by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Swing Parade of
1946 — that’s the title in
Leonard Maltin’s filmography of the Three Stooges, who play important
supporting roles in it, though the print we were watching was simply titled Swing
Parade (apparently Monogram Pictures,
or whoever handled the reissue, simply dropped the year number, as did the
reissuers of Sensations of 1945) — which turned out to be a surprisingly good musical featuring the
girl whom “B” Movies author
Don Miller called “Monogram’s own little twinkling star,” Gale Storm. She plays
Carol Lawrence (ironically, there was a real Carol Lawrence who achieved Broadway stardom about
a decade after this film was made as the original Maria in the stage cast of West
Side Story), who as the film opens —
stop me if you’ve heard this before — is about to be thrown out of the
boardinghouse where she lives by a hatchet-faced landlady for owing four weeks’
worth of back rent. In order to get a job, pronto, she stops by the Embassy
Club, a yet-to-be-opened nightclub owned by singer Danny Warren (Phil Regan)
whose security person, Moose (Edward Brophy), throws out everyone who comes to
the club whom he doesn’t know personally. We soon learn that the reason he’s
doing this is that Danny’s father, utilities magnate Daniel Warren, Sr.
(Russell Hicks), and his attorney Bascomb (John Eldredge, seedy as usual —
imdb.com describes the character as the elder Warren’s “lieutenant” but the
actual film’s dialogue makes it clear he’s his lawyer) have secretly bought the
building in which the Embassy Club is housed and are going to evict Danny to
prevent the club from opening so Danny will come back to his dad’s utilities
company with his tail between his legs and assume the destiny of utilities
magnate, junior his father intended for him presumably since he was born.
(There doesn’t seem to be a Mrs. Warren anywhere, which given the usual iconography of 1946 Hollywood
makes it likely we’re supposed to think that she’s dead.)
Thrown out of the
club without being given even a hello from its mysterious proprietor, much less
a chance to audition, Carol returns to the boardinghouse and finds that she’s
not only been served an eviction notice but her clothes have been locked up so
she has nothing to wear but what’s on her back just then. Desperate for a job,
she ends up by authorial fiat (the screenwriter is Edmund Kelso, adapting an
“original” story by Tim Ryan, with Nicholas Ray, of all people, credited with
“additional dialogue” — that’s one of those he-had-to-start-somewhere credits) at the offices of Warren, Sr., and he and
Bascomb hit on the idea that an attractive woman would probably have a better
shot at getting close to Danny and serving him the dispossession notice than a
frumpy-looking middle-aged professional process server. She gets in and serves
Danny — but by mistake she gives him her own eviction notice instead of the
document she was supposed to serve him, and Danny, realizing she’s about to
become homeless, takes pity on her and gives her an audition. She sings “On the
Sunny Side of the Street” and she’s good (and swinging) enough that she gets
hired as a singer at the club if and when it opens. Danny also offers to take
her to dinner, but she balks at the potential threat to her virtue when it
turns out that means they’re going to have dinner together in a private room at
the club — she weasels her way out of a potential seduction by inviting Moose
to join them — and as she rehearses for the Embassy Club’s opening, proximity
works its magic and she and Danny fall in love. There’s an obligatory
misunderstanding between them in the next-to-last reel when he discovers she
really was hired by his dad to serve
him, but things are all patched up by the end. As for the Three Stooges, they
play the nightclub’s cooks, though with the club short of waiters at the big
opening (am I really letting
out any secrets by telling you the club opens as scheduled?) they have to work
as such, and there’s a great scene in which Moe Howard tries to tell an
officious customer to order roast beef instead of roast turkey. There are also
some nice slapstick scenes, in a few of which Ed Brophy (who after all had
worked with Buster Keaton on The Cameraman and Doughboys and
therefore knew something about
slapstick!) participates and becomes a virtual Fourth Stooge. Maybe I’m having
a second childhood, because after years of having avoided the Three Stooges and
regarded them as something I outgrew once my age got past single digits, now
I’m finding them quite funny again!
