VIDEO: HISTORY OF THE BIG BROADCAST

THE BIG BROADCAST GETS A SHOWING

One of the most elusive Bing Crosby films to collectors and fans alike is Bing's first starring movie The Big Broadcast. If you live on the West coast, you will get a chance to see this rare 1932 film. It is part of a film showing presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. It will be shown at the Billy Wilder Theater at 7:30 on March 16th. The film is restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Packard Humanities Institute and Universal Pictures.

Here is what the UCLA Film & Television Archive writes about the film:

In the late 1920s, the talkies introduced a wave of all-star revues, such as MGM’s The Hollywood Revue of 1929 and Warner Bros.’s The Show of Shows (1929), which were inspired by the boisterous spirit of vaudeville. Paramount used this variety format as a vehicle to showcase a dazzling array of radio personalities—15 total—whose stardom was built on coast-to-coast radio programs, record sales and nightclub shows. Radio was in its golden age, and Hollywood had found ways to capitalize on its popularity.

The Big Broadcast stars Bing Crosby in his first major role in a feature. The crooner had made his screen debut in Universal’s King of Jazz (1930) as part of The Rhythm Boys trio. Crosby later signed with Mack Sennett, starring in a string of successful musical comedy shorts. In The Big Broadcast, Crosby portrays a radio heartthrob whose perennial tardiness—caused by Sharon Lynn’s vampy Mona Lowe (a play on the tune “Moanin’ Low”)—leads a sponsor to pull the plug on the WADX station. When Mona jilts him for another man, the inconsolable (and inebriated) Bing enters a suicide pact with newfound friend Leslie (Stuart Erwin), an equally lovelorn Texas oilman. In the sober light of day, Leslie resolves to set things right by buying the radio station and preparing the next big broadcast.

The loose narrative interweaves performances by each of the radio talents, among them the Boswell Sisters, Cab Calloway (who steals the show with “Kickin’ the Gong Around”) and the Mills Brothers. Burns and Allen make their feature film debut as the distressed station manager and his birdbrained stenographer. Director Frank Tuttle, who had been making comedies since the early 1920s, further animates the film by employing a number of delightful camera tricks that harken back to slapstick two-reelers. The film proved to be a hit, prompting Paramount to revisit the variety format with International House (1933) and three more Big Broadcast pictures in the 1930s. —Jennifer Rhee

SOURCE

BING'S MOVIES THAT DESERVE A DVD RELEASE

With new mammoth Universal box release of some twenty Bing Crosby movies on DVD, you would think that the loyal allegiance of Bing Crosby fans would be clamoring to buy the expensive and yet seemingly extensive collection of Bing films. However, I do not think it will be the case, because all of these films have already been issued on DVD – sometimes for the fifth and sixth time. It got me thinking of the countless Bing Crosby movies that have never seen the light of day. Here are five films that in my opinion deserve to be released:

1. THE BIG BROADCAST (1932)
It is really shocking that this early musical is not on DVD yet. It was never even been issued on video. It not only was Bing’s first feature film for Paramount Studios, but it also had a huge cast of radio superstars in addition to Bing like: George Burns, Gracie Allen, Kate Smith, The Boswell Sisters, and The Mills Brothers just to name a few. Bing gets so sing some great standards as well like: “Please”, “Here Lies Love”, and “Dinah”. The old days of radio may seem outdated these days, but it is fun to see how the most important medium of 1932 worked.


2. THE STAR MAKER (1939)
This forgotten film was Bing’s first movie where he played a character based on a real person. Bing played entertainer Gus Edwards (1879-1945). Edwards did not want his life made into a movie, so they changed Bing’s name in the movie to Larry Earl. The movie did not really touch upon the songwriting ability of Gus Edwards but more about his work as a child show producer. Bing sings some great vintage numbers like “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now” and “School Days” as well as singing some new songs like “An Apple For The Teacher” and “Still The Blue Birds Sing”. Again, it amazes me that such a cheerful and fun movie has not even been released on video, let alone DVD.

