Blues in the Night

In some self-help book that I perused years ago, I read the startling comment that the most tragic of all destinies was to desire to become a professional musician.  Human ingenuity and determination is so powerful that many, many thousands of young people achieve virtuosity on the piano, or as singers, or playing instruments.  In every little town in the US, for instance, there is a local guitar hero, as accomplished as Stevie Ray Vaughn, a village virtuoso that you have never heard of and who will never achieve any sort of fame.  Only a tiny minority, the merest fraction of these immensely talented people, can earn a living by pursuing their dreams to be professional musicians.  Most will fail and, in fact, find their lives stunted by the very talent that they have so assiduously cultivated.  It's a melancholy truth that, for the vast majority of talented people, the 10,000 hours spent mastering an instrument or voice or dance would have been better devoted to studying accounting or carpentry.

This truth lies close to the heart of Anatol Litvak's strangely unsettling and purgatorial Blues in the Night (1941), an odd and disturbing musical.  The film begins with an indirection -- we see a young law student enthusiastically praising the jazz piano work of a dark-haired and dark-eyed man named Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf).  The law student, played by Elia Kazan, seems to be Jewish and repeatedly talks about his mother to whom he is ardently devoted (we never see her -- it's a tic of the sort that Hollywood thought showed "character" at the time this film was made).  At first, we think the law student who proposes to form a real jazz band with Jigger is the main character -- we suspect that as in The Jazz Singer, the subject will be the young clarinetist disappointing his parents to pursue a career in the tawdry world of pop music -- and, then, inevitably achieving fame.  But the film doesn't go in that direction.  Jigger and his boys get into a fight with a patron who wants them to play "champagne" music, the "bubbly stuff".   They end up in jail where the boys encounter another man, a huge guy, who is also a musician.  In those days, the world was segregated -- the Black prisoners in the hoosegow are across the hall and they sing the blues mournfully, the title tune "Blues in the Night."  The white musicians listen in awe and resolve that they will form a band, a "unit" with five members like a hand in a glove, to play Jazz.

Along the way, the band picks up an egotistical trumpet-player -- a self-proclaimed heel with a pretty blonde girlfriend named oddly "Character."  The band travels to New Orleans and listens to real Black musicians playing jazz in a juke-joint.  (The film expresses obliquely a real anxiety about the fact that the white protagonists are culturally appropriating -- to use today's terminology -- African-American art.)  The trumpeter boasts he can play as good as the Black musicians -- so, on a bet, he takes up his trumpet and, unable to share the stage with the Black performers, plays a duet with them from the audience.  (Again, the specter of strict segregation rears its ugly head -- at the time,apparently, it was forbidden to show White and Black musicians on the same stage.)  The band plays various gigs but makes almost no money.  They have to travel from place to place by hitching rides in box cars.  This is all depicted by astonishing montages that were apparently the work of Don Siegel, later to become the famous director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry.  A kindly railroad yard guard lets the kids stay in the box-car where they merrily play and sing -- Character is the band's girl singer.  A gangster hitches a ride in the same box-car and coldly robs the band of its tiny reserve of funds.  Later, the young people arrive in Hoboken, near the George Washington Bridge, where they are hired to play at a gambling joint called"The Jungle".  This dilapidated venue is operated by the gangster, Del, who true to form, has a sluttish, big-eyed babe as his moll.  This woman, the film's femme fatale, is a little like Marlene Dietrich's trashy chanteuse -- she has humiliated ex-lovers in her service who help her with putting on her stockings and act as her body-servants.  One of these disgraced men is a former rodeo star, now a cripple, named  Brad.  An actress unknown to me, Betty Field, plays this part and she exudes raw sexuality in a disturbingly charismatic manner -- you can understand how she has destroyed the men around her.  Kay, as this woman is called, is hopelessly in love with the brutish Del.  Poor Character, the band's girl singer, is pregnant with the trumpet-player's child.  She has trouble with the pregnancy and has to refrain from performing.  The band leader, Jigger Pine, falls in love with Kay who is simply using him to make the gangster, Del, jealous.  Kay is so wicked that she breaks up the "unit" of the band.  She seduces Jigger who leaves the band to pervert his talents with a popular Big Band in Manhattan -- this show-band features a girl-singer who babbles pig-Latin and baby-talk while tap-dancers cavort atop Jigger's piano.   Jigger can't tolerate his life as a sell-out and,.when Kay cruelly leaves him, he has a spectacular nervous breakdown.  (Siegel shows this with multiple superimpositions of Kay's demented sneer -- the woman multiplies to become hundreds of identical musicians and, then, she frantically tap-dances as a miniature devil doll on Jigger's hallucinated keyboard.) Jigger's band members save him, and Character nurses him back to health.  (He isn't told that Character's baby was still-born.)  Playing a gig at the gambling hell, "The Jungle", Jigger glimpses Kay stalking about in a wild lightning storm.  He goes to her and pleads to be her lover again.  As she is coldly dismissing him, Del appears, knocks her around, and, then, after a ferocious fight between Jigger and the gangster, Kay seizes the bad guy's dropped gun and shoots him to death.  Brad, the humiliated rodeo clown, has been lurking around the edges of this scene.  He drags Kay to a sedan and drives wildly into the storm, vowing to put an end to their misery.  The sedan crashes and there is a fiery explosion.  The band, restored as a "unit", leaves Hoboken.  In the final scene, a box-car is towed into a railcar switching yard late at night.  Music is heard and the kindly night watchman comes to the freight car and finds the band members playing and singing in their miserable lodgings.  He walks away and the film ends.

The picture is noteworthy because there is no happy ending, not even a vestige -- in a picture like this, the audience expects the band to achieve some modicum of fame and fortune.  But this is not the case in Blues in the Night -- in fact, the band achieves no success at all.  We last see them impoverished, still riding the rails, and unable to live except hand-to-mouth.  The sets are expressionistic murals, black tableaux that resemble the woodcuts of Frans Masereel -- the train-yard is a gloomy angular mass of shadows near a skeletal-looking grain elevator; Manhattan is an inaccessible range of lights beyond a huge shadowy bridge.  The film's acting is extremely broad and cartoonish -- the creator of The Simpson's, Matt Groening says that this is his favorite film.  But the playing is effective and brisk.  Major plot points, for instance, the death of Character's baby, are merely glanced at, the subject of a stray allusion.  I have called the film purgatorial because it suggests the hopelessness and unsustainability of the lives of these nomadic musicians and, yet, their dogged devotion to their impractical and impoverishing vocation.  The song-and-dance numbers are all very good and, even, thrilling in their different ways.  The desire to perform and create music is infectious and inspiring -- but it leads to playing miserable gambling parlors, sleeping in a barn, cold and hunger, and, at last, riding the rails to nowhere.

(As extras, the DVD contains two amazing short films devoted to African-American musicians, as if in recompense for the deficits in the feature.  One of them, "Jammin' the Blues" features Lester Young and company and it's really wonderful; the other shows a Black big band and is also astonishing.  There are some very fine Warner Brother's cartoons selected because they each briefly advert to "Blues in the Night", a song by Johnny Mercer that became a hit after this film.  The movie was released the week of Pearl Harbor and sank like a stone at the box office.)