Monday, July 28, 2008
Hidden treasure in Special Features menu: Jammin' the Blues
I was hoping that Pete Kelley's Blues with Jack Webb and Ella Fitzgerald was going to be next disc sent in the latest round of Netflix roulette, but I ended up instead with Blues in the Night (1941). It turned out to be quite a strange little film, a fusion of a standard B movie gangster film, a musical where a ragtag group of musicians rode box cars and effusively expressed their desire to keep true to their musical vision, and an early excursion into psychological themes for forties director Anatole Litvak. Litvak went on to direct The Snake Pit and Sorry. Wrong Number, two of the most noted of noirs with women as central characters. But in 1941, the dark side had to be expressed in very strange dream sequences (credited to Don Siegel, no less) where lab overprinting and high key light out are given a work out.
Priscilla Lane plays Character, the effervescent good girl singer who always looks great even when she is traveling in a boxcar. Betty Field is Kay Grant, the bad girl, parasitically preying on the weaknesses of men to get her through. Kind of in the middle is the sensitive artistic genius, Jigger Lane, played by Robert Whorf, Jigger's patron is Del Davis, (Lloyd Nolan, many years before he was Dr. Chegley) who has the band booked at the Jungle, his New Jersey road house and gambling operation. Davis wants nothing to do with Kay after he was double-crossed by her. This gives her the opportunity to get her meathooks into Jigger, causing him to go to a mental hospital for "Psychiatric Neurosis" which means having a bunch of weird montage sequences to describe his mental state during treatment treatment. Hopefully, he will get well enough to play more of those Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer songs he supposedly wrote...
Blues in the Night wasn't terrible. It was a fun little trifle for a hot summer day in the basement. But the best thing about this DVD release were the extras--two Porky Pig cartoons, a vintage featurette with the excellent showmanship of the Jimmy Lunceford Band, who were also featured in Blues in the Night. .
But most notable is the inclusion of Jammin' the Blues, maybe the most important Hollywood jazz film of the forties. Lester Young, Philly Jo Jones, Illinois Jacquet, Sweets Edison and others, perform in a staged jam session with lovely direction and lighting, I have only seen bootleg 16mm copies in the past, so to see a digitally enhanced version was ten minutes of jazz bliss. Here, check it out for yourself...
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:11 PM
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