I found volume 2 of Kino's Hollywood Rhythm: The Paramount Musical Shorts at my local library last week and was pleasantly surprised by this compilation of very early talkie films that were almost like videos, though these were not "soundies", (which I believe came about in the mid-forties), but very brief, sometimes elaborately produced features from the late '20s & early '30s.
The newest vignettes are from 1940, and featured Artie Shaw and his Orchestra in a clever presentation of a "Class in Swing" with the songs "Nightmare", "Free Wheeling", "I Have Eyes", & the wild little number, "Shoot the Likker to Me, John Boy", (Goodnight, John Boy, I thought after this one!). The other 1940 film shows the influential Country Swing performers, Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys singing a low down bluesy version of "Sittin' On Top of the World". Bob and crew still rock and anyone who can keep from tappin' a foot while hearing this is one tone deaf dude. Bing Crosby, in a couple of early films, "Blue of the Night" and "Dream House" shows off his vocal skills and proves that even at the dawn of his film career, he had an easy way with a line and a beguilingly relaxed manner--though the writing and presentation of both sequences creaks badly, structurally and due to painful cliches such as a blackface scene. However, it was nice to see Franklyn Pangborn in "Blues in the Night" as a rival(!) to Bing for a young lady's hand.
Other standouts include early '30s vignettes of Tallulah Bankhead making like a cabaret chanteuse singing "It Had to Be That Way" on top of a piano in that deep, smoky vibrato of hers, "Singapore Sue" with a very young Cary Grant as an amorous sailor beguiled by Anna Chang. Interestingly, none other than character actor Millard Mitchell shows up in this one as a more cynical sailor pal of Grants. Btw, poor Cary wears more makeup in this one than Anna.
The real standouts in this collection are four segments devoted to:
Helen Kane, the Boop-Boop-a-Doop girl who inspired the cartoon character, Betty Boop, (though apparently cartoon creator Max Fleischer denied this in the courts.) Her squeaky voice, kewpie doll face and manner were endearingly childish--or at least tolerable for the roughly ten minutes of her sequence. She was pretty cute, and playing a college coed with a crush on her Professor, she is surrounded with the oldest looking college crowd à la The Way We Were--including a 30ish Millard Mitchell again, who paws Miss Kane amorously in one scene while guffawing at her classroom stupidity in another.
and
Ginger Rogers, in a 1930 film called "Office Blues". A brunette Rogers, fresh from starring in the Gershwin's Girl Crazy on Broadway at the age of 18, she knocked my socks off with this elaborately produced song-filled comical presentation of composer Johnny Green's syncopated "(I See Where)We Can't Get Along" and "Dear Sir". Set in an elaborately appointed Art Deco office, Rogers plays a secretary in love with her dim boss, who doesn't seem to acknowledge the doll with the steno pad and the big blue eyes. Ginger may not have been given her polish by Fred Astaire yet, but when she starts selling the lyrics, such as "I'm so cynical, he's so rabbinical"--you can't resist it. Eventually, Ginger's appears on a giant steno pad backed up with a chorus of girls in dresses emblazoned with letters, singing "Dear Sir" to her dreamy, if dull employer!
Ginger Rogers also appears in one more very brief but noteworthy extra segment introduced by a very youthful Fredric March. She sings a racy pre-code song that March describes as of her own composition, called "Used to Be You", appearing in drag with Jack Oakie as a woman, (well, sort of). It's slight, cute, and probably got locked away asap when the Production Code came to pass in '34.
and
Ethel Merman in Her Future (1930), one of her first appearances on film, in which she is a prisoner in a very German Expressionist-looking courtroom where she knocks two songs out of the park, warbling the torch song "My Future Has Passed" and a rousing "Sing You Sinners" to the apparent indifference of a somnolent -looking judge. How anyone could look so enervated with Merman at her very best here is beyond me.
Video segments devoted to Lillian Roth, Ruth Etting, Maurice Chevalier, Jeanette MacDonald, and others were disappointing since they seem to be singing the "B" side of records or the more memorable songs are not particularly well-staged. I'm going to try to find out if my library can corral the Volume One of this Kino number, which was decently transferred to dvd, though there are some short films, notably the Cary Grant one, that were in poor shape visually and some patches of sound in the lesser segments were muddy. I hope that some of the very knowledgeable Musical aficionados will chime in with their comments about this unexpectedly enjoyable discovery.