Jazz Age

Almost as soon as the '20s stopped roaring, they began echoing, and are echoing still, in musicomedy, novels, memoirs and even women's fashions. To produce an echo that would come closest to what the '20s would call the real McCoy, television turned to its indispensable ally, the cinema. Four film searchers took 800 hours to view all they could find of the decade's imprint on celluloid. Out of it they culled 23 hours of film for NBC Producer Henry (Victory at Sea) Salomon and his Project 20 staff. This week (Thurs. 10 p.m., E.S.T., NBC) TViewers can see the result: The Jazz Age, which boils ten gaudy years down to 54 lively minutes.

In the boiling, Writers Salomon and Richard Hanser lost or overlooked some of the decade's juicy memories, e.g., the Scopes "monkey" trial, marathon dancing, flagpole sitting, Billy Sunday, the bathing beauty, Florida's real-estate boom, the Sacco-Vanzetti case--even (unaccountably) the advent of radio broadcasting. But the '20s had flavor to spare, and Jazz Age catches the tangy essences that should send oldtimers on a sentimental binge and plunge the younger set into wistful incredulity.

There is a pitiless closeup of an ailing, sorrowing Woodrow Wilson, after he had lost his crusade for internationalism--and an equally telling shot of Warren Gamaliel Harding as he testily misses a short putt. The Ku Klux Klan parades in great billowing ranks down Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue and through a flare-lit initiation ceremony in a Georgia glade. J. P. Morgan stares inscrutably through a Wall Street window, Josephine Baker struts her stuff at the U.S.-tourist-packed Folies-Bergere, Al Capone waddles contemptuously in and out of a courthouse, Babe Ruth rounds the bases, Lindy goes into a teetering take-off to make history--and international pandemonium. (The searchers tried but never could track down one storied shot of young Ernest Hemingway feeding a martini to a poodle in Harry's Bar in Paris.) Somewhat less authentically, but no less evocatively, the movie puts together the story of the speakeasy, the gangster, and the upheaval in manners and morals largely out of clips from such forgotten contemporary films as Hot Money and Follies of Youth.

Nothing in Jazz Age is more stirringly nostalgic than its sound track. Arranger Robert Russell Bennett has woven together 18 songs, e.g., Dardanella, Chicago, Yes Sir, That's My Baby, in the orchestral style of the period, and orchestrated Hallelujah with the clack of a stock ticker as its motif. The narration of the film, the second in a Project 20 trilogy (first: The Great War; third: The Story of the Thirties), is redolent with the decade's slangy idiom, from "Let's get blotto" to "Nerts." Better yet, not only for its authentic ring but for its unforeseen link to the unsummonable past, the idiom is spoken in the friendly, adenoidal singsong of Comedian Fred Allen, who died last March soon after finishing the job.

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