Friday, October 31, 2014
Happy Halloween 2014 From Way Too Lazy To Write A Blog
Photo by Christopher Walters
Happy Halloween! Since the last post covered musical short subjects of the early 1930's and it wasn't possible to get ALL of them in, here, straight from the cartoon universe and the deep subconscious, is the following stunner from Fleischer Studios. No matter how many times Mr. Blogmeister sees the following phantasmagorical cartoon, he's floored by the cinematic invention of it all. Making history as the dancing apparition: Cab Calloway.
Also pretty darn wonderful is this Aesop's Fables cartoon produced down the block from Fleischer's by the Van Beuren studio. Main characters Don & Waffles pretty much spent their entire screen career getting chased around by skeletons, goblins, ghosts and any ghoul who had a SAG card.
Many of us born at a certain time grew up watching The Dean Martin Show, which always had at least one comedian as a guest. Usually, if said comic was not Dom DeLuise, the featured comedian on Dino's variety program was the hilarious Paul Lynde.
Yes, THAT Paul Lynde, the one who repeatedly got away with flagrant censorship flaunting of the first degree inhabiting "the middle square" on The Hollywood Squares. So, submitted for your approval, here's The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, which features, among others, Margaret Hamilton, Tim Conway and Kiss.
With a big time tip of the Max Linder/Raymond Griffith top hat to the San Francisco Giants, who beat an exceptional Kansas City Royals team to win the 2014 World Series, here is the dapper Parisian himself, Max Linder in Ah Secours!, a hallucinogenic and surreal black comedy more akin to The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari than Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush - and directed by Abel Gance of Napoleon fame.
Labels:
Fleischer,
Halloween,
Max Linder,
Paul Lynde,
Van Beuren Studio
Friday, October 24, 2014
All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! Part 4 - Selected Short Subjects by Paul F. Etcheverry
Today's post begins with a question: what happened in 1929? Well, for starters, The Jazz Age a.k.a. Roaring Twenties ended with a thud, of more accurately, a series of dull thuds caused by Wall Street speculators and ordinary folks who lost everything jumping out of tall buildings, thus, giving new meaning to the phrase "pounding the pavement".
People up and down the society, in all walks of life, had the blues. The balm in hard times? Such virtuosos of the blues as Bessie Smith, who made her first and last silver screen appearance in a 1929 short.
Composer-bandleader-pianist Duke Ellington was also featured in a 1929 musical short subject, Black And Tan Fantasy, co-starring dancer Fredi Washington. Duke, who had recorded with The Washingtonians as early as 1924, had been developing an original and sophisticated approach to how to write and arrange for varying sizes of ensembles (from septet to orchestra), which would continue evolving and changing through his six decades in music.
In April 1930, Universal Pictures released its musical "revue" flick The King Of Jazz, starring The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, but it would be six months later, on October 25 when the real "shot around the world" of jazz on the silver screen transpired: the first appearance by an African-American band and reference to the Harlem Renaissance in a feature film, RKO Radio Pictures' Check And Double Check.
While an enormous box-office hit, this vehicle for radio stars Freeman Gosden & Charles Correll (a.k.a. "Sam & Henry", then "Amos N' Andy") and pert silent movie ingenue Sue Carol has not aged well.
A fair amount of this is because comedians Gosden and Correll, at that time and into the 1940's the biggest thing on the airwaves, appear in blackface throughout. Another reason: difficulties in translating the specific cadences and approach of radio, in which the character relationships are more fully delineated and the listener supplies the visual element, to movies.
RE: Gosden and Correll and blackface in general - the phrase "excruciatingly unfunny dialect humor" comes to mind - it frequently leaves even seasoned, seen-everything, grizzled and dyed-in-the-wool historians scratching our heads in utter bewilderment and asking repeatedly why the audiences of 1930 found THIS funny (note, for answers to that question, watch this documentary). That said, in this otherwise retrograde RKO Radio Pictures comedy, we see the future - and that future is the cutting-edge Cotton Club Orchestra!
In the "Three Little Words" number, the dubbed singing voices of The Rhythm Boys, featuring pop-sensation-to-be Bing Crosby, can also be heard. So the musical segment of Check And Double Check includes Bing and Sir Duke, dynamos who would grace numerous musical short subjects, television shows and feature films over the next four decades.
