A group of professors working on a new encyclopedia encounter a mouthy nightclub singer who is wanted by the police to help bring down her mob boss lover.
1h 51min | Comedy, Romance | 9 January 1942
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: screen play by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, from an original story by Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe
Stars: Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, Oskar Homolka, Henry Travers, S.Z. Sakall, Leonid Kinskey, Richard Haydn, Allen Jenkins, Dana Andrews, Dan Duryea, Gene Krupa and His Orchestra.
Nick Castle
...
dance director (uncredited)
I included the writers here because it's Brackett & Wilder. It's so good!
At the 16:30 mark we hear the intro to Drum Boogie. I don't think this is a standard, I think I've just watched this film so much that I know it well. And they do it twice in a row, once with the full band, and once with only GK on a matchbox. BS sings and wiggles (she worked as a chorus girl in her pre-film days), but it's really Martha Tilton's voice we hear, and she matches BS's speaking voice well. (MT sang for the Benny Goodman orchestra, including the Carnegie Hall concert in '38.)
In watching the execution of the song, the lyrics introducing each instrument, I see the trumpet section is lit much darker than the woodwinds. And seated behind a tallish player with black hair is a short Negro trumpeter, who stands for a brief solo, still in darkness. He's listed in the credits: Roy Eldridge. So Krupa had an integrated band on film, and the scene was likely darkened so it wouldn't be noticed and cut in the those regions that did such things. (Recall that in the 30's Benny Goodman had an integrated Trio with Teddy Wilson and Krupa, and added Lionel Hamption for a quartet. We saw them in Hollywood Hotel ('37).)
This isn't tagged as Music/al, and I wouldn't argue the point. But its remake, A Song is Born ('48) is, so I added this to the list. And the fact that it has a song that I know (and I know it from here) elevates it above the vast majority of the musicals I've watched.
I listed a lot of the professors above. All have mostly gray hair except GC and Homolka (who's gray at the temples) and are made to look about equally old. Comparing birth years: BS '07, GC '01, OH '98, HT '74, SZS '83, LK '03, RH '05. So the last 2 are playing much much older than they are, and even OH is younger than he plays. Richard Haydn played a friend of Von Trapp in The Sound of Music ('65), looking younger than he does here; this is his 2nd film of 38.
BS and GC paired in Meet John Doe earlier this year, and again in Blowing Wild ('53).
This is Allen Jenkins' 73rd of 111 films. I appreciate him more each time he appears.
Dana Andrews as the gangster, and Dan Duryea as his henchman add the right attitudes, and DA makes it more palatable that BS would want to marry him (as opposed to the complete low-life sadist DD).
I love this movie. Maybe it should be a 9.
Goldwyn, dir. Hawks; 8+
