by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Singing
Kid, a 1936 Warner Bros./First
National (it says Warner Bros. on the opening logo and the original trailer but
First National on the closing credit) production that was Al Jolson’s last
starring vehicle for the studio at which he had not only created a sensational
hit but established the talking film as the wave of the future with The Jazz
Singer nine years before. Jolson
was coming off Go Into Your Dance, which had been a major hit but largely because of the audience
attraction of getting to see him with his real-life wife (at the time), Ruby
Keeler, and the fact that the two of them could sell more theatre tickets than
just Jolson alone had the predictable deflating effect on his ego. The “suits”
at Warners clearly thought Jolson’s act had started to wane, for they began it
with an elaborate montage showing his Broadway stage hits of the 1910’s and
1920’s and his big number from Go Into Your Dance, “About a Quarter to Nine,” before establishing Al
Jackson (guess who — they even cast Jolson as a character with a name similar
to his own) as a current Broadway and radio star with a frantic schedule, a
no-good fiancée named Dana Lawrence (Claire Dodd, who made a specialty of these
“other woman” roles and not surprisingly got tired of them) and an equally no-good
manager, Bob Carey (Lyle Talbot, more restrained and therefore actually better
than usual in his appearances of the time), who leaves Al owing $500,000 to the
Internal Revenue Service, embezzles just about all the rest of Al’s money and
runs off with Dana to boot.
The stresses cause Al to lose his voice in the
middle of a performance, and his faithful retainers, Davenport Rogers (Edward
Everett Horton) and Joe Eddy (Allen Jenkins), decide to help him get away to
the country, where hopefully the placidity of the lifestyle will enable him to
relax enough so his voice will return. They get more than they bargained for as
Al falls in love with the woman who owns the cottage he’s renting, Ruth Haines
(Beverly Roberts, a woman Warners appeared to have high hopes for — the
original trailer proclaimed her “a lovely young newcomer you’ll rave about!” —
but her career went virtually nowhere: she made it into the trivia books by
taking over the female-lumberjack part in God’s Country and the Woman, the film Bette Davis walked out on her Warners
contract rather than be forced to make, and though she’s O.K. in that one her
performance really does seem
like it should have been accompanied by a little slip of paper in the program
reading, “Miss Bette Davis is indisposed tonight, so her part is being played
by Miss Beverly Roberts”), and he falls even harder, though in a strictly
licit, Production Code-approved way, for Sybil Haines (Sybil Jason), Ruth’s
niece (whom she’s been raising as a single parent since Sybil’s mom and dad
died in an accident).
Sybil Jason was obviously Warners’ attempt to create
their own Shirley Temple, and she comes off as so Temple-esque (the curly hair, the insufferably
sugary manner, the ditzy little-girl’s voice) one gets the impression someone
at Warners stole one of Temple’s fingernail clippings and cloned her. I saw The
Singing Kid once before, in the early
1970’s — when I was just getting serious about Old Hollywood — and it struck me
as a pretty silly movie, with Jolson spending much of it singing a ridiculous
song called “I Love to Sing-a” (“with the moon-a and the June-a and the dear
old sunny South-a” and just about every noun lyricist E. Y. Harburg could think
of sticking “-a” at the end of) — Harburg wrote the lyrics for the new songs and
Harold Arlen wrote the music, but aside from “You’re the Cure for What Ails Me”
(a charming, memorable ditty which the filmmakers made the mistake of using as
a duet between Jolson and Jason) and “My, How This Country’s Changed” (a
feature for the Yacht Club Boys that at least touches on the political issues
dear to Harburg’s heart — he was an active Leftist and spent the 1950’s on the
blacklist, which was why Ira Gershwin and not he got to do the lyrics for
Arlen’s songs for the Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born — it’s not as good as “Down with Everything,” the
spoof of college Leftists the Yacht Club Boys performed in Pigskin Parade, but it’s fun, and the line about how the Supreme
Court throws out laws as fast as the President and Congress can pass them rings
all too true today!), there’s nothing here
that’s going to make anybody forget the great songs Arlen and Harburg wrote for
The Wizard of Oz.
