Sometimes the extras are better than the movie.
This is no knock on The King of Jazz, a Universal “revue” musical from 1930. The film is remarkably undated. But King is also the inspiration for infectious accolades from a host of writers and musicians, all evidenced on the new Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, which restores the work to its former colorful, infectious glory. Writer Gary Giddins calls the film an “ice cream sundae of a movie. Delicious.”
The King of Jazz is built around the Paul Whiteman orchestra, which contained some of the best musicians of the time. Whiteman was a guy from Denver with daddy issues, who landed in New York City and rose to become one of the most popular acts of the 1920s. Hollywood summoned, and after a year, the band leader and the executives settled on an approach – an old fashioned revue, a series of skits, musical interludes, blackouts, and solos that highlighted the variety of talents in the orchestra, and the burgeoning versatility of movie sound and color (it’s in two-strip Technicolor).
The label “King of Jazz” was dreamed up by a publicist. To his credit, though, once Whitman got the hang of Manhattan, he realized that the real jazz players were the influx of African-Americans from the south and midwest, and he tried to place them in the band. Objections from his managers put the kibosh on that – he wouldn’t be booked in the South, and not even in some Northern hotels. Whitman’s end run was to hire them as arrangers and background musicians. The upshot is that Whiteman went from a traditional band leader with jazz-inflected portions of the act which let improvisation fly, to a groundbreaker and trendsetter. His “signature” was Rhapsody in Blue, which his musicians introduced, though he later had a falling out with George Gershwin, who does not appear in the film to play the piece.
Less an orchestra, really, than a clutch of interlaced individual acts, the band included numerous masters of their trade. Bing Crosby appears here in his first screen appearance as one of the trio The Rhythm Boys. Other notables include Mike Pingitore, the banjo player, Joe Venuti, the violin player who formed part of the band’s sextet, and John Arledge at the keyboard, along with Charlie Greco. Other performers on parade include the Sisters G, The Bronx Sisters, the Russell Markert Girls (later known as the Rockettes), Al “Rubber Legs” Norman, and Jack Fulton. Actors include Walter Brennan, Slim Summerville, and John Boles, later a screen heartthrob. The precious seconds of Pingitore and Venuti may be the only screen footage of the performers. Arguably the most famous sequence is the performance of “Happy Feet.”
The supplements tell the viewer as much as the disc space allows, and those interested can pursue more information in a book about the making of the film by James Layton and David Pierce, who are represented on the disc.
The best place to start is the video introduction by Giddins, who contextualizes Whiteman and isolates some of the joys of the film (16:50). [Update: the second volume of Mr. Giddins's Bing Crosby biography, covering the war years, is to be published in 2019.] Having seen the movie, the next step is to listen to the audio commentary track, with Giddins as the host, and with color commentary by writer Gene Seymour, and bandleader Vince Giordano. One interesting sidelight comes when Giddins mentions the fad for performers pretending to be kids, such as Fanny Brice doing Baby Snookims. He is baffled as to why and how this trope became popular, but he may have inadvertently isolated the source for Jerry Lewis's creation of 'The Kid."
Then there is an abundance of information and background in the video interview with pianist Michael Feinstein (19:14). Layton and Pierce make their presence felt with four small documentaries: a background piece on Universal Studios (about 10 minutes), some of the problems involved in shooting this color film (also 10 minutes), a brief piece about the animated cartoon opening, and a general “making of” documentary (17 minutes).
The rest of the supplements round out the presentation. You can survey pages of the score for one of the numbers. There are no less than three deleted scenes, comedy skits titled after their punchlines: "Pretty Lucky So Far “(1:30), “Look What it Makes Me“ (0:28), and “Horse’s Neck“ (0:26), three surprisingly dirty jokes that show how far pre-Code Hollywood wanted to go. When the film was re-released later in the 1930s it came with alternative opening titles, also offered here (2:05).
Paul Whiteman and the orchestra are on the periphery of some other supplements. I Know Everybody and Everybody’s Racket, is a short program filler from 1933 with nightlife columnist Walter Winchell playing himself, in a nightclub where the band happens to be playing (21: 07). There are also two Two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from 1930, incorporating both music and some animation moments from King of Jazz: My Pal Paul (6:51), and Africa (5:42), with some sad racialist overtones.
Arguably the most interesting of the secondary supplements is All Americans, a sound short from 1929 (19:03). It’s a version of a huge number that was restaged by John Murray Anderson for the inclusive “Melting Pot” number that concludes King of Jazz. Anderson was an innovator and a lot of his work on King of Jazz anticipates choreographer Busby Berkeley, and his camera angles, trick photography (which he supervised but was created by others), and camera movements broke the bonds that films suffered from in the early days of sound. You can see the lasting influence of All Americans and “Melting Pot” in the work of Guy Maddin, who found inspiration from the sequences for his film The Saddest Music in the World, his paean to part-talky and ‘30s musicals.
Finally, there is an 22-page insert with cast and crew, transfer information, and an essay by rising film writer and novelist Farran Smith Nehme.
The King of Jazz hits the street Tuesday, 27 March, 2018 ($39.95, Criterion Collection No. 915).
Originally published at All Classical Portland, 25 March 2018