Now, musical short subjects were nothing new by the time The Singing Kid and The Broadway Melody were runaway hits. The DeForest Phono Films and Vitaphone Varieties had already played theaters well the first wave of all talking, all singing, all dancing feature films hit the neighborhood houses and metropolitan movie palaces like a showgirl-filled tidal wave in 1929.
Always interested in the latest technological advances, producer-mogul William Fox, eager to market the Movietone sound-on-film technology as the alternative to Vitaphone's sound-on-disc system, produced newsreels and comedies as early as 1927-1928 (note: for more, read Movietone's Synchronized Shorts and Features). The Fox short subjects included the Movietone Musicals series, presumably the studio's answer to the Vitaphone Varieties. One of the Fox Movietone Musicals, many of which were directed by Marcel Silver, starred Beatrice Lillie, while others included the film debuts of Ruby Keeler and Winnie Lightner.
Fox also commenced a series, beginning with musical comedy shorts, headlined by the comedy team that starred on Broadway in The Ramblers, lecherous wiseguys Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough.
The Belle Of Samoa, one of the two existing Fox short subjects of Clark & McCullough, is a musical and somewhat in the school of the "revue" films. Co-starring stage and silent movie actress Lois Moran (known for her key role in Henry King's 1925 version of Stella Dallas) and a troupe of Hawaiian dancers with the wacky comedy team, it was intended to be included in Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929, but released as a short subject instead.
Seen today, The Belle Of Samoa presents a time capsule capturing vaudeville, Broadway and burlesque - and at this juncture remains the sole existing footage shot for Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929 a.k.a. William Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929.
As the Clark & McCullough series continued, it would appear that directors Harry Sweet and Norman Taurog did not employ the musical and "revue" format again. The series of featurettes and shorts also co-starred such ubiquitous comedy supporting players as Marjorie Beebe, Florence Lake and Otto Fries.
After shooting the last of the 15 comedies for Fox, Clark & McCullough returned to Broadway to appear in George Gershwin's Strike Up The Band. Films became something the comedy team did to make a buck between their Broadway engagements.
After Vitaphone and Fox, the next studio to plunge full force into musical short subjects would be would be Paramount Pictures, in 1928. Adolph Zukor's organization hit the ground running and began making numerous tuneful 1-reelers.
The stars: everything from everything from purveyors of humorous songs The Yacht Club Boys and Borrah Minevitch & His Harmonica Rascals to such iconic performers as Sophie Tucker (soon to star in her own feature-length vehicle, Honky Tonk) and George White Scandals star Frances Williams.
Eddie Cantor, who unquestionably liked his work, starred in Paramount short subjects before and after he was headlining feature films for Sam Goldwyn.
Unfortunately, in quite a few of the early talkies from Paramount, such as A Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic, starring Eddie Cantor and a series of five short subjects featuring vaudeville and burlesque eccentric dancer/singer/dialect comic James Barton (noted in Constance Valis Hill's Tap Dancing America book), the order of the day is . . . minstrelsy, the burnt cork routine, still all the rage in entertainment when the movies made the painful transition from silents to talkies in 1926-1929. After all, Cantor's big showbiz break was his first blackface character was in Gus Edwards' Kiddie Kabaret), and, at the same time, even Bert Williams, the Trinidad-born comedy star of the Ziegfeld Follies, used the burnt cork for his movie appearances.
Even with some historical perspective regarding what was going in on the society as a whole back in those days, 85 years later, in 2014, no getting around it, that staple of vaudeville looks bad, very bad.
The second of the five James Barton 2-reelers, After Seben, plops the racism right in front of us latter-day viewers while also serving up historic footage; the dance contest that comprises the second reel features bandleader-drummer-avatar-powerhouse Chick Webb, as well as truly stellar footwork by Barton - who demonstrates the origins of the "moonwalk" - and the amazing "Shorty George" Snowden.
So strap on those industrial strength May 18, 1929 goggles tight, plunge into another time capsule and see why Bing Crosby singled out James Barton, who readers may recall from the 1948 film adaptation of William Saroyan's The Time Of Your Life as one of the top vaudeville performers, as well as why Fred Astaire extolled the terpsichorean talents of Shorty George.
Ultimately, the Paramount musical shorts start finding consistency and charm as a direct result of the rise to prominence by sprightly and original vocal groups. One of the best and brightest was The Boswell Sisters, who appeared in 1-reel musicals and Big Broadcast features for Paramount and also enthusiastically contributed their lilting yet swinging 3-part vocal harmonies to the Fleischer Studio's "Screen Song" cartoons (a.k.a. Follow The Bouncing Ball).
