Blues in the Night (1941)
directed by Anatole Litvak, starring Richard Whorf, Jack Carson, Betty Field, Priscilla Lane
Note: Review requested by W.B. Kelso, of the fabulous blog 3B Theater: Micro-Brewed Reviews
Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) is a world-class pianist with only one dream in his heart. To start his own jazz band (or "unit" as he calls it). A group of guys that play the same, live the same, and think the same. All of them on a mission to find the music of the streets and give it back to the people. His friend, reluctant lawyer/aspiring clarinetist Nickie (Elia Kazan) believes in his vision and they recruit two of their friends: Pete the bassist (Peter Whitney) and Peppi the drummer (Billy Halop). It isn't long before their enthusiasm wins over more people, too. Scheming trumpeter Leo (Jack Carson) and his sweet, optimistic wife Character (Priscilla Lane). The quintet begin their ragged life on the road, hitching rides on boxcars and playing to whatever audience they can find.
It's a hard but happy life until one faithful day when they run across ex-con Del Davis (Lloyd Nolan). One careless act of generosity on their parts is enough to win the gangster's loyalty and he brings them to his roadhouse, the aptly-named jungle. The former members of Davis' gang, his old partner Sam (Howard Da Silva), his old flame Kay (Betty Field), and Kay's crippled ex-lover Brad (Wallace Ford), are running the joint and none of them are too happy that Davis has decided to adopt this group of stray musicians. It isn't long before Kay, still angling to win back Davis, takes up with Leo. When Leo gets wise, she sinks her hooks into Jigger. Her toxic demands turn Jigger from a confident musician into a hollow-eyed wreck, willing to tear down everything else to make her happy. Even if it means turning his back on the band and the music he loves.
Blues in the Night is a movie that seems specially ordered for a night of insomniac channel-surfing, the kind of movie you watch through bleary, dazzled eyes at 3:00 A.M. and then forget about until the next morning, when you try to summarize it to your friends. All goes normally at first ("There's these guys that want to start a jazz band"). But before long you start to stumble over the details ("So the baby's dead and the pianist goes on some insane acid trip on account of the gangster's ex-girlfriend and he starts hallucinating that he's an organ grinder's monkey, but the band convinces him to come back, but then the ex-girlfriend returns to plot more evil until her crippled sidekick decides to put a stop to her.."). And then you start to think, "Wait, what the hell was I watching?"
But Blues in the Night is more than the sum of its delirious plot points. It's an amazingly appealing genre mash-up, a film that starts out like any other light musical comedy of Hollywood's golden age and spirals into a proto-noir of backstabbing dames, mental breakdowns, and vengeful gangsters. Despite the descent into darkness, though, the movie remains innocent at the core, allowing its group of music-minded misfits to walk through Hell and emerge unscathed. I have a weakness for movies that can skip through multiple genres. Maybe it's because as movies get bigger, they also get safer. Scene after scene of well-made, polished sameness. Did Blues in the Night seem as messy to the theater audiences of 1941 as it does now? Probably. But I doubt those audiences could have predicted how exhilarating watching that kind of mess could be, seventy years later.
I can pinpoint the exact scene where I fell for this movie. We catch up with our band of musicians as they steal a ride on a boxcar. After raising each other's spirits with a round of "Hang on to Your Lids, Kids," our gang welcomes a fellow traveler aboard. Only this traveler is no ordinary bum; he's a hardened criminal, who immediately pulls a gun and demands money. They hand over all they have and the train travels on, into the night. The gangster, Del Davis huddles by himself in the corner while the gang falls asleep, clutching their instruments. When the train pulls into the station, a railway man opens the car and beams the flashlight into the faces of our heroes. Instead of getting mad, he greets them as old friends. "Last time I saw you was three months ago...still riding the boxcars?" He promises not to kick them off, leaving them with a warning not to play so loud. When he's gone, the gang promptly settles back down to sleep but Davis won't let them.
"You could have turned me in," he snaps.
"Why should we? We've been broke and hungry, too," says Jigger, the band leader.
The band members lie back down, curled up together like kittens or a bunch of kids at a sleepover. They are total innocents, completely unafraid or resentful. A smile breaks out over Davis' face and you can see the lost humanity slowly return to his eyes. When this hardened gangster decides to take care of them, it plays out not just as some ridiculous plot twist, but a sweet fantasy. Nobody survives on luck and music alone but sometimes, it's nice to pretend we could.
