Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Gay Sparkling Musical Hit!

Note: My dive into the movies of Gail Patrick continues apace.  

Artists and Models
1937 / 1:37
[internet archive]

As we would expect of a musical comedy, the plot is just an excuse to string together pop music of the day, comic songs with yodeling, dance numbers, and skits. Hollywood musicals are parodied in two extravaganzas that are worth watching, especially for movie-goers like me who genially despise musicals.

A curious antique, this picture gives a sense of what the folks thought was funny in the late Thirties. Jack Benny was a comedian whose image was a subtle mixture of diffidence and conceit. His character here is a blowhard PR man who bumbles his way to professional success and manages to attract society luminary Gail Patrick. Seeing Gail Patrick propose to reticent Jack Benny is like seeing Pallas Athena mopping the floor. Plus, with regard to 19-year-old Ida Lupino – all vigor and bloom - asking 43-year-old Benny to marry her, well, Hollywood really was a factory of fantasy.

The folks also thought knock-about comedian Ben Blue was funny. He sang, danced, and mugged in the tradition of Red Skelton. His physical business will remind the beholder of moderate to severe neurological symptoms. In an odd sequence, Blue interacts with two marionettes who stroll by giving him the saucy eye as if they were sex workers. As if we were not doubting our senses enough, another marionette sidles up, a foppishly-dressed Englishman with a posh accent. The marionette strokes Blue’s thigh and says, “Spring arrives, the sap begins to rise,” suggesting that they might experiment with relations in the form in which they arise in English boarding schools.

The finale is Public Melody #1. Despite Paramount’s cooperation with the FBI, J. Edgar’s bureau apparently did not have a problem with this sequence that satirizes the ambushing ways of the FBI (though one doubts Bonnie and Clyde would be amused). In Public Melody #1, FBI agents storm a peaceful black neighborhood like Harlem with their tommy-guns blazing. Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet a little but does more feets-do-yo-stuff stuff than we feel comfortable with in 2025. It stings to see the giant and genius Armstrong made small in view of the fact that he was one of the most talented and popular entertainers in the history of our country, white or black.

Martha Raye also sings and dances in Public Melody #1. I don’t know anything about the art or history of dance in 20th century America. But it looks to me as if Martha Raye is doing a parody of the freewheeling and athletic gyrations of jitterbugging. Good enough but things get weird. The print posted on IA is sharp enough to discern that Raye’s skin type starts, per the Fitzpatrick Scale, at light brown, then morphs to an olive tone, and finishes at medium white. This lightening is so strange that I struggle to make a meaning. My pea-sized brain just churns to a halt.

Our brains, however, were designed to tease out meanings so let’s consider another message: like Martha Raye, we too, Mr. and Ms. Movie-Goer, can learn from those Magically Wise Minorities and loosen up and sing and dance and have fun as if life were not one goddamn thing after another. Take risks, face fears, be grateful. Life isn’t working for The Man every night and day.

However, in 1937, this positive psychology, this self-help, was decidedly not the message that some ill-willed censors saw in Public Melody #1. This number was ordered snipped from the movie by some southern distributors because they thought their communities below the Mason-Dixon would not stand for blacks and whites performing together, such mixing implying the equality of the races. At any rate, sticking a thumb in the eye of racists, segregationists, and white supremacists, even if inadvertently, was (and is) a good thing.

This review grows long so we can’t cover in detail the parody of hillbilly songs by Judy Canova and her family.  Singer Connie Boswell is appropriately kept in silhouette for her number Whispers in the Dark. But we do miss her sisters and the harmonies. Artists Peter Arno, McClelland Barclay, Arthur William Brown, and John Lagatta do their rendition of England’s most famous fashion model Sandra Storme. Rube Goldberg and Jack Benny trade barbs.

Basically, this movie works as an artifact of American Oddness if one is in an anthropological mood. It’s interesting to think about social changes that render certain kinds of humor outdated and stock characters unfunny. Self-analysis may be stimulated by scenes that make us laugh though Our Better Angels know we ought to be outraged.

Other Gail Patrick Movies: Click on the title to go to the review

·         If I Had a Million
·         The Phantom Broadcast
·         The Murders in the Zoo
·         Death Takes a Holiday
·         The Crime of Helen Stanley
·         Murder at the Vanities
·         The Preview Murder Mystery
·         My Man Godrey
·         Murder by Pictures
·         

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