Above, Lionel Hampton and Louis Armstrong trading fours in Howard Hawks’ 1948 A Song Is Born. By Robin Wood’s lights, this is a “vastly inferior” remake of Hawks’ own 1941 Ball of Fire; asked by Joseph McBride why he made the picture (for producer Samuel Goldwyn), Hawks himself replied “Because I got $25,000 a week, that’s why,” going on to describe male lead Danny Kaye as “about as funny as a crutch” and female lead Virginia Mayo as “pathetic.”
Well. For all that, the picture has more than a little to recommend it, and much of it is musical, as The New Yorker’s Richard Brody noted in a brief appreciation of the picture last week. Also, any picture shot by Gregg Toland in Technicolor can’t be all bad. Watching the spiffy but extras-free new MGM DVD (one hopes the label will do more Goldwyn upgrades—yes, Dodsworth for sure…) of the pic I was also struck by how relatively enlightened the film’s racial attitudes were. The above capture finds Danny Kaye’s music professor visiting what appears to be a pretty much exclusively African-American nightspot, researching this mysterious genre called “jazz.” The joint is jumping, and the shots of the audience that Hawks intercuts with the musical action depict the patrons bopping and grinning for sure, but never descending into minstrel-ish caricature. In a scene prior to this, Kaye and his cohorts are introduced to boogie-woogie by a pair of window-washers played by the piano and dance team of Buck and Bubbles. The duo here are paragons of dignity compared to the way they were compelled to act in 1937’s Varsity Show (which I wrote about here). Yeah, they do schtick, but they hardly come off as dumb, merely lacking in a certain technical vocabulary (hence the schtick).
Hawks told McBride, “One of the things [the studio] said was, ‘Look, now, don’t get the Negroes and the white musicians too close together.’ And I said, ‘Get yourself another director, will you? I’m not going to pay any attention to that. To hell with you. As far as I’m concerned, the Negroes belong in music because they’re part of this kind of music.’ Well, the whole thing was unfortunate. Only one good thing happened. Satchmo and I became such good friends.”
Writing about this film, Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy notes that in the larger scheme of things Hawks was “not exactly known for his broadmindedness about race relations.” But for whatever reason—possibly Hawks’ enthusiasm for the music itself—the film winds up looking, and feeling, practically progressive about such matters.
Also, I don’t care what Hawks says: Virgina Mayo is a dish.
Correct me if I am wrong, Glenn, but didn’t Hawks say Kaye was funny as a crutch because the actor was having some personal troubles at the time? If memory serves, he kept quitting the set early to see his shrink because Sylvia had walked out on him. Anyway, this was never in my Hawks pantheon but your screen cap reminds me how that scene swings. And yes, Mayo was a dish, and not half bad in a handful of movies, including White Heat where she was actually good.
Could I break a lance for Virginia Mayo, whom I see badly treated or with too much condescension? I find her real fun in “A Song Is Born” (which, perverse as I am, I find ALMOST better than “Ball of Fire”, despite poor Danny Kaye, which for once has an adecuate role), I find her great with Walsh (“Colorado Territory”, “Captain Horatio Hornblower”), and with Tourneur. Certainly she could be vulgar, but also lively, natural, a good companion.
Miguel Marías
I heartily concur, Miguel. I may revisit “Hornblower” soon, now that you remind me of it.
She is also quite fine in, of course, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and an excellent Hope foil in “The Princess and the Pirate.”
And I forgot her perhaps best role, much imitated in later years (in Hathaway, Peckinpah and Hawks), in Walsh’s unduly neglected “Along the Great Divide”.
Miguel Marías