Tales From the Warner Archives #5: "Mammy" (Curtiz, 1930); or, "Feelin' Grate"

I’ve bumped this delight­ful (if I may say so myself) piece up a bit from its ori­gin­al place. Because writ­ing about movies really is more import­ant.

That corner of my sens­ib­il­ity that I some­times refer to as “my weird Al Jolson thing?” It all began with Aaron. I’d known him slightly since grade school, a blustery, larger-than-life fel­low who was a fan/scholar of vin­tage music­als of all sorts—he was the kid who once bor­rowed the key to my house so he could play hooky and go over there and watch Rose Of Washington Square on the box (both my par­ents worked days). Not merely an Al Jolson nut, he was a fant­ast­ic Jolson imper­son­at­or, and his greatest tri­umph in a high-school the­at­ric­al career full of tri­umphs (includ­ing a rauc­ous turn as Luther Billis in Dumont High’s pro­duc­tion of South Pacific) was the Jolson act he did at S.O. (for “Student Organization”) Night in early February of ’74. Singing “Mammy,” “Rock-a-bye Your Baby,” and “California, Here I Come…” in a peri­od suit, white gloves, string tie…and full black­face. Not only did nobody care about the black­face (Dumont was a pretty lily-white town, and in the ’74 high school year­book I only count a total of three African-American stu­dents; as for teach­ers, for­get about it), but Aaron com­pletely brought down the house. He was just the third per­former of the first act, but he pretty much defined the show. Not even the spec­tacle of Aaron’s young­er broth­er in drag, with Larry Golden and Mark Zecca sim­il­arly arrayed, doing the Andrews Sisters doing “Rum and Coca-Cola,” could touch Aaron’s white socks.

As some American high-schoolers may be aware, it’s tough when you peak in your juni­or year. Which is, effect­ively, what Aaron had done. As my friend Joseph Failla recalled in a recent con­ver­sa­tion, “After ‘S.O. Night’ there was no where else to go, right away, so Aaron just kept preach­ing the Jolie gos­pel to who­ever would listen.”

Hence, bug­ging the Dumont Public Library into let­ting him intro­duce at least one screen­ing of a Jolson pic­ture. Which is how I first saw Mammy. A film I found very befud­dling, and con­tin­ued to be befuddled by for many years.

The musi­cian and artist Peter Blegvad once did a series of graph­ics pieces in which he’d depict a par­tic­u­lar object first as he ima­gined it, then as he actu­ally observed it, and finally (after put­ting away the first two depic­tions for a suf­fi­cient peri­od of time) as he remembered it. My remem­brance of Mammy for lo these many years has been of a film almost entirely black. That is, I remem­ber the min­strel show scenes as being black-on-black; men in black suits with blackened faces “enter­tain­ing” in front of black back­grounds. I remem­ber Jolson’s char­ac­ter unjustly accused of murder early on, and flee­ing from his com­pat­ri­ots, and throw­ing a black pis­tol into a black gut­ter and board­ing a black train into the black night. I remem­ber the film as entirely dreary, and slow. And I remem­ber being con­vulsed, in an almost Lynchian man­ner, by a min­strel show exchange wherein the inter­locuter asks one of the pan­el how he feels. “Why, ah feels like the inside of a stove,” the fel­low says.

“What do you mean, you feel like the inside of a stove?”

And I remem­ber a gar­gan­tu­an pause, and the fel­low strain­ing to come up with an answer. Which he finally, lamely, does.

“Ah…ah feels grate.”

I remem­ber going into extremely loud hys­ter­ics at that, not because it was at all funny but because it was so pain­fully awk­ward. And that’s how I’ve remembered Mammy for all these years, to the extent that I did­n’t even both­er to revis­it it when I got that Jolson laser­disc box set back in 1990. A couple of years back, I remem­ber hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a film schol­ar with chops a whole lot bet­ter than mine, and rather con­fid­ently pro­claim­ing Mammy as Michael Curtiz’s worst film. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, kindly, and pro­ceeded to whip off about a half-dozen oth­er titles.