Hearing the Bozzies (Connee, Martha and Vet), the line that extends to Ella Fitzgerald, The Andrews Sisters, The Platters, The Four Freshmen, The Hi-Los, The Four Seasons, The Beach Boys and The Roches is obvious - and a beautiful thing.
At Vitaphone, director Roy Mack must have helmed 500 musical comedies and big band shorts, before finishing his career with some of the earliest Soundies in 1941. Since film producers who ignored the growing popularity and staying power of jazz did so at their own peril, among the dozens of musicals and band shorts Mack cranked out were historic films starring, at long last featuring legendary African-American performers as the headliners. First up, the fabulous Cora Lee Redd, featured vocalist with The Noble Sissle Orchestra (who had previously starred in a DeForest Phono Film), in this clip from That's The Spirit.
Smash Your Baggage showcases a host of incredible dancers and vocalists.
Next, a Vitaphone 1-reeler co-starring the groundbreaking singer and actress Ethel Waters with a child star who would grow up to be arguably the greatest pure entertainer of his generation, actor-dancer-singer-impressionist Sammy Davis, Jr.
Clearly desiring to corner the market on tap dancers, Vitaphone also signed teenage hoofers Hal LeRoy and Mitzi Mayfair. Ms. Mayfair, having demonstrated considerable dancing skills in her Paramount On Parade appearance at the age of 15, captured the attention of Vitaphone short subject producer Sam Sax and soon was teamed with tappin' Hal for a series of musical shorts, starting in 1931.
The plots are the same, there's absolutely zero pre-Code risque/weird WTF factor, Hal's essential dialogue is "aw shucks - let's dance", but who cares - the young duo danced with a joy that carries the day.
Any hokeyness and clubfooted acting is invariably mitigated by the sheer earnestness, enthusiasm and likability of the tap dancing stars.
One inexplicable realization is that the most peculiar of all the early 1930's mini-musicals were made by big-budget MGM, the "Tiffany" of movie studios. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced such Oscar-winning prestige pictures as Grand Hotel, but also were responsible for Jules White's Dogville comedies.
Actually, it shouldn't be THAT much of a shocker that the same studio that produced Cecil B. DeMille's pre-Code feature (and Exhibit A in the That's WTF department), Madam Satan, starring Kay Johnson in a goofy devil costume and, at one point in the epic's (ouch) climax, showgirls jumping out of dirigibles, also made the weirdest musicals that were not Fleischer Studio cartoons.
Producer Jack Cummings, later a key figure at MGM, directed several of the wildest 1-reel and 2-reel musicals, including this short subject, Crazy House and a bunch of hodgepodges that alternated 1929 musical numbers with wraparound segments starring Ted Healy & His Stooges. The following remains most notable for this bit of fancy dancing, completely unrelated to the rest of the film, by Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker, who lives up to his moniker and then some.
The remaining cast of Crazy House (no relation to the 1943 Universal feature starring the Helzapoppin' comedy team of Ole Olsen & Chic Johnson) also includes a motley crew of performers and comics - Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards, wisecracking Benny Rubin, slapstick queen Polly Moran, Broadway comedian Gus Shy and character actors Karl Dane and (that favorite nemesis from Three Stooges and Harry Langdon comedies) Vernon Dent. Here's Crazy House, in its entirety.
Meanwhile, as the Depression wore on. . . and on. . . and on, MGM's downright bizarre 1-reel and 2-reel musical short subjects got weirder and wilder.
Some of the pre-Code bacchanals must be seen to be believed. In this clip from Wild People, the spunky and inimitable Eleanor Thatcher sings her heart out while Joyzelle Joyner prowls around the set as The Panther Lady. The supporting dancers and Joyzelle all wear wigs that would have been totally appropriate had they been able to time-travel and audition for backup singer gigs in Sly & The Family Stone 34 years later.
Over The Counter presents an unbeatable mix of veteran character actors (Franklin Pangborn), undulating showgirls, questionable taste, pointless grotesquery and the most ridiculously unsubtle phallic imagery ever seen in a motion picture. Ms. Thatcher sings "Check Your Husband" with chutzpah.
