Pop Song of the Week: "Puttin' on the Ritz"

This is obviously not a Mitt Romney campaign video. And I doubt Barack Obama would approve of it either -- though I did find it ironic that the blackface sequences were censored by the same MTV which refused to play black music videos until David Bowie shamed them into it.

Rimplegars Rule!

Oh my! In this movie I've just seen, a family matriarch lost her entire fortune in the stock market while another family member speculated on the possibility of selling the family homestead -- and the impossibility of doing so in the current economic climate. If that is not bad enough, one family member collapsed due to hunger and overwork while another faced the choice of either meeting her boss after work for a “date” or losing a badly needed job. In other words, it was a movie just full of situations that most modern people can identify with all too well -- and yet it is set in the 1930s.

I'm referring to the 1933 film Three-Cornered Moon -- one of the first screwball comedies* and very easily one of the least known. The most famous member of the cast is Claudette Colbert who went on to become far more famous in films like It Happened One Night and Since You Went Away. Lyda Roberti of College Rhythm fame played Jenny, the linguistically-challenged Polish maid who does not speak much English -- and inevitably mangles what little she does know. The rest of the cast is not so well known as these two but they were entertaining as well in a story that illustrates what a lot of upper-middle-class families had to go through when they lost their money in the Great Depression.

It would have been very easy for the filmmakers to make this flick another “unlikable rich people get their just desserts” type of movie but to their credit, the rich family -- who go by the name of Rimplegar -- are actually quite sympathetic. Not only are their struggles likely to seem all too familiar to people like myself who have done their share of job hunting, but their plight moved me in a way that the plights of many characters in more recent movies did not.

The one scene that most struck home with me was the scene in which Colbert's character (Elizabeth Rimplegar) literally begged her boyfriend Ronald -- an aspiring novelist -- to help out the family by condescending to take an office job. However, the boyfriend -- despite having lived with the Rimplegars rent-free for quite a while and eating his share of groceries -- chose not to pursue the job offer -- not because of cowardice or ill health -- but because of his “artistic integrity,” apparently preferring to let his beloved's family work their fingers to the bone rather than help out with anything that does not involve his novel.

Needless to say, the Rimplegars were not too happy with Ronald's Rousseau complex and Elizabeth was especially unhappy. And although I have known enough people who had struggled to appease both Mammon and the Muses -- including myself -- I could not bring myself to sympathize with him either. Perhaps because most of the struggling artists I have met were unable to make the same choice in good conscience that Ronald made.

In any event, should not a true artist have felt some responsibility to help support the people who were supporting him -- or should he -- like Ronald -- have chosen to play grasshopper to the more plebeian worker ants? And what point is there in artistic integrity if it does not translate into sympathy for the people around you? In an age when it is becoming more and more common to see celebrity misbehavior excused on the grounds that so-and-so is a great artist and therefore not obliged to abide by the same rules as ordinary folk, I find this an intriguing question.

Anyway, even if you disagree with the movie's philosophy, I suspect that you would find this to be an entertaining movie.

* Yes, you read that right. It is a comedy.

Back to the 30s Again

Apparently Mother Nature knows how much I love the movies and music of the 1930s because that's where the temperature keeps going. It got all the way into the 30s on Sunday and Monday morning but this morning it only got into the 40s. Which is a shame because I'm not all that fond of swing music...

CD of the Week


Yes, the artwork is horrible, but the songs on "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?": Songs of the Depression are really nice to listen to. As you might guess, the High Hatters' version of "Ten Cents a Dance" is one of my favorite songs on this CD. Nor does it hurt that this CD contains Dick Robertson's surprisingly witty tribute to vocational hindsight, "If I Ever Get a Job Again." Then, of course, there's Eddie Cantor's classic mocking of Panglossian economics, "Cheer Up! Smile! Nertz! (Ballyhoo)" a song that seems almost as relevant today as it did back in 1931. Plus there's a great many songs on this CD including a version of "Happy Days Are Here Again" that has actual vocals.

It's not the easiest CD to find, but I found it to be worth the effort. After all, if we must relive the 1930s, we might as well have some decent music to listen to.

Movie Song of the Week: “42nd Street”

How odd that I started developing this weird obsession with the movies of the 1930s just before people on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., started doing their damnest to bring back the 1930s. Perhaps it's just a coincidence. I would like to think that all this talk about the oncoming Depression is mere wishful thinking on the part of some pessimists. But I could be wrong.

Just in case, I prefer to relive the best of the 1930s, starting with the title song of one of my favorite movies, 1933's 42nd Street. I first got obsessed with this movie when I started wondered why the title character in John Sayles's The Lady in Red was obsessed with this flick. Once I saw a glimpse of the title number on YouTube, I was hooked and eventually I ended up watching the whole film on DVD. Busby Berkeley's musical vision is not for everyone and some on the Net have even hinted that his songs are in bad taste. If so, most modern musicals should have such tastes.

Now return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear when young women thought nothing about dancing on car tops and one never knew when one was going to run into a parade of tap-dancers. When life was so lyrical that even the wooden Indians danced and even domestic disturbances were choreographed. Okay, I doubt it was like that in real life, but in this movie number...

Well, please feel free to see for yourself. And I hope you enjoy it.

Busby Berkeley: Social Realist?

The depression, dearie.
--Ginger Rogers, Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

Whoa! Where did that line come from? I thought good old-fashioned Busby Berkeley musicals were too escapist to mention anything as humdrum as the Great Depression.

And what's up with that “We're in the Money” number that opens Gold Diggers of 1933? Film anthologies cite that song so often as evidence of 1930s Hollywood's obsession with escapism that it is a bit ironic to note that that number ends with the local sheriff's men coming in to confiscate the singers' props and costumes in order to make up for all the producer's unpaid bills. I'm sorry but that does not seem very escapist to me.

You could argue that some of the movie's other numbers (“Pettin' in the Park,” for example) are a bit more escapist, but then you get to the show's big finale, “Remember My Forgotten Man,” in which young Carol King (played by Joan Blondell and not to be confused with the songwriter with a similar name) laments the fate of unemployed WW I veterans while receiving vocal accompaniment by Etta Moten Barnett, and suddenly this whole escapism argument seems at best dubious.

True, one is never likely to confuse any Busby Berkeley movie with the works of John Steinbeck. But they do not seem as disconnected from reality as one would expect.

And I, for one, consider that a good thing.