NFR Project: 'Swing Time' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Swing Time’

Dir: George Stevens

Scr: Howard Lindsay, Allan Scott, Dorothy Yost, Ben Holmes, Anthony Veiller, Rian James

Pho: David Abel

Ed: Henry Berman

Premiere: Aug. 27, 1936

103 min.

The sixth of 10 film collaborations between Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is considered their best effort. Jerome Kerns and Dorothy Fields won as Oscar for the film’s song “The Way You Look Tonight,” and all the other numbers – “Pick Yourself Up,” “Waltz in Swing Time,” and “Never Gonna Dance” -- are painstakingly choreographed and executed. (“A Fine Romance” is a non-danced comic ballad.)

Supposedly the duo went through 47 takes of a passage in one of their numbers. Astaire was an obsessed perfectionist, and Rogers had an iron constitution. That they made their complex duets seem easy and effortless belies how much work went into them.

The movie is marred by the “Bojangles of Harlem” number Astaire performs. Ostensibly a tribute to the great Black tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, it features Astaire in blackface – a form of denigration no longer practiced.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Trance and Dance in Bali.

NFR Project: 'Show Boat' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Show Boat’

Dir: James Whale

Scr: Oscar Hammerstein II

Pho: John J. Mescall

Ed: Bernard W. Burton, Ted Kent

Premiere: May 17, 1936

113 min.

The director James Whale’s favorite film of his was quite unlike his usual output. Best known as a horror director, Whale’s assured foray into an epic musical theater production is a great adaptation of a stage classic to film.

Show Boat started a revolution in musical theater. Until it premiered, musicals were scattershot affairs – loose collections of sketches and songs, or light-hearted fluff and farce, or operettas set in imaginary European kingdoms. With the creation of Show Boat, a musical with three-dimensional characters and a serious plot, the musical grew up.

It didn’t hurt that some of America’s most enduring ballads are studded throughout the work. “Bill,” “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” “Make Believe,” “You Are Love,” and of course the iconic “Ol’ Man River – all are classics that continue to be performed today by jazz and cabaret artists. The songs all serve to advance the plot, and stand on their own as well, as all catchy tunes should.

The musical was adapted from a 1926 novel by the best-selling author Edna Ferber. It’s an epic story that plays out between 1887 and 1927, from the banks of the Mississippi to the theaters of New York City, encompassing the evolution of American music from old-time sentimental ballads through bluesy torch songs and on to jazzy standards. Kern had plenty of practice as a songsmith – he’d already been in the business for 20 years, and had cranked out 16 musicals between 1915 and 1920. Hammerstein was similarly experienced.

The story involves the steamboat Cotton Blossom, which serves as a floating, traveling theater along the banks of the Mississippi River. Its owners, Cap’n Andy and Parthy, have a daughter, Magnolia. When it revealed that the show’s leading lady, Julie, is of mixed race, she is forced to leave the show boat. Her role is taken over by Magnolia, who acts opposite the charming gambler Gaylord Ravenal.

Magnolia and Gaylord end up together and have a daughter, but, impoverished and ashamed, Gaylord leaves the two of them. Magnolia goes on to be a successful singer in a club thanks to the selfless sacrifice of Julie. Twenty years later, Magnolia and Gaylord are reunited at their daughter’s Broadway debut.

The musical was the first to deal with racism, and has been accused of a kind of racism itself. While the “n-word” is bandied about freely in the original script, later times have caused alternations to accommodate better sensibilities. It deals frankly with the scourges of the time: the segregation of black and white populations, the inability of a mixed-race person to be thought of as little better than an animal. No one had tried to seriously engage these thorny issues on stage before. Merely the act of having black and white performers on stage together was seen as the breaking of a taboo.

Whale recruited many of the show’s original performers to recreate their roles for the film. In particular, Charles Winninger’s definitive rendition of Cap’n Andy, Magnolia’s happy-go-lucky father is a treat. Though she is 20 years too old for the part, Irene Dunne does a meritable job as Magnolia, tenor Allan Jones proves himself to be a bit of an actor as Gaaylord Ravenal.

Of particular merit are the performances of Helen Morgan and Paul Robeson. Morgan, a well-known torch singer, was the original Julie, and her renditions of “Bill” and “Can’t Help . . .” are iconic – musically superior and heart-rending. And, of course, Robeson is purely and magnetically Robeson in the role he originated in the London production, a role no one else could play to satisfaction.

This became his signature song, one he would reprise with more hopeful lyrics throughout his career. It’s the best remembered song from a history-making production.

America’s systemic cultural racism of the time is on display here. The Black people in the film are depicted as simple-minded and none too ambitious; Magnolia does a blackface number that is interesting today only for its documentary value.

Yet Whale wrestles the cold, hard facts of segregation and racism, topics generally never covered in Hollywood film of the time. Show Boat represents the one-step-forward, two-steps-back struggle of Black people to be taken seriously as people.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Swing Time.

NFR Project: 'Rose Hobart' (1936)

 

NFR Project: ‘Rose Hobart’

Created by Joseph Cornell

1936

19 min.

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was one of America’s most unique artists. Untrained and reclusive, he created art in his Queens basement. To be more precise, he created boxes – glassed-in assemblages of relatively small boxes composed of found objects and illustrations. They evoked yearning, melancholy, memory. They are still quite absorbing and alive as art works, utterly unlike anything else around.

Cornell would troll the second-hand stores, junk piles, used book shops, and random marketplaces of Manhattan for the small items he would collect and integrate into a visual piece. These are quiet, meditative works that summon up a comforting view, a Victorian wonder land where dolls, birds, keys, bones, pebbles, string, and maps conjoin in an exotic portrait of an imaginary universe.

Cornell made films as well. His first significant film was made without him ever touching a camera. He used to collect and show 16-millimeter films for his and his disabled brother’s amusement. He took a 1931 jungle melodrama, East of Borneo, and cut out everything irrelevant to him, retaining only footage highlighting the actress Rose Hobart, who plays the female lead in East of Borneo. This ode to the actress is Rose Hobart.

Cornell was an obsessive. Many times, he would idolize a woman from the movies, or from dance, or from history, and build boxes about her. He repeated this any times in his work. There is something voyeuristic, erotic, even masturbatory about the film. Cornell is engrossed in any view he can get of Hobart – in evening gowns, in plain dress, in men’s clothing, standing, sitting looking, reacting. Her place face, dark hair, and slender body obviously captivate the filmmaker.

He cut together footage of Hobart, rearranging the chronology of the film to suit himself. The result is a disconnected, non-narrative gem. We look, again and again, at Hobart’s face. The camera can’t tear itself away from her, and that gets us thinking about our complicity in looking. Hobart is objectified as an object of desire, but she is also elevated to the status of a wraithlike spirit, floating through the action like a dreamer.

Cornell accentuated the dreamlike feel of the film by slowing the projection of the film from 24 frames per second to 16 frames per second, by projecting it through a blue filter, and by adding Brazilian samba music in the background, which adds a kitschy counterpoint to the slow beauty of the film.

Cornell showed the film in 1936 at a gallery. Salvador Dali was in attendance, and he was so outraged by the film that he knocked the projector over halfway through the film. He claimed that Cornell had stolen his idea from his subconscious. As Cornell was shy and retiring, he took this interruption poorly, and did not show the film for decades after.

In 1968, Cornell donated the film to the Anthology Film Archives, which struck off black-and-white and purple-tinted copies. After that, the film became known in avant-garde circles. It is still a remarkable work of melancholic obsession.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Show Boat.