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| Ralph Cooper |
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| Lena Horne |
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| Phil Moore |
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| Phil Moore |
THE DUKE IS TOPS C+ USA (73 mi) 1938 d: William L Nolte
He’s the man that smokes that jive Jive will take you for a dive One slip you will arrive When you smoke that killin’ jive. —Killin’ Jive, by Cats and the Fiddle
Made the same year as Howard Hawks’ BRINGING UP BABY (1938), Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Fritz Lang’s You and Me (1938), and a year before GONE WITH THE WIND (1939), just to offer some period perspective, but this is a different entity altogether. The Hollywood studio system had a near-monopoly on the film industry in the 1930’s, the heyday of the Great Depression, but due to fraught circumstances entertainers like Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Josephine Baker, and Nina Mae McKinney, along with jazz musicians like Sydney Bechet found opportunities in Paris that weren’t available in the United States, a period marked by wars, race riots, and lynchings. Despite a depressed economy, there were opportunities for black entertainers, but they mostly relied upon white patronage, as even the notorious Cotton Club in Harlem was owned by Owney Madden, a prominent bootlegger and Irish gangster during Prohibition, becoming a white-only establishment that brought in black entertainers exclusively for gangsters and a wealthy, upscale elite. The club thrived with a decor creating a plantation-like atmosphere, with the mostly black staff presented as plantation residents, while the high-energy musical acts often perpetuated black stereotypes, only opening its doors to blacks following the Harlem riot of 1935 in preparation for a Joe Louis fight in 1935, before permanently closing in 1940. They imposed a color line for their chorus girls, as they had to be young and light-skinned while wearing skimpy outfits, with Lena Horne getting her start there in 1933 at the age of 16, but her singing voice led her to nightclubs all over New York, making her first film appearance in the 8-minute musical short CAB CALLOWAY’S JITTERBUG PARTY (1935) before starring here in her first film, produced by Million Dollar Productions, an independent white-owned subsidiary specializing in black movies, initially intended to be a quickie film made in just ten days, but the producers ran out of money before the completion of the picture. The cast, however, stayed on to complete the film, made during the peak of Race film production (80% were destroyed, production values are poor, and they are rarely restored), starring predominantly black casts in theaters that had previously been used for vaudeville acts and geared towards black audiences, articulating narratives of black identity, but they were marginalized from the industry as a whole, rarely seen by white audiences, and typically produced and directed in a fly-by-night fashion by white filmmakers, remaining mostly inaccessible to black communities outside of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, as mainstream theaters would not screen these films. A note of interest, with all-black casts, Lena Horne’s musical presence is integrated into the overall narrative, while in Hollywood white-cast productions, she had virtually no connection to the narrative, as she was prohibited from having a relationship with a white man, which limited her emotional range and made it easier to cut her songs out of the picture altogether for screenings in the South. The connection between black Americans and musicality was somewhat ironic, as they performed in a musical genre celebrating social integration and strength in community, even as the films themselves were segregated and played before even more strictly segregated audiences. In Hollywood studio films, you’d be hard-pressed to find a black actor portraying any character that was not a racist stereotype, with a prevalence of “pickaninnies” and watermelons, as this was the image being force-fed into white audiences at large during the Jim Crow era, while theaters in the South refused to show films that portrayed blacks in anything other than subservient roles to whites.
According to Loren Miller (judge), an activist journalist and civil rights attorney writing for The Crisis in November 1934:
A few years ago I attended a showing of Trader Horn (1930), a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, at a Negro Theater. One scene depicts the “beautiful”—of course, blond—heroine in the clutches of “savage” Africans. In typical Hollywood thriller style the girl is saved just as all hope is ebbing away. At this particular showing the audience burst into wild applause when the rescue scene flashed on the screen. I looked around. Those who were applauding were ordinary Negro working people and middle class folk. Hollywood’s movie makers had made the theme so commonplace and so glorious that it seemed quite natural white virtue should triumph over black vice. Obviously these spectators were quite unconscious of the fact that they were giving their stamp of approval to a definite pattern of racial relationships in which they were always depicted as the lesser breed.
