A Song Is Born – Directed by Howard Hawks. A musical academic researching jazz falls foul of manipulative nightclub singer. 117 minutes Color 1948.
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You will have the memorable chance to hear Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnett, Louis Bellson, and Louis Armstrong jam together in a picture which you will find impossible to remember otherwise. Goldwyn paid Hawks a quarter of a million to direct it and it cost well over two million and it resembles a high school varsity show. Hawks jammed it between Red River and I Was A Male War Bride, and to film it we have the man who filmed Citizen Kane, Gregg Toland no less, but the picture is nothing other than a series of gaudy setups, which is what Goldwyn liked for his Danny Kaye series. Production stopped every day so Hawks could listen to the boys play, and so Kaye could go to his psychiatrist, which is perhaps why in this picture, except for a few facial gesticulations, he is not funny once. His voice is placed just under his nasal passages and is perpetually plaintive. Of course, Danny Kaye was not an actor at all, but an entertainer, a zany in the line of The Marx Brothers, Jonathan Winters, and Robin Williams, He was separated from his wife at the time this was made, and she, Sylvia Fine, wrote all his riffs. The writing seems astoundingly dull, although by Brackett and Wilder, although it didn’t when it fueled Hawks’ Ball of Fire of which this is a remake.. But the War had intervened, and that changed everything. This sort of naive hokum was passé. It’s a lazy film, using the exact same script, set, setups, cameraman, and even Mary Field, excellent as Miss Totten once again. One can only talk around this movie; it defies criticism. Except perhaps to say that Steve Cochran and Virginia Mayo, neither of whom Hawks wanted, do just fine in it. Hawks made Mayo go to a warehouse and yell to lower her voice, which didn’t work, but she is dressed up and hair-doed as a Hawks woman, and she gives us a dame of fine sexual insolence such as we have come to rely on from Hawks. She watched Stanwyck’s performance in the earlier film over and over, but she does just fine on her own; it’s one of her best screen performances. A cast of brilliant supporting players, Felix Bressart and F. Hugh Herbert among others, founder when they are acting, and the musicians founder when they are not playing, but when they are you will hear Lionel Hampton do duets with Armstrong and with the redoubtable Goodman, and for a moment things almost seem worthwhile. For a short time, it was the number one box office draw in the nation. The Death Valley of the 50s was about to begin.
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