Hollywood Rhythm: Mini-Musicals

In the 1930s, long before anyone ever dreamed up MTV, there were the equivalent of music videos -- short films that played in movie theaters before the main feature. Kino Video has just released a series of four videotapes called Hollywood Rhythm: The Paramount Musical Shorts that include 31 musical shorts made by Paramount between 1929 and 1941. Some of these are merely filmed radio concerts, but some of them are historical documents and fascinating in their own right.

Many musical stars of the day made these films: Ruth Etting and Lillian Roth (whose scandalous lives Hollywood would film decades later), and Bing Crosby, who's in two comic shorts produced by Keystone Kops director Mack Sennett. Hoagy Carmichael, the delightfully roly-poly Mack Gordon and his partner Harry Revel, and Duke Ellington, in his first screen appearance, perform some of their own songs. There are precious films of black entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and a teenage Billie Holiday, with traces of baby fat still visible. The great Bessie Smith made her only film appearance in a brief 1929 melodrama called "St. Louis Blues" that her singing raises to a kind of tragic grandeur. And a 1941 short has Fats Waller doing his freest, most delicious version of "Ain't Misbehavin'."

Studios also used these films to get audience reactions to new personalities. In "Office Blues," an irresistible pre-blonde Ginger Rogers moons over her passive boss ("I am cynical, he's rabbinical," she sings). Cary Grant made his film debut in a musical short called "Singapore Sue."

Some of these films tell little stories, often about some form of sexual abuse to women. And some are startlingly experimental. Just before her Broadway debut, in 1930, Ethel Merman made a short called "Her Future," in which she stands before a judge in a malevolently distorted, Kafka-esque courtroom and promises to reform. "If I've gone wrong, then Heaven will judge me, for I learned the game from men," she sings, then floats out one of the hit tunes of the day, "Sing You Sinners." In "Old Man Blues," Death lies to Merman about her boyfriend and tries to tempt her to jump off a bridge. The surrealism prefigures the dream sequences in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

Perhaps the most impressive of these mini-musicals is Duke Ellington's "Symphony in Black," in which director Fred Waller cuts back and forth from Ellington composing this jazz symphony and performing it in concert to powerful images of coal workers, a jilted woman (Billie Holiday) getting knocked to the ground by her ex-lover, and some exuberantly filmed sequences in a Harlem nightclub. Another Ellington film here features the scintillating Fredi Washington; yet another includes one of Ellington's favorite girl singers, the elegant Ivie Anderson, who sings "Stormy Weather" in a sensational Ellington arrangement.

I'm especially crazy about a 1929 film called "Makers of Melody," in which Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, playing themselves, send up the usual trashy interviews about how they came to write their hit songs. The satirical scenes are punctuated by three enchanting musical numbers: "Manhattan," "The Girl Friend," and "Blue Room." The charming and stylish performers make today's young singers seem plodding and inert.

How can you resist a film in which a lively flapper, more libidinously uninhibited than her boyfriend, sings: "He's very short on looks, but long on decency/He's long on decency, he's very tame/But he has made an awful hit with me since he/A hit with me since he first came."

It's funnier -- and sexier -- than anything I've ever seen on MTV.

-- Lloyd Schwartz