By 1938, black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux had been making race films for twenty years under the banner of Micheaux Pictures Corporation, yet when assessing the filmmaking efforts of Micheaux and other black film companies, Miller asserted their failure to be commercially successful was due to the fact race films simply mimicked the white movies without offering an alternative, believing it was the social responsibility of these films to confront prejudicial Jim Crow distortions from reality. However, because of the necessity of using white-controlled channels of distribution and exhibition, this was simply not possible, as Micheaux relied upon the financing of white businessmen like Apollo Theater owner Frank Schiffman. At the time, Micheaux’s film GOD’S STEPCHILDREN (1938) closed after one day, as a coalition of Communist party sympathizers and Harlem activists picketed the theater and shut it down, complaining it was racist, while this film drew more anticipated interest because it’s a musical and due to the title’s implicit connection to jazz great Duke Ellington, though he has no association whatsoever with the film. Nonetheless, to black audiences in New York or Chicago, the Ellington name carried a very specific meaning, linked to other great jazz artists, like Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, or Count Basie, but none are in any way connected. It’s a confounding aspect of the picture, as it never claims to feature Duke Ellington, but it nonetheless capitalizes on his name. The biggest star in race pictures in 1938 was Ralph Cooper, starring in two all-black gangster pictures, DARK MANHATTAN (1937) and BARGAIN WITH BULLETS (1937), where he was often described as the “Dark Gable.” Through the mid 30’s, he was a dancer, comic, singer, and bandleader, moving to Los Angeles with hopes of becoming a Hollywood star, thinking he might replace an injured Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in the latest Shirley Temple venture, but that dream was soundly rejected by his skin color. In making this film, if you notice closely, it has the stamp of Hollywood approval, as the MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association) seal verifies the film was approved by the 1930’s standards of the Production Code Administration Office, which indicates, among other things, that there is no miscegenation or obscenity in the costumes or dance.
Originally packaged as a vehicle for the studio’s major star, this was filmed in Hollywood, co-scripted and co-directed by that star, Ralph Cooper, best known as the originator and master of ceremonies of Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem for fifty years, which helped launch the careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan, among others, while he also served as the production manager on the film. While it initially planned to co-star Nina Mae McKinney as the female lead, she was unavailable, so the film has historical value in discovering Lena Horne at such an early stage in her career, only 20 at the time, not yet exuding the confidence of the star she would become, described in the film as the Bronze Nightingale, later capitalizing on her fame, re-releasing the film in 1943 as THE BRONZE VENUS, with Lena Horne’s name prominently featured above the title. However, this is a lackluster effort, moving at a snail’s pace until the final fifteen minutes, with mostly wooden performances, where it’s clear there was no money in this project, feeling amateurish at times, despite the considerable talent level, where the B-picture plot is secondary to all the musical specialty numbers which feature a variety of great performers who are not household names, as their screen opportunities were limited. Among the featured acts are The Basin Street Boys (originally known as the 4 Dots) performing a ragtime number Blackberry Baby, The Duke is Tops clip YouTube (2:17), returning late in the film to perform Thursday Evening Swing, The Basin Street Boys Explain Thursday Evening Swing YouTube (1:59), also the debonair tap dancing of Willie Covan, and the more explosive, physical style of Rubberneck Holmes, who actually does handstands in his remarkably unconventional routine, appearing in only two pictures, seen at the 4:10 mark in this compilation of the film’s best musical acts, The Duke is Tops 1938, Lena Horne, Harlemania Orch., Cats & Fiddle (excerpt YouTube (26:55), while also featuring the stark originality of Cats and the Fiddle ("Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks - THE CATS AND THE FIDDLE"), seen wildly performing an off-color marijuana song here, Killing Jive. Performed by Cats and the Fiddle - Duke Is Tops (1938) YouTube (2:38). You can’t emphasize enough the importance behind the scenes of musical arranger Phil Moore, the first black to be hired full-time by the music department of a major Hollywood studio (MGM), having an influence on the developing careers of not only Lena Horne, regularly accompanying her during her concerts, but later Dorothy Dandridge, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe, yet rarely received credit. The director never really utilized the talent he had in front of him, as the camera work is utterly conventional, with little to no motion whatsoever, where the straightforward view is reminiscent of watching television, while the dim lighting is reflective of such limited resources. According to James Gavin, author of Stormy Weather: The Life of Lena Horne, even he acknowledges that “her singing is generic, her acting flat.” It’s not by accident that the two headliners are both light-skinned, while most all of the men have their slicked-back hair straightened, part of the age-old dilemma not just in show business, but the country at large, where capitulation to the purse strings of mainstream white audiences was unfortunately where their bread was buttered, part of the larger socio-economic dynamic of race relations in America. Lena Horne almost didn’t get the part because she was considered “overweight,” made only weeks after the birth of her first child, and did not attend the June 1938 NAACP charity premiere in Pittsburgh because she was not paid for her work in this picture, or the re-release years later.