Director Anatole Litvak doesn't give you any time to question the plot of Blue in the Night. He keeps it moving at a frantic pace; you can almost hear him snapping his fingers in the background of each scene, ordering each actor to pick up the tempo. These jazz musicians talk faster than Wall Street stockbrokers, trading quips and comments and insults at such a rate that one scene can shuffle through six different moods. I like the speed, though. It reminds me of His Girl Friday and Stage Door, other movies about people doing what they love, no matter what it costs them. If you love something so much you couldn't imagine doing anything else, then why wouldn't your brain zip along at the speed of twenty ideas per minute?
While Litvak's direction is smooth and confident throughout, the movie really turns on the heat with the montage sequences (credited to Don Siegel). The first one is a sharp evocation of what life on the road means for a penniless jazz band. We race through images of the band members playing, of maps, and outstretched thumbs and speeding cars. I especially like the way the film uses angles, swiping across the screen with a character's instrument when it cuts into the next scene, as if to show music itself as a physical force, propelling these people onward.
But the second montage is the crowning glory of the film, its most perfect, bizarre moment. Jigger Pine falls off the deep end after the femme fatale Kay leaves him. He can't even remember how to play the songs he wrote. Suddenly, after a disastrous reunion with his friends, Jigger falls unconscious and dives headfirst into a surreal hallucination. He sees his bandmates. Then they turn into the five fingers of a hand. He sees Kay, repeated over and over, until she becomes an entire orchestra, each of them playing a separate instrument. Giant hands wave in his face. He shrinks down into an organ grinder's monkey while his bandmates taunt him. And then, in an image that feels like it should have been storyboarded by Salvador Dali, Jigger finds himself at the piano, ready to play, only for the keys to melt into white goo, trapping his fingers completely. The imagery is so stark and arresting that the movie doesn't even try to follow up on it in any logical way. Jigger just wakes up from this crazy dream and that's it, he's ready to be cured. I'm sort of wondering if Kay herself is supposed to be a metaphor for drug or alcohol addiction, because it really does play out more like Ray Milland coming off the DTs in The Lost Weekend than anything else.
Richard Whorf plays the film's protagonist, Jigger Pine, as a man of almost unreal goodness and conviction. He's always smiling, always supportive. Litvak keeps Whorf as the focus of nearly every group shot, letting the other band members cluster around him like eager acolytes. Because the movie holds Jigger up to such a high standard, I found myself almost rooting for the femme fatale Kay to drag him off his mountaintop. And drag him she does, right into the mental ward. Whorf has a relaxed, friendly presence onscreen and he handles Jigger's descent into desperation without histrionics (except that loopy hallucination scene). The script doesn't give him much chance to add character depth. Jigger's downfall happens as simply and easily as if someone had just flipped a light switch.
I'm really beginning to wonder what quirk of fate and casting kept landing dimpled, all-American Betty Field in the role of irresistible, untrustworthy female. Every time I see her, she's playing some kind of tramp, from low (Mae in Of Mice and Men) to high (Daisy in The Great Gatsby). Maybe it was that insinuating nasal whine she could put into her voice. Or maybe it was the go-for-broke energy she displays here as conniving Kay. Field's femme fatale is a jangling bunch of nerves and tinsel, a two-bit, no-talent floozy who chews through men like they were strips of gum. I've ripped into Field before on this blog, but she's much improved here, clearly relishing Kay's barbed-wire ambition more than Daisy's aristocratic charms. However, Field relishes it rather too much, playing up Kay's whiny, nagging side so much that it's difficult to understand how she ever manages to enslave men. Personally, I'd be hopping a boxcar just to escape the woman's awful vowel sounds. And when she calls down vengeance upon Jigger and Del and all the men who haven't given her what she wants, Field goes right for the rafters in a way that's madly enjoyable and downright silly. I mean, she doesn't shout, "And then I will build my race of atomic supermen!" but she comes close.
As Field's good-girl foil, Priscilla Lane manages the trick of being the squarest jazz musician ever seen, until Martin Milner stole her spot in Sweet Smell of Success. Okay, so that's rough on Lane. She does have a nice voice and if her sweet, blonde singer seems like she'd be more comfortable baking an apple pie than hitching it on boxcars, well, at least she provides the audience with a pleasant break from Field's nastiness. The script does add a bizarre touch by giving her character the name, "Character." Really? Maybe Ethel Waters could pull that off but Priscilla Lane?
