Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Jack Webb With Cornet Instead Of His Badge
About half way through Pete Kelly's Blues, I wondered if the film's star/director, Jack "Sgt Friday" Webb had some kind of obsession with Orson Welles or if Welles had served as some kind of role model for him. There certainly were some parallels in their careers with their reputations being made from being radio show auteurs. Plus all kinds of Wellesian shots appear in Pete Kelly. The famous shot in Citizen Kane that begins with the cockatoo on the porch is repeated similarly in Pete Kelly's Blues, which is also filled with lots of low angle mise en scene compositions similar to Kane.
There is an entire song in a notable full two minute shot, all low angle with Martin Milner sopped out of his mind drinking beer instead of playing drums and Lee Marvin with his legs crossed playing the clarinet that ends with plot point conflict between the coronet wielding Sgt Friday, oops, excuse me Pete Kelly. Jack Webb is one of the most wooden of actors. His love scenes with Janet Leigh are particularly stagnant. You almost expect him to ask for "just the facts maa'm."
Pete Kelly's Blues strives to be a big 1955 wide screen experience to compete with television has gorgeous color cinematography by Harold Rosen, a couple of nice tunes by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald. But Edmond O'Brien, at least to my mind, is never a a very imposing gangster. And Jack Webb playing the cornet in a roaring twenties outfit during the height of hard swing and bop of the fifites makes him about as out of touch as when he was trying to bust hippies in the sixties in the third or fourth generation of Dragnet.
Still there is a kind of audacious campy pleasure to this film. It begins with an elaborately staged New Orleans funeral where the cornet of a greatly admired horn player ends up in the mud and then is won in a WWI era poker game by Webb. (for real, I'm not making that up) and Peggy Lee has a strange mad scene in a mental hospital that earned her an Oscar nomination. Don't expect much. Instead just sit back and enjoy the Rebel without a Cause Warner fifties colors and Jack Webb's walk, one of most self conscious in Hollywood history among other goofy delights.
One thing links to another. One of the great finds after looking up Jack Webb on the net after viewing Pete Kelly's was the Acid Logic Ezine. These guys definitely could dine at my buffet.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:05 AM
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