Cooper plays Duke Davis, a tireless small-time producer out in the hinterlands showcasing the talent of Lena Horne as singer Ethel Andrews, his off-stage girlfriend and star of a low-rent traveling show called Sepia Scandals that is touring small towns in the dying days of vaudeville, making this something of a musical romance, accentuated by Horne’s early performances, including the theme song, Early Lena Horne "I Know You Remember" from The Duke Is ... YouTube (2:09), returning later for another number, Lena Horne sings Don't Let Our Love Song Turn Into a Blues - Duke Is Tops (1938) YouTube (2:42), remaining still, smiling sweetly, while swaying her hips with her arms extended. But an East coast talent scout (George Marshall) makes Duke realize he’s holding her back from success, as she has a chance to be a real star on Broadway, but as a single act, not the duo they have always been. In heartbreaking fashion, he resorts to deception to fool her into believing he’s selling her contract for needed money, which is the only way to convince her to leave the act and make a go on her own. But rather than follow her dreams to New York, the film sticks with Duke as he hitches his wagon to a traveling medicine show through the South, becoming a barker accentuating the exploits of a flamboyant huckster snake-oil salesman known as Doc Dorando (Laurence Criner), whose claim to fame is selling fake elixirs before quickly heading out of town. Despite introducing a series of specialty musical acts, the film gets bogged down in this section and falls into a moral crevasse, accentuating the stereotypical aspects of exploitive con artists, as if they’re just trying to earn a buck, playing it for laughs and entertainment while downplaying how they’re deceptively preying upon impoverished communities for their hard-earned money. While the film accurately portrays the sideshow circuits, eking out a living by traveling from town to town, yet for the star performer to be associated with pilfering rural black communities in the South, it’s just not a good look. Like a jolt of needed adrenaline, however, the film happily reconnects the two near the end, as Ethel’s career takes a nosedive in New York without Duke, ironically labeled a specialty act in the film, just as Horne was treated throughout her film career. Their reunion infuses the film with combustible star power, as their newly written act is surrounded by wild music and crazy choreography, coming together in a stunning final revue that is a crescendo of unbridled enthusiasm, emblematic of the mad finale of Footlight Parade (1933), but without the extravagant set pieces, featuring the sophisticated tap of Willie Covan amidst the dancing chorus line, directed by Duke in a savvy nod to Cab Calloway conducting his Swing Band Harlemania Orchestra. Nearly the entire budget was spent for this showstopping finale, with all those snazzy costumes, mirroring the high-energy floor shows at the Cotton Club, Harlem Is Harmony. Sung by Ralph Cooper - YouTube (3:08). The topper is the outrageous African jungle costumes and dance rhythms of Marie Bryant, actually veering into camp by casting a hypnotic voodoo spell, Marie Bryant in The Duke Is Tops (1938) YouTube (3:43), concluding with a rare onscreen kiss, Lena Horne, age 20, You Remember, Cotton Club, First B/W Kiss YouTube (4:58). The extended finale is hugely entertaining, providing a rare glimpse into what was at the time an excluded aspect of black culture, as the widespread segregation of the motion-picture industry also meant that most funding channels, exhibition venues, and business opportunities were closed not just to black artists, but to their deprived audiences as well.
Lena Horne in "The Duke is Tops" (1938) entire film is available, YouTube (1:15:13)