Blues in the Night benefits from a wealth of wonderful supporting actors. There's Jack Carson, playing a heel as only Jack Carson could. It's a typical Carson role, the guy who knows he's laying traps for suckers but is honestly hurt and confused that these suckers would expect any more or less of him. There's also Elia Kazan, turning in another enjoyable, fast-talking performance after City for Conquest. Seriously, guys, I never would have pegged Kazan as any kind of acting talent, but that's twice now I've found him pretty good. Lloyd Nolan, as the gangster Del Davis, manages to convey the perfect amount of affability and menace.
But by far and away, my favorite supporting performer was Wallace Ford, who plays Brad, Kay's ex-lover and fumbling sidekick. At first, Brad seems like nothing more than a pathetic crony, a shuffling Igor too stupid to free himself from Kay and Davis. But in one key dialogue with Jigger, Ford slowly reveals the tragedy behind the man. Once he felt sorry for Kay. And then he fell in love with her, breaking his own body in a rodeo just to impress her. "I wasn't much good for anything after that except hanging around her." As Ford talks, you see Brad stand straight and tall for the first time, his voice free of self-pity, revealing a depth of experience that turns him from a cringing crony into a fallen hero.
Blues in the Night is a movie I'd be very happy to stumble across again. It's weird, it's sweet, it's got good Arlen and Mercer tunes, and it's entirely unique. I don't think I'd ever want to own it, though. It really belongs to that realm of happenstance movies. Too mixed-up for respectability, too cute for sophistication, and too enjoyable to resist.
Favorite Quote:
"You see, I'm a student of jazz. I know the anatomy of swing, not only musically but theoretically. I've heard everything from Le Jazz Hot to Downbeat. You'll find out for yourself. As the Latin say, res ipsa loquitur. On the side, I'm a student of the law."
Favorite Scene:
As I mentioned before, that crazy montage scene. Can't say it enough.
Final Six Words:
Exhilarating riff turns into fever dream
As a new year dawns, I look forward to many things. To seeing new places, to meeting new people, and of course, to seeing many more movies. And one of those movies is Baz Luhrmann's much-anticipated and much-delayed The Great Gatsby. Odd considering I don't really expect it to be a success. While I admit to a weakness for Moulin Rouge, I feel like Luhrmann's bombastic, all-or-nothing style is more likely to smother Fitzgerald's story than to lift it up. But the truth is that I am a Gatsby junkie, I have been since high school, I've seen the 1949, 1974, and 2000 movie adaptations, and I will no doubt go to the Luhrmann film still hoping for the best. The Great Gatsby is a story that feels so cinematic in its concept and yet it's never found a solid footing onscreen. Why?
Because my fascination with all things Gatsby extends to the films, I decided to examine the 1949 and 1974 films and how they went wrong. If you choose to read further, be warned that I assume you've read the book and know all these characters already.
The 1949 Film
(directed by Elliot Nugent, starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field)
This movie's been out of circulation for a long time due to copyright issues but a new print came out last year and a fuzzy but passable version is floating around online. It's definitely worth a look for just how strange it is. I say strange because its makers don't treat Gatsby like the great enshrined classic it would become. They appropriate the basic plot and turn it into, of all things, a film noir. It becomes the tale of a noble-hearted gangster and the woman who betrayed him. The writers and director play fast and loose with the story, spending a great deal of time on Gatsby's rise to power and subtly altering Daisy and Tom from callous aristocrats into treacherous and calculating plotters. Their final betrayal of Gatsby becomes a typical noir frame-up, with Daisy agreeing to make her lover into the patsy as Gatsby overhears. It is utterly unreal to see a Gatsby that actually wises up to Daisy's true nature in the end. Perhaps these alterations, bizarre as they feel to a lover of the book, could have worked. But the filmmakers don't fully commit to such a dark reinvention. Instead they put a white picket fence around it by making it a morality tale of lawlessness punished and bland goodness rewarded. You get the sense that this film was constructed from the scraps of other '40s films rather than being carefully crafted as its own story. So it's pretty much a failure as both a film and as an adaptation. And yet there is something interesting about seeing The Great Gatsby treated as just another story. It's something that would never happen again.