Eleanor Thatcher, the pride of Binghamton, New York, subsequently got fired by MGM and, very likely - as Buster Keaton no doubt was - kicked in the butt with a gentle "you have no talent and don't let the door hit you on the way out" insult as she left.
To some degree, due to the 21st century presence of YouTube, Eleanor got the last laugh. When Ms. Thatcher busts a move using that great wiggling riff of hers, as she does here in her third (and last) silver screen appearance in the independent "juveniles gone wild" film The Road To Ruin, it's pretty darn entertaining. Take that, MGM corporate!
All of the aforementioned material represents merely the tip of the iceberg regarding musical short subjects of the late 1920's and early 1930's. Part 5 of this series shall pay tribute to our dear celluloid pals, Busby, Ruby and Marlene - with a passing mention to the cartoon shorts that didn't make it to this post and starred Betty.
For more on movie musicals, African-American entertainment legends, the big band era and the color line, read historian Donald Bogle's book on "the two Hollywoods", Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story Of Black Hollywood.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! Part 3 by Paul F. Etcheverry
The early talkie musicals featured entertainers who, having headlined feature films over an extended period of time, received some measure of enduring fame, others whose stardom was short-lived, as well as performers who, because they appeared in few movies, remain lesser-known.
Dear readers, do you start rolling around on the floor, laughing to the point of utter hysterics on the mere mention of the name "Osgood Fielding"?
Bought Blu-rays and DVDS of his movies or, even better, had the pleasure of seeing him get big laughs onstage in a touring company of Show Boat? Then you know what an outstanding performer and comedian Joe E. Brown was.
In the following toe-tapping number from Top Speed, Joe's dancing partner, Laura Lee, was also terrific, holding her own with the goofy, triple-jointed, rubber-legged comic - and showing plenty of spunk in the process. Take it, Joe and Laura!
Your correspondent is an absolute sucker for the epic late silent films (directed with cinematic genius by F.W. Murnau and Frank Borzage, respectively) Sunrise and Seventh Heaven. Both starred another actress in the category of "the camera loves her", Janet Gaynor.
Here's Janet, with extra Alice White style pep, demonstrating charm, the effects of excessive coffee drinking and early talkie musical mojo in a Fox feature that made its New York premiere squarely between the September 1929 implosion of the London Stock Exchange and the Wall Street crash in October, Sunnyside Up.
Actress and vocalist Sharon Lynn is remembered fondly as the uber-villainess co-star of the Laurel & Hardy feature Way Out West, but also achieved silver screen immortality in the wonderful "Turn On The Heat" production number - also in Sunnyside Up.
Ms. Lynn, also among the stars of the lost Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929, delivers the vocal prelude to skillful and snazzy dancing by nimble Ziegfeld Follies hoofer Ann Pennington in the following production number from Happy Days.
Sam Goldwyn signed vaudeville icon Eddie Cantor to a contract. His appearances in silents (Kid Boots) were quite successful, so, to make a splash in talkies, Goldwyn produced Whoopee as just the first of a slew of musical comedy vehicles starring the legendary "Banjo Eyes".
Whoopee not only starred the great Eddie Cantor, but also a bevy of adorable showgirls (including Betty Grable) and, most importantly, the way-out visions of the one, the only Busby Berkeley.
Paramount Pictures got into the musicals game early, with Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, starring legendary "torch singer" Helen Morgan, as well as The Love Parade, the first of several wildly successful vehicles co-starring Maurice Chevalier, everyone's favorite randy Parisian, with diva Jeanette McDonald.
Ernst Lubitsch's sophisticated musical didn't just spotlight the stars but also featured magnificent numbers featuring the supporting players, in this case England's finest acrobatic comedian, Lupino Lane, and actress-songstress-comedienne Lillian Roth.
Some of the lesser-known stars and supporting players from the movie musicals of 1929-1930 were incredible performers. One was Broadway legend Zelma O'Neal, hugely popular on stage and in her excellent recordings.
Zelma was a larger-than-life personality, and, unfortunately, the movie that provided the perfect showcase for her formidable talents never materialized. Why MGM never signed her to be singing-dancing "comic relief" in their big budget musical extravaganzas starring Eleanor Powell and other headliners, we'll never know.
Still, Ms. O' Neal was responsible for absolutely blazing moments in her relatively few silver screen appearances.
