The Crooner Lay Dead...

Note: Gail Patrick's film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role Murders in the Zoo. In the movie reviewed here, she plays a cheerful optimistic woman that must choose between marriage and a singing career. Radio was filled with live programming in the days before widespread recording so it is in fact conceivable that singers, no matter in what genre, could make a living in big cities. Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement tedious in the 1950s, so she became the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama ever Perry Mason.

The Phantom Broadcast
1933 / 1:12
Tagline: "The Crooner Lay Dead...Yet His Voice Haunted 20,000,000 People!”
[internet archive]

Grant Murdock has become a radio star with song and charm that entrance women of all ages. He’s earning so much money that gangsters want to take over his management and skim his earnings. After all, they are facing a loss of revenue due to the Repeal of Prohibition in December and mobsters have bills to pay too. To accomplish this end, the mugs must knock off Norman Wilder, Grant’s business manager, accompanist, and singing coach.

Ironically, the hoods don’t know that killing Wilder would tank Grant’s career. Wilder, in fact, is the singing voice behind Grant, since this kind of faking was easier to pull off in the bygone days before Milli Vanilli stole our innocence. Not explained was how sensitive sensible ethical Wilder got himself neck deep in such a sham. Maybe he got sucked in because he loved singing so much and he knew music brought comfort to Americans hard-pressed by the Depression. A noble artist! An idealistic soul!

Grant, not an artist but a star, is a total ingrate and brute, mocking Wilder’s spinal deformity which makes it impossible for him to become a heart throb. Inserted in this talky drama for the sake of a modicum of action, an attempt is made on Wilder’s life involving a car chase and tommy guns. The attempt fails but gallant Wilder finds himself implicated in another killing.

As a fickle puritan, I must opine on the Pre-Code aspects of this picture. While Wilder is a paragon of the lofty and high-minded, morally iffy is the gangsters having Elsa sleep with Grant in order to insert a wedge between Grant and Wilder. Much to the mobsters’ disgust at mixing business and pleasure, Elsa falls in love with Grant, who treats her like trash because, in the tradition of "ladies' men," he holds women in contempt. Plus, Grant has hit on the grubby idea to defile wholesome Gail Patrick.

Also lowering the moral tone is everybody mocking the afflicted Wilder for his kyphosis. On the upside, Wilder takes these insults philosophically, since it is easy to assume that he has been hearing put-downs about his body his entire life. He would have had to develop a thick skin to stay sane.

Bold is the sexuality of the characters played by Vivienne Osbourne and Pauline Garon. They both move like women who know they are free, though Osbourne’s Elsa is using her charms with an eye to future big bucks, furs, diamonds, etc. Most shockingly, the culprit gets away with murder. Getting a movie-goer to pull for a culprit to get away with it is about as Pre-Code you can get, I imagine. I’m down with the guilty party walking away every once in a while, just for the contrast to the glop and pap Hollywood was later to so cautiously churn out.

Hey, I said I was fickle.

Attractions include not only sophisticated Art Deco decorations in Grant’s apartment. The acting and writing make up a garland of antique charms. The acting has carry-over from the silent era, with lengthy shots of overwrought faces expressing profound emotions. Actors talk real slow, as if the audience were not used to voices coming from the big screen yet. The ending is as corny as Kansas in August. There are many weak lines that call to mind short stories in romance magazines. “A heartening phrase.”  “To reach people you must have sympathy.” As a budding star torn between career and marriage, Gail Patrick does what actors have to do, i.e. make feeble lines persuasive: “I've reached a crossroads.” “Music is a zealous master,” Wilder sagely warns her.

Also of interest to movie-goers into the history of pop culture, the word “crooner” is twice used indignantly in “He’s not a crooner.” By the early 1930s, the term “crooner” and “crooning” had taken on a pejorative nuance. Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the New York Singing Teachers Association (NYSTA)* both denounced crooning in the papers. Perhaps fearing that women would be emotionally manipulated by libertines who sang in that style, Cardinal O'Connell called crooning “base,” “degenerate,” “defiling” and “un-American,” with the NYSTA adding “corrupt.” Other culture mavens stigmatized crooners as gender and sexual deviants. The loyal assistant of Wilder, Sandy, sourly observes of Grant “When all the dames are gaga about a guy, there's usually something wrong with him." 

* Still in existence, NYSTA is the oldest continuing singing teachers organization in the world.