The 1974 Film
(directed by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow)
The 1974 movie is every inch the prestige production, including a respected director, the screenwriting talents of Francis Ford Coppola, popular stars, and an all-out, sumptuous recreation of the Jazz Age. Everything in this movie shimmers. The fashions are to die for. The parties are lavish. Unlike the sloppier 1949 version, the 1974 film dutifully repeats most of the original dialogue from the book. It also excises a fair amount of Nick Carraway's narration, instead focusing on the tragic romance of Daisy and Gatsby. You can tell that people were expecting this to be the definitive version, a dreamy, star-studded example of the best Hollywood craftsmanship. And yet this film also fails. Like Gatsby, it tries too hard. Jack Clayon opts for dramatic zooming and high-pitched melodrama so that moments that worked on the page become laughably overdone on film. Everything is categorized so that all love scenes have soft focus and slow music while the sleazy scenes all have a dyspeptic saxophone. And, as if to cap it all off, the film cuts off Nick's final testament to American dreamers for a kicky rendition of "Ain't We Got Fun?" over the credits. It's like a cake made only of stale icing, nothing underneath at all.
And now we move on to the most interesting part of these two faulty films: the casting.
Jay Gatsby
(Alan Ladd in 1949, Robert Redford in 1974)
The best reason to watch the 1949 film is because Alan Ladd is really, surprisingly very good as Jay Gatsby. In his day, Ladd was acclaimed more for his style than his depth (Where Danger Lives has a fascinating essay on the star and the tortuous insecurity he felt over his acting) but this film proves that assumption wrong. Ladd feels like a very natural Gatsby, the boyishness of his looks and manner contrasting with the cool confidence that Gatsby the character (and Ladd the actor) had learned how to fake. Ladd is able to utter even the absurdest bits of Gatsby's backstory with utter conviction. It's a great shame that the role never got Ladd the respect he so deeply wanted.
There's an old story Mike Nichols would tell about Robert Redford and the day he was almost cast as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. Nichols asked Redford to describe a time when he had struck out with a girl. Redford didn't understand the question. Whether the story is true or not, it does hit on an essential weakness of Redford the star. You could never buy him as a loser. That supernal golden-haired beauty and distant manner put him on a different plane. And that feeds into his portrayal of Gatsby since Redford never seems fully keyed into the desperation under Gatsby's dreaming or the eager, searching nature of a reinvented man. He is a more melancholy and thoughtful Gatsby than Ladd even while the script keeps trying to cast him as the earnest romantic hero. Overall, a noble failure. He does make for quite the iconic image though, as he stares at that green light.
Daisy Buchanan
(Betty Field in 1949, Mia Farrow in 1974)
The wide-eyed, plaintive Betty Field just feels like she's batting out of her league with Daisy. It's a flat, distracted performance, as if the main star of the show had been delayed and Field was a harried usher sent to distract us, all while keeping one eye on the fire exits. If the intent was to turn the '49 Gatsby into a film noir, then they failed utterly in giving their femme fatale any of the original Daisy's seductiveness, charm, or survival tactics.
If Field's performance is lackluster, Mia Farrow's portrayal has luster by the barrelful, enough to choke you with. At one point, director Jack Clayton literally films her with stars in her eyes. Unlike Elliot Nugent, who rushed through a lot of his Daisy's scenes, Clayton's camera bathes Farrow in shimmering light and loving close-ups. But he also indulges her in a performance that's so neurotic and silly that even the cutest and rootin-tootin-est of the Jazz Babies would have wanted to take an axe to this Daisy. In high school, my English teacher couldn't resist rewinding Farrow's final breakdown for us, calling it one of his favorite bits of bad acting ever. But then, Farrow was so painfully miscast. Daisy's voice should sound like money and Farrow, even at 29, had the cracked, mournful voice of an old woman. Daisy's meant to be the illusive lovely idol of Gatsby's dreams and Farrow, well... it's hard not to think of David O. Selznick's ungallant slap to Katharine Hepburn: "I can't imagine Rhett Butler chasing you around for twelve years."
Tom Buchanan
(Barry Sullivan in 1949, Bruce Dern in 1974)
Barry Sullivan wins an extra point from me for being the actor who physically looks the most like how I envisioned his character. Handsome and polished but with a lurking coldness in the eyes. It's a performance that emphasizes the menace of Tom's character. He barks orders more like a gangster than a polo player. Going along with the noir-like feel of the film, Sullivan is no golden boy. He's every bit the tough guy.
Bruce Dern is a very different interpretation of the rich, entitled Tom. Instead of emphasizing his violence, the later film emphasizes his comical nature. Dern delivers Tom's rambling comments on the superiority of Nordics and the social order in a reedy, petulant whine. This Tom is weak, childish, and unlovable, his ratty little mustache and irritable manner held up against Robert Redford's golden superiority as if to say, "Creeps like him can still get it all." Again, it gives an interesting angle on the character but as with the Sullivan version, you never get the sense that this Tom is a true aristocrat. The kind of man who can make Gatsby shrivel inside because no matter how idiotic he sounds, he was born to the purple. And Gatbsy is not.
