[Dixielandjazz] "Vitaphone Varieties," reviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

All Talking, All Singing, All but Forgotten
by Dave Kehr
New York Times, May 8, 2011
Fans of Preston Sturges will probably recognize Jimmy Conlin, an impish little Irishman
with wild hair and owlish glasses who turns up at one point or another in nearly
all of Sturges's great Paramount comedies of the 1940s.
But here he is, in one of the 60 short films that make up "Vitaphone Varieties,"
a fascinating new four-disc set from the Warner Archive Collection, as a vaudeville
star in 1928. Working with his wife, the blues-belting singer Myrtle Glass, Conlin
goofs and grins his way through a comedy musical routine, the punch lines punctuated
by an unseen chorus of kibitzers who holler "Whoa!" every time Jimmy lands a good
one.
Myrtle playfully roughs him up, as Jimmy struggles manfully to provide a piano accompaniment
for her rendition of "Morning, Noon and Night," a delightfully casual routine that
the performers seem to be inventing on the spot, enjoying themselves tremendously
as they do so, even though they'd probably been doing it five times a day for years
on the vaudeville circuit. There is one new line, though, as they sing their way
offstage: "We hate to leave you here alone / But we hope you liked Jimmy Conlin and
Myrtle Glass / on the Vitaphone."
That one short phrase -- "on the Vitaphone" offered as an equivalent to "on the radio"
or "on your record player," to name the two other technologies that were reshaping
popular entertainment in the 1920s -- says a lot about the status of the talking
film in the summer of 1928, when "Sharps and Flats," as the Conlin and Glass short
was titled, appeared in Warner Brothers' flagship theaters. Despite the popular (and
apparently unshakable) notion that the talkie revolution occurred overnight with
the premiere of the Al Jolson feature "The Jazz Singer" on Oct. 6, 1927, the truth
is far more complex and far more interesting.
As Donald Crafton demonstrated in his classic history "The Talkies" (University of
California Press), "The Jazz Singer" was only a single step, and not one particularly
well remarked at the time, in the gradual transition to sound that took place between
1926 and 1931. By the time Jolson improvised a few lines of dialogue in "The Jazz
Singer," audiences had already become accustomed to hearing actors speak and musicians
perform from the screen.
Warners had been turning out its "Vitaphone Varieties" -- one, and later, two-reel
recordings of comedians, jazz bands, classical musicians and even short plays --
at a rapid pace since the summer of 1926, when the studio unveiled its new sound-on-disc
process at the new Warners' Theater in New York. Meanwhile the Fox Film Corporation
was showing off its rival sound-on-film process, Movietone, with newsreels, including
Charles A. Lindbergh's historic 1927 takeoff from Roosevelt Field on Long Island
that demonstrated Movietone's lesser fidelity but greater portability. It's a wonder
that Jolson's apparently prophetic line, "You ain't heard nothin' yet" (actually
a stock phrase from his stage show) could be heard at all above the general din issuing
from Broadway's movie theaters.
Few if any producers were thinking at the time of full-length talking features. The
Vitaphone, first and foremost, was to be a way of bringing elite culture to the masses
-- like radio (but better). It would allow the benighted souls between the coasts
to enjoy Marion Talley singing arias from the Metropolitan Opera or the New York
Philharmonic playing snatches from "Tannhauser." But soon more popular acts began
to appear.
The new Warner compilation begins with "The Revelers," a male quartet harmonizing
pleasantly on "Dinah" and a couple of other standards in a club setting. And although
the technology of 1926 allows the performance to be recorded only as a single take
from a fixed camera position, the effect is already more cinematic, more intimate,
than a simple stage presentation.
Warner released a large set of Vitaphone shorts last year ("Vitaphone Cavalcade of
Musical Comedy Shorts") that ranged up to 1938, when the studio discontinued the
Vitaphone brand. This collection concentrates on earlier work, much of it uncovered
through the untiring efforts of Ron Hutchinson of the nonprofit Vitaphone Project
and restored by the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive and the Library of Congress
Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation.
A few of the faces may be familiar. (Jay C. Flippen, like Jimmy Conlin later a hard-working
character actor, turns up doing a risque patter routine.) But for the most part these
are acts forgotten by time, whose rediscovery greatly widens our sense of the vaudeville
era. Here is the skinny young Eddie White, who tells a couple of "Hebrew" jokes and
belts out a rendition of "Mammy" that makes Al Jolson seem dry; here is Frank Whitman,
"That Surprising Fiddler," who apparently was able to make a living playing the violin
with a playing card, a matchstick and a whiskey bottle.
The surprise is the large number of nonsense comedians, specialists in crazy non
sequiturs and bizarre visual gags, like the Mutt and Jeff comedy pair Born and Lawrence
or the British brother act Val and Ernie Stanton, whose surreal riffs demonstrate
that the Marx Brothers were far from alone in practicing this kind of anarchic humor.
As the collection, which is largely arranged chronologically, moves toward 1930 and
the normalization of the talking feature, the form of the films becomes more sophisticated,
with multiple camera angles and occasionally more than one set. The proscenium effect
fades away, and the films seem less like fly-in-amber records of stage presentations
than little movies in their own right. The musical short would continue to exist
until it was finally killed off by television, where variety shows provided a final
showcase for the kind of specialty performers seen here in their prime. We now live
in a world without Surprising Fiddlers and are perhaps a bit worse for it.


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
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