Although the popular team of silent film headliner Buddy Rogers (from Wild Bill Wellman's WINGS) and winsome musical star Nancy Carroll were the headliners of Paramount Pictures' Follow Thru, the question remains, who stole the picture?
Answer? Zelma O'Neal and her equally funny co-star, the fabulous Jack Haley!
Singing the number she originated onstage, Zelma demonstrates her buoyant good humor, comedy chops and winning personality. No doubt, those who got to see Zelma tear it up onstage enjoyed a rare treat!
Readers of this blog may recognize Zelma from Peach O' Reno, a splendid and fast-paced 1931 film starring the comedy team of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. In the following clip, Bert and sprightly Dorothy Lee, as Joe E. Brown did so well, show us a thing or two about keeping the fun quotient in entertainment.
Here, Mr. Woolsey does a bit of terpsichorean tripping the lights fantastic - invariably with good humor.
Wheeler & Woolsey also began their movie career in musicals shot in glorious two-strip Technicolor. The first two RKO films starring the team, Rio Rita (1929) and Dixiana (1930), employ the semi-operatic format which was popular on stage, but never quite right for movies.
The team, however, would go on to star in a series of very good comedies through the 1930's, daunted only when strict enforcement of the Production Code commenced in July 1934 and "sanitized" their trademark double entendre-filled humor.
Even in these rather stage bound films, Bert, Bob and Dorothy are nothing if not troupers! Dorothy and Bert sing the following song with a genuine sweetness that's a welcome alternative to the empty snark of 2014 entertainment.
Another team that was not served well by the "filmed stage play" method was the Marx Brothers. Their first feature films were the stagey adaptations of their Broadway smashes The Coconuts (which featured the music of Irving Berlin and a book by George S. Kaufman, with additional material by Morrie Ryskind) and Animal Crackers. Then as now, Groucho got the last laugh.
Here's Groucho, merging Algonquin Round Table with Gilbert & Sullivan in a ditty he deftly pulverized Broadway audiences with and would sing with caustic glee the rest of his performing life.
Part 4 of this series will cover the WTF wonders that were musical short subjects, from MGM, Paramount, Vitaphone, Columbia and more.
We sign off with a respectful Jack Buchanan top hat tip to The Talkie King, who has done film historians a valuable service by posting dozens of numbers from movie musicals on his YouTube channel.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! Part 2
The "revue" musical, a clever way for a movie studio to showcase their stars en masse and exploit their singing and dancing acumen - whether they had any or not - was quite the rage in 1929.
By far, Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's favorite number from all the revues is comedienne Winnie Lightner's boffo performance of the indescribable "Singing Of The Bathtub" number from The Show Of Shows. It epitomizes The All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing! All WTF! heading of this series.
The sensation that was "talkies", of course, led to a spate of "revue" pictures. MGM got the ball rolling with The Hollywood Revue Of 1929.
The number from MGM's hit revue - spoofed mercilessly with by "Singing In The Bathtub" - was the original "Singin' In The Rain", performed enthusiastically by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards and a cast of thousands. And it was a box-office smash.
For this writer, the highlight of the film, even given the fun comic turns provided by Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton, is the larger-than-life Marie Dressler singing For I'm The Queen. Sound was no problem for Marie, a stage star 30 years before The Hollywood Revue Of 1929 was made.
One can imagine moviegoers all over the United States and the world traipsing in droves to their movie palaces to see this and saying, "look, Hortense, it's Joan Crawford - and she's in one of them thar talking pictures!"
The MGM hit was also a confluence of new talent on the way up and silent film stars on the way down. Case in point: this scene co-starring Billy Haines (star of Brown Of Harvard and Show People) and Jack Benny. Haines was actually near the end of his stretch as a movie headliner, although he would enjoy great success in his post-showbiz career as an interior decorator to the stars, while Jack, believe it or not under the age of 39 here, was a few years away from radio stardom.
Seem every studio followed Hollywood Revue Of 1929 with their own star-studded extravaganzas. That would include Universal's The King Of Jazz, Warner Brothers' aforementioned The Show Of Shows, Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929, Paramount's Ziegfeld Follies style revue Glorifying The American Girl and the epic Paramount On Parade.
The King Of Jazz has much to recommend it. There's the historic first screen appearance of Bing Crosby, bandleader Paul Whiteman performing an abbreviated version of George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, and a jaunty, inventive cartoon segment in the early 1930's "rubber hose" style courtesy of the Walter Lantz Studio.
