhaps this is a good thing.
Anyway, without further ado, here's "You Brought A New Kind Of Love To Me" from the Marx Brothers comedy Monkey Business, words and music by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman, sung by Zeppo, Chico, Groucho and Maurice Chevalier.
I promised you that if I found Al Jolson performing "Toot Toot Tootsie" from The Jazz Singer with the "Wait a minute, wait a minute—you ain't heard nothing yet" introduction intact, I'd upload it for you.
Well, here it is, arguably the most pivotal moment in movie history:
I've been neglecting the musically inclined part of my audience—brother Uncle Tom, Mister Muleboy, Who Am Us Anyway, among others—and to make it up to them, I present here what I consider to be the top musical number to appear in a movie in each of the first four Oscar seasons since Hollywood first introduced sound in 1927.
By the way, I'm not choosing songs based on what would have been eligible for an Oscar, which limit the award to songs written specifically for the movie, but am instead choosing the song I think had the biggest impact both culturally and artistically regardless of when it first debuted. Thus, even though "Toot Toot Tootsie" had been a hit for Al Jolson a couple of years before, its appearance in The Jazz Singer was a pivotal moment in the history of motion pictures. As co-star May McAvoy put it "In that moment just before 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie,' a miracle occurred. Moving pictures really came alive. To see the expressions on their faces, when Joley spoke to them ... you'd have thought they were listening to the voice of God."
1927-28: Al Jolson singing "Toot Toot Tootsie" from The Jazz Singer. Unfortunately, there are no clips on YouTube that include the "Wait a minute! You ain't seen nothing yet!" introduction. Well, actually that's not true. There are a couple that include it but the Warner Music Group has made a copyright claim and the sound has been eliminated from those clips. No doubt the sound will be eliminated from this one, too, in a few days. I have The Jazz Singer on videotape down in the basement if anybody wants to come over and watch it. Or you could track it down on DVD. That's what a responsible person would do.
1928-29: "The Broadway Melody" from the Oscar-winning best picture of the same name. The Broadway Melody was the top box office movie of 1929 and also featured "You Were Meant For Me" and "Give My Regards To Broadway."
The song and dance man in top hat and tails is Charles King. Bessie Love is the one arguing with Eddie Kane (whose Francis Zanfield is an obvious nod to Florenz Ziegfeld) while personal favorite Anita Page looks on in horror. Never mind that everybody in this movie seems miscast as veteran stage performers—it's the songs I'm talking about.
1929-30: This one you've seen: Marlene Dietrich singing "Falling In Love Again" in The Blue Angel but here it is again, an encore presentation.
1930-31: And finally, Eddie Cantor performing "Makin' Whoopee" in the 1930 hit musical Whoopee!
By the way, this clip isn't colorized—the movie was actually filmed in an early two-strip color process that had been showing up occasionally in theaters since 1922's The Toll Of The Sea. Movies had been hand tinted even before that. Sounds like another essay, doesn't it. Well, some day, maybe, if you're good.
While I was working on my essay about the best picture of 1929-30, it occurred to me I've written about all of the nominees at some length—except for Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, the movie that made Marlene Dietrich an international star.
As stories go, it's nearly a carbon copy of Pandora's Box with Marlene Dietrich playing Lola Lola, a singer/prostitute who leads a stuffy college professor (Emil Jannings) to his destruction. Unlike Louise Brooks's innocent take on her spiritual sister, Lulu, Dietrich plays Lola Lola as more of a vampy femme fatale. Not bad, highly regarded.
There are actually two versions of The Blue Angel, shot simultaneously, one in English for American and British release, the other (Der Blaue Engel) in German for the rest of Europe. This was actually a common practice back in the day, it being technically easier at the time to shoot a scene twice than to dub the film with a foreign language. Which one you choose to see is up to you. Many cinephiles prefer the German version simply because Dietrich and Jannings are more comfortable with their native language, but it turns out I'm more comfortable with mine and so I am more likely to watch it in English.
Which, admittedly, makes me a philistine.
Anyway, the English language version introduced Dietrich singing what became her signature song, "Falling In Love Again," and I present it here for your entertainment.
So, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, Marlene Dietrich and "Falling In Love Again."
My old pal and movie mentor, bellotoot, and I have been exchanging comments about King Vidor's Hallelujah!, the all-black musical we both enjoyed starring Nina Mae McKinney as a jazz-singing temptress. In fact, bellotoot enjoyed Hallelujah! so much, he dug up this 1932 short, Pie, Pie Blackbird, one of the twenty movies McKinney made in her film career. It co-stars Eubie Blake and his orchestra as well as the tap dancing team, the Nicholas Brothers.
That Hollywood could ignore this much talent while stuffing musicals of the time full of non-entities like Charles King (see The Broadway Melody) only underscores the self-defeating nature of racism ...
Forewarned is forearmed: In setting the scene, McKinney uses a word (pickaninny) that has long been considered offensive. McKinney's use of the word is so casual, however, it prompted me to do some research on the word's origin and evolution. It is believed to have been derived from the Portuguese word "pequenino," an affectionate diminutive of the word "pequeno," which means "little," and was used in the American South prior to the Civil War to refer to African-American children. Later, the word became associated with particularly grotesque stereotypes which I will not pass along here, yet remained in general usage (see, e.g., Scott Joplin's "I Am Thinking Of My Pickaninny Days for clarinet," The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, etc.) at least until the 1940s. By the late 1950s, however, it had fallen strictly into the category of offensive and anybody using the term in the 21st century would rightly be considered a racist buffoon.
The latest Oscar trivia question from Turner Classic Movies (read it here) inspired me to start another poll. Of the top five songs in movie history, as chosen in 2004 by the American Film Institute, which is your favorite?
