The King of Jazz

The King of Jazz is a very early Technicolor movie musical from 1930.  The picture was directed by a Broadway stage director, Paul Murray Anderson, and, reportedly, budgeted at 1.5 million dollars -- an enormous fortune in Depression-era money.  Recently released on Criterion in a luminous reconstruction, the film now runs about 98 minutes (original screen time was 105 minutes) and it is almost indescribably weird.  The picture reminds us that the past is a strange country, indeed, and, in some respects, more trackless than the jungles of the Amazon basin.  The wayfarer ventures into such territory at his or her own risk.

Essentially, the movie is a film of a Broadway revue.  Because of technology limitations, the camera doesn't move.  However, the director had access to a crane and there are a number of showy overhead shots, images of flailing legs and arms arranged florally that undoubtedly influenced Busby Berkeley.  There is no plot and the picture proceeds on the basis of a hand turning pages of a scrapbook -- each scrapbook page announces the next skit or number.  The common thread linking sections is Paul Whiteman and his jazz band.  Whiteman was a classically trained musician who rose to enormous fame in the twenties with his brand of symphonic "jazz".  Although largely forgotten today, Whiteman was an influential figure -- Bix Beiderbecke played for him and he commissioned Gershwin to write "Rhapsody in Blue" for his band's performance in 1924 (Ferde Grofe did the orchestration -- Grofe was also once famous for his symphonic suites, most notably "the Grand Canyon Suite.")  The film is designed to provide just about every species of American popular music from up-tempo jazz dance tunes to ballads and big orchestral numbers including a reprise of Gershwin's "Rhapsody" -- it turns out to be a rhapsody in grey and silver-teal because the film's resplendent, but limited, two-color Technicolor process couldn't reproduce blues.  What makes the film so ineffably strange is that it is a kind of zombie -- the heart and soul of American popular music is African-American:  the Blues, Dixieland jazz, and spirituals.  Whiteman, although he hired African-Americans as composers and arrangers, didn't have any Black musicians in his band -- the logistical problems of touring a mixed-race band in segregated America were simply too challenging.  Accordingly, the picture affords the peculiar spectacle of a thorough-going review of American pop music, but without any authentic blues, jazz, or spirituals -- the effect is to render the film curiously soul-less and heart-less:  there's a big hole where the film's authentic American spirit should be found.  Popular music, of course, defines itself as counter-cultural -- it opposes the staid traditions of the opera and marching band and the symphonic  hall.  Authentic American pop is always counter-cultural because it derives from Black music -- that is, music produced by a group of people who have been traditionally excluded and treated as outsiders by the dominant White culture.  But there is another kind of pop, less authentic perhaps, but equally pervasive -- this is youth pop and much of the film seems to be in thrall to this influence.  Grown people talk in iddy-biddy baby voices and much of humor is profoundly unsophisticated and childish. (Children also occupy a position outside of the cultural mainstream.)  The film's default mode seems to be bizarre infantilism.  There are all sorts of examples of this peculiarly juvenile and puerile aesthetic and it's my contention that this sort of thing is what you get in pop music if you extract the real suffering and authentic roots implicit in Afro-American jazz, blues and other musical forms.  Whiteman himself is a big pale cartoon figure -- he looks very much like Oliver Hardy and seems to be babyish himself.  A woman that likes him talks baby-talk to him ("I want to do things for you" -- this number also features a bizarre sadomasochistic couple, female dominant, in which the woman repeatedly slaps and beats her male counterpart.)  Several of musicians use baby-talk and there is an extended vaudeville number consisting of card tricks and weird banter that is so strange that it has to be seen to be believed.  The film commences with an animated cartoon of Whiteman threatened with death in darkest Africa -- itself a childish notion, although, like everything else, in the film, extremely amusing.  One man dances with an adult-sized rag doll, another astonishing sequence, and there are all sorts of contortionist and gymnastic dance scenes.  A "rubber-legs" dancer performs, leading viewers to wonder exactly how the performer achieved the boneless gyrations in his lower extremities.  Parts of the show resemble Laugh-In -- that is, there are short, often ingenious, black-out skits, none more than a minute or so in length.  Bing Crosby appears as one of the Rhythm Boys and sings a couple of songs, some of them with inscrutable lyrics.  (Crosby had to perform on day work-release from jail; he was imprisoned in jail as a result of a drunk-driving crash on Sunset Boulevard.)  There is a Rockettes number in which all the dancers remain seated -- another number begins with them kicking their legs in their air with each girl flat on her back.  There are proto-country-and-western songs and, even, a strange climax in which Paul Whiteman, the King of Jazz, dances with delirious proficiency (although it turns out that the dance is actually performed by a very similar-looking double -- this is revealed when the real Whiteman peels off the pencil-thin moustache of his double.)  The film is gorgeous -- people's faces glow like ripe peaches:  in one hallucinatory scene, two pale girls with black-bobbed hair, coiffeurs such as that sported by Louise Brooks, sing with their heads lolling on a kind of mirrored floor -- they seem to be decapitated.  The final number is called "Melting Pot" and it shows whole platoons of ethnic musicians from Germany and Ireland and Scotland; there are even a couple hundred people from Bohemia playing accordions.  But there is no trace of any African-Americans in the film with one exception -- a number called "On a Park Bench" shows various couples canoodling on stylized outdoor park benches:  the scene ends with a shot of Whiteman holding a little Black-girl on his lap -- she's a pick-a-ninny of the sort featured in the old Minstrel Shows with a huge infectious grin.  The credits name her as "Snowdrop."