3. DIXIE (1943)
I do not think the film Dixie will ever see the light of day because of how racist blackface is viewed as. It is an outdated and sort of embarrassing genre of entertainment, but I believe it is a part of American history no matter how it is perceived now. Bing again played a real person, songwriter Dan Emmett (1815-1904) who wrote the popular song “Dixie”. This film was important because it was Bing’s first movie in color, and the story is actually pretty good. Aside from Bing trying to make it as a song writer and performer he had an interesting love triangle with Marjorie Reynolds and Dorothy Lamour. A nicely remastered version of this Technicolor film would be great to see.


4. MR. MUSIC (1950)
Of the five Bing films I put on this list, Mr. Music is the only film that was released on video. So it is a shame it is not on DVD. The movie is not great, and unfortunately the songs are not that memorable either, but Bing was in great voice. The film is the charming story of a lazy songwriter (another songwriting role) who is facing financial ruin if he does not start writing again. The cast included guest appearances by Groucho Marx, Peggy Lee, and Dorothy Kirsten to name a few. Bing and Kirsten duet on “Accidents Will Happen”, which is a sleeper favorite of mine, and Bing is great on the number “And You’ll Be Home”. The movie was no Holiday Inn, but it is a breezy fun movie in my opinion.

5. MAN ON FIRE (1957)
Man On Fire was one of the four films Bing made at MGM Studios. The other three were Going Hollywood (1933), High Society (1956), and That’s Entertainment (1974). This 1957 film is distinctive because it was one of the few movies Bing did not sing it. The film is a tense drama about a husband divorcing his wife and fighting for the custody of his only son. Many people do not like this dramatic side of Bing Crosby’s movie career, but I enjoy the film. TCM plays the movie from time to time, but it has yet to be released on DVD. Viewing this movie even makes me wish Bing would have done more dramas.


All five of these films are worthy to be released on DVD. Maybe in time they will be. Fortunately I have been able to get bootleg copies of all five movies, but again they deserve an official studio release…

GUEST REVIEWER: THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1932

Bruce Kogan is back with his usual in-depth look at Bing Crosby's filmography...

Paramount made the first of its Big Broadcast films, the first and best of them. This first one gave Bing Crosby his first role in a feature film, previously he had done guest appearances and also short subjects for Mack Sennett. Not wanting to mislead anyone about who was numero uno in this film, Paramount had him play a radio crooner named Bing Crosby. Eleven years later Frank Sinatra would make his feature film debut as Frank Sinatra.

Bing's the star attraction of this one horse town radio station, appearing for Griptight Girdles on the Griptight Girdle Hour. That is when he can get to the studio. His job is being threatened and he's also coming between Stu Erwin who buys the station and Leila Hyams who's manager George Burns's secretary.

It's a thin plot, but nicely done and it's to show off some of radio's greatest talents of that year. In addition to Bing Crosby, appearing are Kate Smith, Arthur Tracy, the Boswell Sisters, Burns and Allen, Cab Calloway and Vincent Lopez with their respective orchestras, the Mills Brothers and tenor Donald Novis.

Bing gets to sing three numbers, Please and Here Lies Love which were written for this film and Dinah. Crosby made a classic recording of Dinah with the Mills Brothers and I wish they'd reprised that for the movie. Instead it's done with a black shoeshine boy giving him a beat with the rag while Bing is scatting like Ella Fitzgerald. Bing was great, but the staging is something that black people would find offensive. Please became a great early hit for him.

