Those Glorious Movie Musicals!

By Vince Iuliano

Years in the making, Those Glorious Movie Musicals! Is the perfect companion to a lazy rainy weekend and a buttered drum of popcorn. Starting with the advent of sound in the late 1920's  and continuing to it's last great gasp in the late 70's, this is a definitive year by year anecdotal history of the Hollywood movie musical, the author takes us from The Jazz Singer to Grease,with all the stops in between!
The  Movies, The Magic, The Stars of Yesteryear.  The stories, the tunes! All talking, All Singing, All Dancing!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vince Iuliano
• Release date: Apr 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393008163

Vince Iuliano

Freelance writer. Staunch crusader for truth, justice and the American Way..(writes under various names. You could be reading me right now, and not know it!)

Book preview

One.

Wait a minute, folks! Jolie blurted suddenly from a luminescent screen in the middle of a hot August night. You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!

And in nineteen hundred and twenty-seven, with just nine simple words, Al Jolson – in complete blackface make-up, his eyes popping with excitement – introduced  a New York audience, and eventually the entire world, to a startling new innovation  in motion picture enjoyment and in the same broad stroke cut short the careers of some of the screen’s brightest and most popular stars.

Perhaps the novel invention itself was not quite so remarkable as the ruinous effect it would have on the lives of those Hollywood  players, in many cases ending tragically in suicide or in alcohol-induced deaths:

There was adorable Clara Bow, the IT girl, whose loud and brassy voice seemed almost to shake the theater buildings to their very foundations  and thereby frighten the patrons, and who spent the remaining years of her life watching old movies on television; and matinee idol Jack (John) Gilbert, who drank himself  to death after movie audiences thumbed their noses at his slightly effeminate delivery and after his highly-publicized romance with Greta Garbo fizzled to nothing.

There was Dolores Mrs. Jack Barrymore Costello, who made fewer sound pictures in deference to her marriage and who never regained her original popularity after the Barrymore’s were divorced in 1935; and Richard Bathelmess, who made other talking pictures but none quite so successful as his earlier triumphs  (he died in Southampton , NY at the age of 68).

And there was Colleen Moore, who among other splendid films appeared in Orchids and Ermine in 1927 (the film in which Mickey Rooney played an adult midget), but whose career somehow never made a successful transition to sound.

There seemed to be a proliferation of Hollywood success stories that littered the fan magazines and gossip rags; stories that almost always began in poverty and straddled a fine line of fantasy and legend. The tale of the junk dealer (or the glove salesman, or the fish-scaler, it really doesn’t matter) who gambled his money to invest in a small theater behind a barber shop and who bankrolled his modest investment into a healthy fortune.  Or the yarn of the poor orphan girl who spent her last four dollars on a one –way ticket to Hollywood, and became a star just three days later.

But little attention was wasted on the faded stars of  yesterday , those pitiable burnt-out  creatures of the screen  on their way back down to the bottom of the heap. Make no mistake about it, the streets of tinsel town were strewn with their twisted little bodies.

Wallace Reid – the handsome movie star with everything to live for, who died at a very early age (31 ) , and at the height of his popularity, of drug addiction. The pretty young actress  Peg Entwistle,  dissatisfied with the hopelessly slow progress of her career, who climbed to the top of the third ‘O" in the HOLLYWOOD LAND sign and plunged to her death twenty feet below. *

But if little sentiment was spent on the  lost souls caught floundering in the wake of the great SOUND  transition (of her torrid love affair with the late John Gilbert, Greta Garbo was reported to have offered only a noncommittal shrug and a mumbled "oh, he was alright’ ) , no time at all could be wasted preparing for the rather uncertain future.  It was as if a giant hand had taken an unexpected swipe at

*some people have suggested she jumped from the H, but the end result was the same.

the movie colony and toppled any false hopes of security or romantic notions of a safe happy future in

the film industry to the dirt.

As Bette Davis was later to remark in her stunning portrayal of the success-driven Margo Channing in the 1950 film smash ALL ABOUT EVE, Fasten your seat belts – it’s going to be a bumpy evening!

Well, it was going to be a bumpy two or three years before the film  industry  could finally get back on its feet again; a feat no less complicated by the fact that there had been  warning signals to predict the about-face direction of things to come,  almost a full year before Jolson ever uttered  those prophetic nine words ...

■  IN THE BEGINNING

Not the very beginning  —the story of how Thomas Edison experimented  with his crude motion picture camera in New Jersey while the Lumiere brothers toiled in France is an oft-repeated  and tiresome legend  - but at that point in time in which we are most concerned.  That is,  the beginning of synchronized sound to match the images projected on the screen; the birth of the talkies.

And it was at the Warner Theater in New York, located on the corner of Fifty –second and Broadway, that the first feature-length talkie program made its official debut.

Heading the bill would be an action-packed adventure yarn called Don Juan, starring John Barrymore in the title role as the legendary Spanish lover.  Barrymore, the current female heartthrob and favorite of theater audiences the world over, seemed perfectly cast in the role, with his steamy romantic gaze and classic famed profile.  But the true star of the show , the big scene-stealer on this night, would seem not to have been the players  at all but rather the sound effects and special synchronized music which was recorded on a companion disc to accompany the picture. 

