MAKERS OF MELODY

By RICHARD CORLISS

In The Jazz Singer, after Al Jolson says, "You ain't heard nothin' yet," he doesn't burst into speech. He sings Toot Toot Tootsie. In the dawn of sound, talking pictures were often singing ones. Hollywood released 55 musicals in 1929, an amazing 78 in 1930. And these were just the feature films. To pad the program, studios made shorts (typically 10 minutes) in which stars from Broadway, radio and nightclubs performed and, as best they could, acted in a dramatic setting. Back then these films--the equivalent of short stories, but with songs--were fillers. Today they're thrillers, precious documents of American music at a vital crossroads.

So Hollywood Rhythm, Kino on Video's four-cassette release of 31 musical shorts from 1929 to 1941, is something to sing about. They reveal terrific artists--Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby, Ethel Merman, Ginger Rogers--in their early prime, making the music that made them famous. The tunes sound fresh, the interpretations supple. A melody can suddenly improv into Rhapsody in Blue or Chopin's Funeral March or 'Deed I Do. Half a century before rap, Louis Armstrong was already sampling.

The directors improvised as well. In early talkies the camera could hardly move, but Dudley Murphy's Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) daringly depicted the Duke Ellington composition in bold chiaroscuro, then used woozy prismatic images to show that a star dancer (the gorgeous Fredi Washington) is feeling ill before she goes on for a fatal final number. Fred Waller directed Ellington's Symphony in Black: A Rhapsody of Negro Life (1934) with artful lighting of black laborers, and moody shadows caressing the young Billie Holiday. Aubrey Scotto set most of A Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932) in a cleaning man's dream kingdom, Jazzmania, where Armstrong scats among soap bubbles and disappears into a whirlpool of multiple exposures.

Scotto could be the D.W. Griffith of musical shorts, not so much for his story-telling vigor as for his love of racial stereotypes. He bedecks Armstrong in a leopard-skin tunic, harem pants and body glitter; he urges his black actors to grimace grotesquely and gives them fearful patois to spout ("I run until I's black in de face," says a man fleeing a Latin American revolt in the 1931 Be Like Me). He was not alone in caricaturing African Americans. Crosby, whose crooner inflections owed much to black musicians, wears blackface in the 1932 Dream House--as Jolson did in The Jazz Singer.

Yet the shorts offered a lesson in liberalism: they opened middle America's ears to a burgeoning range of music. Not just black artists but country singers (Eddie Younger), opera stars (Nino Martini) and Chinese-American flappers (Anna Chang) burst into the consciousness of audiences who may at first have resisted the performers as foreign, then melted in the presence of all that charm, talent, eagerness to please.

The films have the audacity of the talkies' youth: you'll hear "hell" and "damn" in the 1929 Makers of Melody, see Calloway make love to a married woman, and get away with it, in Hi-De-Ho (1933). The films also showcase future stars, like Rogers, perky and alluring from the start, and Cary Grant, who made his movie debut in Chang's Singapore Sue. Some stars Hollywood couldn't figure out. Merman, setting a torch to After You're Gone in Be Like Me, is tough, sexy, charismatic--a singing Stanwyck. But film musical heroines were soft creatures, and Merman was sent back to Broadway.

A few times, the shorts directors got composers to cavort onscreen. Some look embarrassed--check out Richard Rodgers' stiff delivery and Lorenz Hart's plaid jammies in Makers of Melody--while others are to the camera born. In the 1934 Hollywood Rhythm, tubby lyricist Mack Gordon (Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?) is fast with a quip and light on his feet; doing a Latin dance, he irrepressibly shouts, "I got rumbatism!"

Gordon and Merman, Calloway and Rogers display an effervescence that bubbles through the decades and chases away our premillennial ennui. They embody the spirit of the Hollywood musical at its primitive best: Have fun; give joy.