There are some other guest stars whose appearances
are even more welcome, including the superb jazz singer Connee Boswell (she
does two songs, one of which is the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler “Stormy Weather” —
she seems to be imitating Ethel Waters, who introduced the song at the Cotton
Club in 1932, and there are better versions by Waters, Ivie Anderson with Duke
Ellington, and Lena Horne, but offhand this is the best “Stormy Weather” I can
think of by a white singer even though Will Osborne’s band is hardly in the
same league as a swing group as Ellington’s!) and the even more welcome Louis
Jordan, who’s shown in the very first Embassy Club sequence rehearsing a song
that was one of his biggest hits, “Don’t Worry ’Bout That Mule.” Director Phil
Karlson (a better filmmaker than usually got Monogram assignments like this)
cuts away from Jordan way too much and takes the edge off his act by filming
too much of it in long-shot, but Jordan’s two numbers are still by far the best
moments in the film. Monogram seems to have spent more money than usual on this
one — there are some fairly elaborate Berkeley-esque production numbers as
well as a dance between Regan and Storm that looks like a low-rent version of
an Astaire-and-Rogers number — and dance director Jack Boyle rips off at least
two of Busby Berkeley’s most famous ideas, a chorus line of girls waving
ostrich feathers and a sequence in which musical instruments are lined with
neon so they glow in the dark. Boyle uses the latter gimmick to introduce Louis
Jordan’s performance of his biggest hit, “Caldonia,” and while the song came
off better in the short film named after it which Jordan had made the year
before (mainly because Jordan didn’t have to deal with interjections from Will
Osborne’s string section the way he has to here), it’s still a fabulous piece
of material and a delight not only to hear but also to watch, with Jordan
kicking up his legs like a spoiled baby as he sings, “What makes yo’ big head
so hard?” Jordan is probably the
most important musician on the cusp between jazz and rock — his infectious
vocals and the insistent beat of his music (particularly the back-beat shuffles
he had his drummers play) mark him in many ways as the first rock ’n’ roller,
and it’s a measure of how timeless his act is that he managed a virtual
comeback in the mid-1990’s, 20 years after his death, through his records, his
films (he made quite a few movie appearances, both in leading roles in “race”
films and as a guest artist in productions like this one) and a Broadway show
called Five Guys Named Moe that revived his songs.
Once we see Louis Jordan in the first five
minutes there’s an understandable sense that the rest is going to be a letdown
(it reminded Charles of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of the film Catalina Caper, in which Little Richard appeared, did one number
and then left, and the MST3K crew joked, “There goes Little Richard, the only talent in this
movie”), but fortunately there’s enough good stuff left to come — from Gale
Storm, who as I’ve noted in these pages before would have probably had the kind
of career Doris Day did if she’d signed with a major studio instead of Monogram
(she was a quite similar talent, with a perky personality, a pleasant and
distinctive voice, and a gift for portraying wholesome innocence); from Phil Regan,
who seems oddly short (though Gale Storm is wearing heels, on screen they’re
about the same height) and doesn’t have a great voice but has a pleasantly serviceable one; from
the Stooges, who do a good job providing the comic relief they were hired for; from
Mary Treen, a homely Charlotte Greenwood-esque performer who plays a rich woman
who’s offered to bankroll the Embassy Club at a new location if Daniel Warren,
Sr. does succeed in closing it down
(in the finale Regan is paired with Storm and Treen is paired with, of all
people, real-life bandleader Will Osborne, who plays himself in the film!), and
from another Jordan song (the Jordan song, actually — Louis Jordan wrote “Caldonia” himself but he
let his manager talk him into giving his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, the credit
on the ground that that would ease his tax burden; then they broke up and he
had to endure seeing her get the
royalties from the many cover versions, thereby making her first name all too
appropriate!), as well as a substantial (by Monogram standards, anyway)
production: for once Gale Storm has a cinematographer (Harry Neumann) who knows
how to light her without making it look like she has a moustache, and this is
one Monogram movie in which one doesn’t have to worry about the sets crashing down on the hapless actors at any
moment. Though almost none of the music in it has much to do with swing (Louis
Jordan’s numbers would have been considered “jump blues” rather than swing in
the 1940’s; later they would have been called rhythm and blues), Swing
Parade of 1946 is still a quite nice
movie, no world-beater but a pleasant, charming film and a worthy showcase for
Gale Storm.