This new process, named Vitaphone by the Warner’s , would make provision to store the sound for an entire reel of film on a 13- to 17-inch record. And the audience on the special night of August 6th , 1926 seemed especially amused as the picture unfolded in all its sonorous splendor.

Also on the same bill as Don Juan that night, theater-goers were treated to a musical short which featured the considerable talents of the New York Philharmonic  Orchestra  and a short filmed address made by the head of the newly organized Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Will H. Hays.  Hays was quick to demonstrate how his lips and the sound on the record disc were in perfect synchronization and then, in a strong voice, he announced how sound pictures  would someday replace silents and revolutionize the movie industry for all time.

But  the audience on that night only laughed.  Of course, they realized the Vitaphone process could be used for half of what it cost to hire a piano player for each performance but the system in its present  crude state was not without its own set of drawbacks;  least of which was the fact that the phonograph records tended to be scratchy, and would sometimes skip at the most inopportune of moments.

Too, an alteration of this magnitude would mean the renovation of motion picture houses the world over, one of which would yet be equipped to handle sound features.

It was all too expensive, too impossible to imagine.

The audience that had come to see Don Juan on the evening of August 6, 1926 left te Warner Brother’s presentation with the idea that sound pictures would never amount to anything more than a passing novelty. It was almost a full year later before any of them would be forced to change that opinion...

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George Jessel  had made The Jazz Singer a Broadway smash hit long before Al Jolson ever stepped into the part.  Playing in the role of Jack (nee Jake Rabinowitz) Robins, a cantor’s son who breaks his father’s heart when  he decides to scrap a promising career in the synagogue for the brighter lights of the stage , Jessel  had endeared  himself to audiences with his heart-tugging performance of Kol Nidre, which he sings in the temple as his father  dies.

Jessel  had toured  for several  years with the play  when Harry Warner  - one of four Warner Brothers  who lent his name to the business and who was considered  to be the brains behind the money end of things – called one morning to suggest that the story of The Jazz Singer might have enormous motion picture potentiality, with George of course in the lead.  While the story may have been  ethnic in content, Warner  argued over the phone , it had a universal theme i.e  that of a boy torn between the love of his father and his intense love for the stage. And with George  in the lead, how could it lose?

To say Jessel was intrigued with the idea of recreating Jack Robins in a Hollywood-version of The Jazz Singer  is  an understatement: he took the next train to California.

Once there, Jessel was informed that Warner Brothers didn’t really have enough money to acquire film rights to the Jazz Singer property and it was with considerable generosity that he helped  the near-bankrupt brothers purchase the play with no money up front;  using instead a method  of notes, dated far in advance. And so it came as quite a shock, and extraordinarily frustrating, when George opened his copy of the Los Angeles Times one sunny California morning to read that the role of Jack Robins – his role – had been given to none other than Jessel’s greatest friend  and worst rival – Al Jolson !

It needn’t have come as so great a shock. After all, it had been Jessel  (once before burned  by the penniless Warners when he had come to Hollywood to appear in several of their two-reel shorts and was paid off in rubber checks) who demanded that this time the studio pay him $5000 up front in addition to making good on those two previously bad checks. Though it was true that Al Jolson firmly believed the plot of Jazz Singer to be his own personal life story and had fought hard to win the part, the final decision to switch actors at this late stage in the game had not been meant as a personal affront to Jessel but rather a simple matter of economics. Jolson worked cheaper.

When The Jazz Singer was at last presented to an  audience in New York’s Warner Theater on October 6th, 1927, it was the name of Al Jolson that was firmly emblazoned on the colored marquee outside.  And it was invariably Jolson , and not Georgie Jessel, who would ride this milestone film into the annals of tinsel immortality.  Not that The Jazz Singer was ever a good film (nor was it intended to be) but it came at a point in time when audiences were prepared to embrace  something new with a dedication reserved usually for masterpieces.  Never after its October premiere date did the picture play to anything less than standing room only crowds.

In retrospect, it has become popularly known as the true point of departure from silent pictures and gas even gone on to become a true classic in its own right. This slightly astounding fact can be attributed  only to the dynamic performance of the star; a portrayal dripping with just the right mixture of melodramatic acting and heavy sentimentality.  Al Jolson, at one point in the film so carried away with his own voice that he burst into spontaneous monologue, had the right screen persona to make an otherwise mediocre show sparkle (it is an ironic fact of life that Sam Warner – the brother most responsible for turning The Jazz Singer into a sound movie – died one day after the New York premiere).

It took a baggy pants vaudeville singer in pre-contemporary  blackface and kinky hair wig to stand the voiceless  dream factories on their collective ears, to make the ticket-conscious moneymen sit up and take notice. Sound pictures had finally arrived, and now there could be no turning back...

TWO

Nineteen hundred and  twenty-eight.

This was a year of transition, of intense paranoia  for nearly all the major studios in California. At costs estimated to