Black and Tan
Dir: Dudley Murphy
Scr: Dudley Murphy
Pho: Dal Clawson
Ed: Russell G.
Shields
Premiere: December 8,
1929
18:28
This could be considered one of the first music videos. It was made by Dudley Murphy, who also made the musical short “St. Louis Blues” with Bessie Smith in June 1929. This film highlights, for the first time on screen, the genius of Duke Ellington.
By this time Duke was in the first flush of success. He began issuing recordings in 1924, but it was his booking as the house band at the Cotton Club in 1927 that made him wildly popular. He and his band also made it to Broadway, playing in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Show Girl.
At this initial point in making of films foregrounding musical performance, it was thought that the music needed a narrative context to succeed. Thus, Murphy composed a brief script that shows us the Duke playing piano in his rundown flat. Two men come to repossess his piano, but Duke’s sweetheart (Fredi Washington, in her film debut), a dancer, gives them gin to make them go away.
She has a bad heart, but insists on performing that night. We go to the club, where Duke and company thrash out “Black Beauty” and “The Duke Steps Out.” He and his band accompany her with his “Cotton Club Stomp,” but she collapses and is taken home to die. There, surrounding her bedside, the band plays “Black and Tan Fantasy.”
Ellington, a master of making three-minute masterpieces that would fit on a 78 rpm record, started writing longer and larger pieces, expanding his abilities and sensibilities. This early film shows him as already an inventive and charismatic composer.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: H2O.
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