Memory is a funny thing. Mammy has just been released in a spank­ing new trans­fer by the Warner Archive…and while as Curtiz pic­tures go, it’s no Mildred Pierce, it’s no dis­grace, either. It’s got its share of weirdly awk­ward moments that were not uncom­mon in early sound films—the back­stage bit wherein Jolson’s char­ac­ter asks his boss for a salary advance to send his moth­er is played expli­citly as a bit, rather than some­thing hap­pen­ing in the film’s story, even though, as I said, the action is occur­ing back­stage. And while my recol­lec­tion of the film was no doubt influ­enced by the fact that the ver­sion I saw the first time was in all like­li­hood a 16mm dupe of a dupe of a dupe, the dif­fer­ence between this and pretty much every oth­er Mammy any­body’s ever seen is, well, stag­ger­ing. The top screen grab shows Jolson’s char­ac­ter, golden-throated Al Fuller, star attrac­tion of the down-at-its-heels out­fit Meadow’s Merry Minstrels, greet­ing the mea­ger crowd that’s watched them parade into town in the rain, with “Let Me Sing And I’m Happy,” one of many Irving Berlin tunes con­tained herein. The pic­ture is in fact based on a play by Berlin. (And hence tends to make me recol­lect one of the fun­ni­est “2000 Year Old” man bits ever, in which Mel Brooks imit­ates a frantic Jolson mak­ing a long-distance phone call to Berlin. But I digress.) And below, there’s min­strel Hank (Mitchell Lewis), hav­ing just delivered the infam­ous “I feels grate” line, and well pleased with him­self (he’s at right).

Well, look at that back­ground! The movie, rather than being black-on-black, actu­ally had pro­duc­tion value after all! And the exchange, while still (delib­er­ately) lame, is in fact pretty snappy. (As for­eign as the mater­i­al had to have been to the Hungarian-born dir­ect­or Curtiz, his pacing remained deft.) Below you’ll see the cricket-like reac­tion to the “grate” line from the audi­ence. The fel­low with the mus­tache on the left, with his thumbs under his vest, is Jack Curtis, as a sher­iff who attempts to shut the show down.

This release is an inter­est­ing one from the Warner Archive in many respect, one of which is that it rep­res­ents an unusu­al first—never before has the video-on-demand divi­sion been respons­ible for releas­ing what, for all intents and pur­poses, is a major res­tor­a­tion. Because that’s what this is, and that’s why it looks so good…and that’s why Mammy is the last of the big Jolson pic­tures to come out via the Archive. This ver­sion not only restores the sound and pic­ture of its black-and-white com­pon­ents, but it restores an almost twenty-minute sequence that was in two-strip Technicolor, and has been unseen by audi­ences for, well, eighty years. The res­tor­a­tion was done from a nitrate print that was dis­covered in the Netherlands back around the turn of the dec­ade, which Warner’s George Feltenstein (a maven on Warner music­als, besides everything else great that he does) had Warner’s Motion Picture Imaging depart­ment and the UCLA Film and Television Archives work on. (One chal­lenge: all the title cards on this here­to­fore unknown print were, natch, in Dutch.) The Technicolor sequence in ques­tion is about an hour or so into the film, and depicts not just a long bit from the min­strel show, but a con­sequen­tial piece of dra­mat­ic action—Fuller’s fram­ing for the on-stage murder of the show’s inter­locutor, Billy West (Lowell Sherman).

It’s all fas­cin­at­ing and strangely beau­ti­ful stuff, a real win­dow into a bygone era in all its ostens­ible glory…and, yes, all its ugli­ness too. As a press pitch for this disc points out, the Warner Archive Collection is  “the per­fect dis­tri­bu­tion arm for a film whose polit­ic­al (in)sensitivity may make it inap­pro­pri­ate for main­stream audi­ences, but whose his­tor­ic­al import­ance makes it a ‘must-own’ for niche fans and his­tor­i­ans.” One could pon­der this prob­lem for days on end and not reach an entirely sat­is­fact­ory con­clu­sion, but I think this one is as good as your going to get. I hardly believe that a Mammy released in any con­text would provide much use­ful fod­der for white suprem­acists. Same for the more racially dicey Little Rascals pic­tures that have recently sur­faced under the Warner Archive ban­ner. Although I doubt even this scru­pu­lously schol­arly approach will suf­fice to jus­ti­fy an author­ized release of cer­tain Looney Tunes shorts. In any event, you know if you are the audi­ence for this par­tic­u­lar piece. You may, in fact, be an audi­ence for it without even know­ing it. Far as I’m con­cerned, after almost a hun­dred years, that Jolson’s still got a way of selling a song…