Part of the problem with The
Singing Kid is that the Warners
producers (Jack Warner, Hal Wallis and Robert Lord, the last of whom also came
up with the original story that writers Warren Duff, Pat C. Flick — a gag
writer in Jolson’s employ — and Sidney Marks, uncredited), writers and director
William Keighley were convinced that Jolson’s style was out of date and he
needed help. Though Jolson’s top-billed and a tag line on the trailer calls him
the “World’s Greatest Entertainer!,” his name appears below the title, and the cast is bolstered with such
other attractions as Frank Mitchell and Jack Durant (playing Al’s radio
writers), a knockabout comedy team who are basically what the Three Stooges
would have been if they’d looked more normal and there’d been only two of them
(they were regulars in Alice Faye’s early movies at Fox and were borrowed by
Warners for this one); the Yacht Club Boys (who really enliven the movie); and
Cab Calloway (ditto, and whose syncopated swing style really shows up the
stiffness of Jolson’s Mack-truck phrasing — though in the scenes in which
Jolson is backed by Calloway’s band instead of Leo F. Forbstein’s Vitaphone
Orchestra, the combination works as the folks at Warners clearly intended and
gives Jolson’s vocals added pep).
This is about the only time I can think of in
which Jolson made a movie with an authentically African-American performer of
his stature — and, indeed, Jolson was past his peak when he made this (he was
also 51 years old, which no doubt cut down on his performance’s athleticism)
while Calloway was in his prime: he’s in total control of his body and his
snake-like motions in time to his own singing and his band’s playing are
spectacular to watch. I did joke that Jolson was a white man who put a lot of crap on his face to
make himself look Black, while the much-“processed” Calloway was a Black man
who put a lot of crap on his hair to make himself look white. Indeed, the best
parts of The Singing Kid are
those which confront the datedness of Jolson’s act and make fun both of him and
of the people around him who wanted to try to update it — notably a long
traveling number that starts as a rehearsal for Al’s radio program but spills
over into the New York streets (or at least the simulacra of them on the
Warners backlot) as the Yacht Club Boys interrupt every time he tries to sing
Walter Donaldson’s “My Mammy,” one of the old Jolson’s mega-hits (and a better
song than any of the new ones Arlen and
Harburg came up with for this film!) and try to steer him into a more
contemporary direction. Ironically, Jolson’s style would come back into vogue
in the mid-1940’s with the release of the biopic The Jolson Story (in which Larry Parks played the on-screen Jolson
but Jolson was his voice double) and would appeal to youngsters getting bored
by the “crooner” style of Crosby, Sinatra, Como et al.; his uninhibited “belting” style and his
appropriation of African-American music really helped pave the way for rock ’n’
roll.
The other problem with The Singing Kid is it changes tone so frequently: it begins and
ends in the realm of Jolson’s biggest hit, The Singing Fool (another movie in which he’s devastated by an
unworthy woman betraying him and redeemed by the love of a child) but in the
meantime it drifts off into a wanna-be gospel number (“Save Me, Sister,” a duet
between Jolson and a blackfaced Wini Shaw obviously inspired by the “Waiting at the End of the Road”
number in King Vidor’s all-Black musical Hallelujah! and Mae West’s similar trip through sin and
redemption in “Troubled Waters” from Belle of the Nineties, but it’s not as good either as those or the
similar “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm” number from A Day at the Races a year later), some swing features for Calloway,
and the pastoral idyll it becomes in the final half (as Sybil Jason makes her
first appearance 43 minutes into this 85-minute movie), followed by one of
those near-miss gags as Al Jackson walks out on his big opening night to try to
find Ruth Haines — only she’s there in front of the theatre in a cab Al gets
into, and she looks at him and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be inside a
theatre opening your show?” I liked The Singing Kid a lot better this time around than I had in the
early 1970’s, and despite the discontinuity and the attempt not only to concede
the datedness of Jolson’s act but even to work it into the plot, it’s actually
a pretty good vehicle for him — but it’s only pretty good, and Jolson had a lot
more moxie as a performer for either himself or his fans to be content with
“pretty good.”