Nick Carraway
(Macdonald Carey in 1949, Sam Waterston in 1974)
When I didn't like Macdonald Carey in Shadow of a Doubt, I told myself it was the contrived nature of his character, the police detective who falls instantly in love with the heroine. When I didn't like Macdonald Carey in The Damned, I said it was just the awkwardness of seeing a man in craggy middle age seduce the sexy young Shirley Ann Field. But it's three strikes now and I have to face the truth. Carey is smarmy. He's bland. There's nothing under the surface with him. And sadly, the '49 Gatsby decided that Nick Carraway should be the voice of the Hays Code so we have to endure Carey's stiff, lecturing presence telling us, "There is a way which seemeth right unto a man but the end thereof are the ways of death." This Nick is so upright and moral, he even reforms Jordan Baker!
Of all the Nick Carraways (including Tobey Maguire), Sam Waterston is the only one whose voice you might actually want for your narrator. He's a soothing, thoughtful presence onscreen but with enough rootless amiability to make his friendship with these people believable. The only problem is, the '74 version decided it didn't really need Nick after all. A lot of his character moments, including his crucial last speech, are pared down and instead we're treated to more Gatsby and Daisy interplay. So Fitzgerald's "boats against the current, borne ceaselessly back into the past" was cut but Daisy wittering about how she wants to push Gatsby around in "a big pink cloud" was left in. Nick is a difficult if not impossible character to succesfully integrate into a film adaptation because he functions more as a gateway than a character in his own right. But the '74 version leaves him stranded betwixt and between, still present but too remote to fully connect with anybody. His growing friendship with Gatsby is excised for more Daisy. It makes the heartbreaking moment when he tells Gatbsy that he's "worth the whole damn bunch put together" into an odd little throwaway moment. Did this Nick ever really care that much?
Jordan Baker
(Ruth Hussey in 1949, Lois Chiles in 1974)
Just as the '49 version of Nick was retooled into the voice of sober respectability, Ruth Hussey's turn as the amoral golfer Jordan Baker was also given a coat of suburban varnish. She vacillates between wanting to be part of her scheming coterie and wanting to be Nick Carraway's love. In the '49 film, we also get to see Jordan's future: she ends up as Nick's loving, gray-haired wife. Because that makes so much sense. Hussey is a fine actress and her specialty was the wisecracking and sensible side character. But she's a little too smart and down-to-earth for either of the roles the script wants to put her in. You get the sense that this Jordan could have a fine busy life elsewhere if she had the sense to get away from these people.
Lois Chiles isn't nearly as good an actress as Hussey but her silver-tongued and sultry Jordan is still a pleasure. While her predecessor was tart and sensible, Chiles comes across more as a person so utterly devoid of inner doubt that she will continue to glide serenely across the surface for the rest of her days. And man does she rock those Jazz Age fashions (The Fashionéaste has an excellent run-through of the '74 film's glorious costume designs). The only problem with Chiles is that her husky purr and seductive smile were given to the wrong character--her voice sounds more like money than Farrow's does.
Myrtle Wilson
(Shelley Winters in 1949, Karen Black in 1974)
The only surprise in Shelley Winters' casting as Tom Buchanan's doomed mistress Myrtle is that it happened before Winters had gotten a permanent lock on all "blowsy, unwanted female" roles. She doesn't really get much of a chance to shine in the part and the '49 version doesn't do much to glamorize Myrtle. Thankfully, it doesn't try to belittle her either.
Karen Black might tie with Mia Farrow for being the performer most unpleasantly indulged by her director. We get lots of closeups of Black either laughing or weeping, her emotions practically dripping off the screen. It's a relief when she moves away. Granted, Myrtle is never meant to be a femme fatale or a delicate flower, but it also means that the tragedy of her death is swallowed up by the film's goofy stylizations. And did they have to play that stereotypical "sleazy jazz" over her scenes?
And what about the 2013 movie?
I really don't know if we will ever have a Gatsby film that works. Maybe the book truly does begin and end with the beauty of Fitzgerald's writing, as some critics say. Maybe Fitzgerald is having a subtle revenge on the Hollywood he hated and he watches from beyond the grave while these films only scratch the surface of what he wrote. It could be that Baz Luhrmann will succeed. As a Gatsbyphile, I know I'll still be watching, for better or for worse.
Note: The still of Betty Field is taken from Classic Cinema Gold and the image of Lois Chiles is credited to Cult Queens.