Here Lies Love is sung by Crosby, but he reprises it after it's been introduced by Arthur Tracy. Tracy, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was billed as the Street Singer and had an almost operatic quality to his voice. He rivaled Crosby, Russ Columbo, Rudy Vallee, and Morton Downey in popularity as a radio singer, but American movie audiences didn't take to him. He went to Great Britain in the mid-30s and there he became a movie star. He went back to the US after World War II and only appeared sporadically after that. Tracy was fabulously wealthy due to good investments and lived to the age of 97. He did a cameo appearance in Crossing Delancey, you'll see him briefly discussing issues of the day over the pickle barrel there.

For Kate Smith, radio was a godsend. That beautiful and powerful voice was also trapped in an elephantine body like a Wagnerian opera soprano. She was never going to be a film star. But she was radio's most popular female vocalist, no one else was ever even close and she sings a great rendition of It Was So Beautiful in The Big Broadcast.

Burns and Allen did surreal comedy that was probably only equaled by Monty Python years later. Gracie Allen was in her own world and the ever patient George gave up trying to deal with her reasoning. They did some great guest bits in films like this one and two more with Bing Crosby. But they never really carried a film by themselves with the exception of Here Comes Cookie. I did a review of that and it's the best example of their work.

Donald Novis was a popular radio tenor, totally forgotten now. He also was on the Broadway stage and in Rodgers&Hart's Jumbo introduced their classic, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World. They give him Trees to sing, Joyce Kilmer's poem put to music. I wish he'd sung something more popular.

With all these radio stars it's hard to remember that the nominal star of the film is Stu Erwin. Erwin did a fabulous job in creating some great milquetoast characters from the early talkies. The climax of the film involves a long running gag with him trying to get a recording of Bing singing Please to the studio to substitute for Crosby who's AWOL. It's done almost without dialog and it is interspersed with several of the stars previously mentioned. It's a hilarious bit of slapstick.

The Big Broadcast is enjoyable nostalgic fun and a piece of history since it's the feature film debut of America's greatest entertainer, Bing Crosby...

EDDIE LANG LIVES ON

EDDIE LANG: THE FATHER OF JAZZ GUITAR By Dan DeLuca

From Django Reinhardt to Jimi Hendrix, the names that commonly appear on argument-starting lists of the greatest and most influential guitarists of the 20th century are familiar. But there's one flat-picking virtuoso from South Philadelphia typically left out of the conversation, whose music has receded into obscurity despite a trailblazing career cut short by his tragic death in 1933: Eddie Lang. That's an injustice an aggregation of local musicians and Lang enthusiasts are doing their best to redress, starting with a multi-act show that will bring Lang's music to life at Chris' Jazz Cafe in Center City on Monday. It's the 108th anniversary of the birth of Lang, who died of complications from a tonsillectomy that his friend and collaborator, Bing Crosby, urged him to get. And it's been declared Eddie Lang Day in Philadelphia in a proclamation from Mayor Nutter that "urges all citizens to be aware of Eddie Lang's history-making musical legacy as well as the role of Philadelphia in the development of early jazz music."

And it's about time, say ardent fans of Lang, frustrated that such a prodigiously talented and innovative figure could be all but forgotten by all but jazz cognoscenti. "He's somebody who died at a young age who had a brief, meteoric career," says Aaron Luis Levinson, the Grammy-winning Philadelphia record producer who helmed Rediscovering Lonnie Johnson, the 2008 release that re-created three of the historic guitar duets between Lang and African American guitarist Johnson that broke the recording industry's color line in 1928 and 1929. At Chris' on Monday, all 12 of the duets - which Lang recorded under the pseudonym Blind Willie Dunn so as to not arouse suspicion of music miscegenation - will be reprised by guitarists Jef Lee Johnson and Jonathan Dichter, who will "play" Lang. "He's not someone anybody ever remembers to talk about when they talk about Philadelphia music," Levinson says. "There's something really unfair about cultural memory. It's like anything that happened before Elvis Presley gets treated like it happened in the dinosaur age." Lang's life story may be little known, but it reads like an unwritten screenplay about a dazzlingly talented, thoroughly modern musician.