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog's pick: "Happy Feet", arguably the greatest "toe tapping tune" ever in a movie musical, not only features Bing & The Rhythm Boys (Harry Barris and Al Rinker), but an absolutely astounding performance, beginning at 2:18, by quadruple-jointed dancer Al "Rubber Legs" Norman.
The Show Of Shows might be the oddest of the group, with the acerbic vaudeville emcee/conqueror Frank Fay as the master of ceremonies, and peculiar talent combinations throughout.
The following number about the famous Floradora girls features a darn near unrecognizable Alice White and a VERY young Myrna Loy (a few years away from glory in The Thin Man series), and, as The Floradora Boys, stalwart silent movie comedians Ben Turpin, Charles Lynn (a.k.a. "Heine" Conklin), Lupino Lane, Lee Moran, Bert Roach and Lloyd Hamilton.
Even odder is the fascinating "recitation" number, featuring stage icon Beatrice Lillie, along with Fay and two favorite avatars who exemplify classic silent film humor, the aforementioned Hamilton and one of the hardest working comediennes in show business, slapstick queen and former Mack Sennett Studio headliner Louise Fazenda. Even here, Ms. Lillie shows why she still ranks high on the short list of all-time legendary performers.
As fate would have it, a reel of nitrate footage from The Show Of Shows, lost for over 80 years (and including the "Sisters" number in its entirety) has been recently discovered and shall be restored by The George Eastman House, so a fresh reassessment may soon be in order.
Fox Movietone Follies Of 1929 didn't have the star power of the others, possibly because the studio was already directing its prodigious creative energy both into its Movietone sound technology and many other places - brilliant feature films crafted lovingly by director Frank Borzage, popular vehicles for homespun Will Rogers and a series of films, including non-revue musicals starring Janet Gaynor.
However, as a hail Mary response to the competition, William Fox produced a feature which was shot in 70mm and, of course, included color sequences. Unlike the other films, Movietone Follies Of 1929 also attempted to break from the revue format and weave a backstage plot (already an old warhorse in 1929) between the peppy production numbers. There were even hit records from songs in the movie.
Unfortunately, Movietone Follies is a lost film, just one among countless Fox productions that burned up in an infamous 1937 vault fire Only the section featuring the comedy team of Clark & McCullough that was shot for the movie but released instead as a short subject exists. The sequel to Movietone Follies, however, an all-singing, all-dancing revue extravaganza creatively titled New Movietone Follies Of 1930 also includes Multicolor sequences and exists in the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
Paramount On Parade could be considered the most interesting, imaginative and entertaining entry in the revue musical sweepstakes. There is a cinematic approach that distinguishes it from the other revue films.
The king of the lot, song and dance man Maurice Chevalier, headlined Paramount On Parade with his customary panache, savoir faire and happy lechery.
Paramount On Parade also features an appearance by the legendary silent film star known as "The It Girl", Clara Bow.
Unlike the rather stiff and labored Romeo & Juliet segment from Hollywood Revue Of 1929 featuring superstars John "Jack" Gilbert and Norma Shearer, this at least reveals why Clara was a movie star of the first rank.
In silents and talkies, the camera loves Clara Bow. Although the powers that were at Paramount tried to get her to lose the Brooklyn accent, it's clearly part and parcel of her onscreen oeuvre.
When viewing the folllowing "True To The Navy" number from Paramount Of Parade, her great charm and megawatt personality are most evident.
The suits at Paramount - then as now - entirely missed the point. At least her final two films, produced by Fox, Call Her Savage and especially Hoop-la, successfully bring Clara's tremendous charisma and warmth to the fore.
At that point, Clara had, with good reason, simply had it with the pressure, paparazzi, tabloid headlines, studio politics and general b.s. of Hollywood, married Rex Bell and retired from showbiz. Over just a few years as a star, she was responsible for amazing silver screen performances.
"The It Girl" was just one of many stars of screen and stage to be featured in musicals of the early talkie era, and we'll get to the others in Part 3 of this series. But first, we'll give a Clara Bow top hat tip to Steve Zalusky for that splendid newspaper ad, and then sign off with "Ping Pongo", another wacky Winnie Lightner number from The Show Of Shows.
Labels:
Clara Bow,
classic movies,
early talkies,
film history,
musicals,
Winnie Lightner
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