by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had watched a quite
delightful movie we’d got as a download from archive.org: Swing Hostess, a 1944 PRC vehicle for former Benny Goodman band
singer Martha Tilton as she tried for a solo career on both stage and screen.
Later she’d appear as a moll in the 1945 PRC gangster film Crime,
Inc. but this time around she’s in a
straightforward musical in which she plays Judy Alvin, an aspiring singer who
lives in a boarding house that seems to be a combination of Stage
Door and You Can’t Take It With
You. She’s got a piano-playing boyfriend,
Joe Sweeney (Earle Bruce, a surprisingly hunky young man for a male role in a
PRC movie), and a roommate, Marge O’Day (Iris Adrian), who’s determined to get
her an audition with the great bandleader Benny Jackson (Charles Collins) — the
character name seems to be an “in” joke on the name of Tilton’s former
employer, except that unlike Benny Goodman, Benny Jackson just conducts his
band and doesn’t play an instrument himself. The first time Jackson is
distracted when his band’s entire library of sheet music gets diverted in
transit; the second time Joe gets Judy to make a record, but by mistake another
track on the master disc is used to record the audition of Phoebe Forbes (Betty
Brodel), “protégée” of management executive Fralick (Harry Holman, playing the
sort of lecherous old man Guy Kibbee regularly portrayed in the Warners
musicals of the 1930’s), who has virtually no voice at all but is convinced
that she’s really singing on Judy’s record because “nobody who hears their
first record recognizes their own voice.”
The record is released under Phoebe’s
name and she gets the big job opening at the nightclub owned by Spumoni (Paul
Porcasi, doing his usual neurotic-Italian act) with Benny Jackson’s band — even
though in the meantime Jackson has started dating Judy but without any idea
that she can sing or that she’s the real voice on “Phoebe’s” record. I thought
the writers, Louise Russell and Gail Davenport, were steering the story towards
Phantom Broadcast territory and
would do a payoff in which Judy would be dragooned into singing at the
nightclub opening from backstage while Phoebe lip-synched to her in front of
the band — but eventually the whole thing gets sorted out and Judy gets the job
she deserves and also the love of Benny Jackson, though quite frankly in the
latter department I wished she’d have declared she’s going to wait for her
hunky piano player to return from World War II, since he’d been drafted in an
earlier sequence. Though the title Swing Hostess is a bit of a misnomer — not only does Tilton’s
character not work as a hostess (in either the legitimate or not-so-legitimate
senses of the term) but the music she sings is light pop rather than swing (the
songs were written by Jerry Livingston, Ray Evans and Lewis Bellin, and while
Bellin’s career went nowhere Livingston and Evans went to Paramount and wrote
plenty of major songs for major talents there) — the film itself is a delight
from start to finish and Tilton proves a personable leading lady even though
it’s clear why she didn’t work up to mega-stardom the way a subsequent Goodman
band singer, Peggy Lee, did.