Born Salvatore Massaro in 1902, Lang took his stage name from a favorite basketball player for the club team the Philadelphia Sphas (an acronym for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association). The son of an Italian American immigrant instrument maker was among the pioneers of the flat-picking style (which involves playing with a plectrum held by, rather than attached to, the fingers) and is credited with popularizing the guitar over the louder, previously more prevalent banjo, as a key instrument for the jazz bands of the 1920s. So much so that the historical marker across the street from the Saloon restaurant in Lang's old neighborhood at Seventh and Clymer Streets, put up in 1995, proclaims him "the Father of Jazz Guitar." Along with his childhood friend, violinist Joe Venuti, Lang laid the foundation for the improvisational gypsy jazz stylings of Reinhardt and his violin-playing counterpart, Stephane Grappelli. Crosby biographer Gary Giddins writes that in contrast to Venuti's merry-prankster personality, Lang was "quiet, thoughtful and responsible, a ruminative Catholic." In A Pocketful of Dreams: Bing Crosby, The Early Years, 1903-1940, Giddins writes that after cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, Lang and Venuti were "arguably the most influential white jazz musicians of the 1920s, serving as a sort of template for the famed European jazz ensemble of the 1930s, the Quintette du Hot Club de France." Lang and Venuti made their names together playing in Philadelphia and Atlantic City showrooms, and according to Dichter, a music historian as well as a guitar teacher at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, toured in England with the novelty band the Mound City Blue Blowers.

 In 1929, they were hired by bandleader Paul Whiteman, and it was there that Lang first began to accompany Crosby, who said of Lang's playing: "He made you want to ride and go." Giddins calls Lang Crosby's "jazz conscience," and the singer's "most intimate friend, almost certainly the closest he would ever have." Crosby brought Lang for the 1932 film The Big Broadcast. He also negotiated a deal for Lang to have speaking parts in all his movies, which is why he urged him to have an operation to rectify the chronic hoarseness attributed to tonsillitis. Richard Barnes, a guitarist and photographer who lives in Aston, is the driving force behind Eddie Lang Day in Philadelphia and will perform at Chris' with his band, the Blackbird Society Orchestra. He'll also do a number of Lang-Venuti duets with violinist Michael Salsburg. Barnes first got the Lang bug after he saw Leon Redbone perform in West Philadelphia in the early 1990s. "That was my exposure to 1920s music," Barnes says. "I got a couple of CDs, and when you listen to Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, there was always this one guitar player that I really liked. It was totally different. Not strumming. "Not blues. He plays in an almost pianolike style. Very interesting chord inversions, always complementing the singer. A real distinct sound. It turns out it was Eddie Lang."

 Barnes put an ad on Craigslist this year, reading "Eddie Lang Day, This October." One of the interested parties to inquire was Mike Hood, who suggested Chris' as a venue, and will play on Monday with his band Cornbread Five. The event will raise money for the Eddie Lang Music Scholarship Program for underprivileged children, and Barnes hopes to turn it into an annual Eddie Lang Festival at Chris' every October. Barnes, who says business for his 1920s-style Blackbird Society Orchestra is looking up thanks to interest in HBO's Atlantic City mob drama Boardwalk Empire, got the idea to approach the Nutter administration from one of his first musical memories. "When I was 13, my first concert was seeing Elton John at the Spectrum," he remembers. "And there was a picture of Frank Rizzo in the newspaper with Elton John, when he declared it Elton John Day. I thought it would be so cool if I could get the mayor to do that with Eddie Lang." The attention is well-deserved, says Dichter, who plays in a band called Beau Django, and who talked to Les Paul about Lang's influence before the guitarist's death at 94 last year. "He said it was just too long ago," Dichter says. "It's convenient to forget." Barnes says he's always on a mission to bring Lang's music to a wider audience. "I'm not trying to form the fan club or anything," he says. "But I do think that people would appreciate this music and enjoy it. It's something you don't hear all the time."