[Dixielandjazz] Bing Crosby documentary reviewed - Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2014 - Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

Recalling Bing Crosby
by Dorothy Rabinowitz
Wall Street Journal, November 27, 2014
Among the innumerable intriguing facts about Bing Crosby in this “American Masters”
documentary is one that attests to his resistance to romantic declarations he considered
mawkish. He wanted nothing to do with songs requiring him to sing “I love you” or
anything like it. A commentator on this all encompassing, frank and undisguised tribute
of a film observes that Crosby was at home only with indirect expressions of romantic
feeling and his writers knew it. With lines like “Love is lovelier the second time
around,” for instance (music by Jimmy Van Heusen and words by Sammy Cahn).
Still he packed into that indirection, that relaxed voice with its golden phrasing,
the kind of emotional power that could turn an Irving Berlin song about Christmas
snow into the best-selling record of all time, and one that made grown men cry. In
his own life he had, in fact, found love lovelier the second time around, lovelier
than with a first marriage to a wife who had battled alcoholism, unsuccessfully,
all their married life. His relations with the four sons of that marriage were rocky.
One of his sons would write a memoir, in 1983, accusing his father of psychological
and physical abuse -- sensational charges especially in light of the warm and easygoing
persona the world had come to associate with Bing Crosby.
In this film, that persona is restored, and more. There are details of what he did,
quietly, for women in the entertainment world who had run into trouble, among them
Judy Garland, whom he coaxed out of isolation after a suicide attempt and brought
trembling before his vast radio audience. He put himself out, similarly, to help
Rosemary Clooney when she fell on hard times.
Crosby was everywhere, entertaining U.S. servicemen endlessly during World War II,
much like Bob Hope. He was aware of the emotional effect of “White Christmas” --
when he sang it, he reported, he could see the tears in the eyes of the Americans
far from home. The song had become, now, a kind of anthem.
Writer-producer Robert Trachtenberg and a splendid assortment of commentators (Stanley
Tucci narrates) have infused the film with insight and clarity, no small achievement
considering the length of Crosby’s career -- that’s in addition to the feast of film
clips and all those songs.
___________________________________
by Robert Lloyd
Los Angeles Times, November 27, 2014
Bing Crosby was a singer and actor of enormous, apparently effortless talent, a phenomenon
in his time and, like most musicians not the Beatles, in need of some rehabilitation
in later ones. Thus the title: “Rediscovered.” I would guess that for most American
under the age of, oh, 50, he is best known as the mysteriously dumpy lead of “White
Christmas,” perennial that it is. (Or perhaps that is over, too? I’ll be watching
it soon, at any rate.) Or possibly as the conclusion of the phrase “Hope and.” The
implication of this, like every other, “American Masters” episode is that you ought
to know him, if you don’t, and know him better if you do; and this seems particularly
apt in Crosby’s case, given the deceptive ease he brought to his work, the impression
of doing nothing at all, of just showing up and living it. But Artie Shaw called
him “the first hip white person born in the United States.” He was bigger than Elvis
and just as radical -- and just as informed by black music; he insisted on using
Louis Armstrong, an influence and friend, in his 1936 film “Pennies from Heaven,”
and also demanded that he be prominently billed. He came along at the right time,
alongside the microphone and radio, fitting his voice to its confidential tone; onscreen,
too, he seemed preternaturally present. (He was the King of All Media before anyone
even thought that could be a thing.)
The person was, naturally, more complicated than the performer. Early on, Crosby
was a hard partier who took a sometimes lackadaisical approach to work. His own drinking,
at that time, might have been a contributing factor to his first wife’s alcoholism.
And if he was perhaps not as bad a father to the four sons from that marriage as
some of them would later claim -- there is one posthumous second-hand retraction
included here -- he was evidently far from cuddly and could be, for what he imagined
was their benefit, cruel. Elsewhere, he was generous and supportive. Second-marriage
family members, happier, appear here to talk. Jazz critic Gary Giddins, whose “Bing
Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams -- the Early Years, 1903-1940” has been waiting a decade
for its conclusion, and Michael Feinstein, who also sings for a living, explain the
music. The documentary is rich in pictures and film clips, but like most such pictures
it is only a start: You will want to go listen to records, watch movies, discover
the source.
-30

-Bob Ringwald
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