Stormy Weather

 

Director Andrew L. Stone

Lena Horne

Horne with Bill Robinson and Cab Calloway

Katherine Dunham

STORMY WEATHER           A                                                                                                      USA  (78 mi)  1943  d: Andrew L. Stone

Don’t know why                                                                                                                          There’s no sun up in the sky                                                                                                           Stormy Weather                                                                                                                                Since my man and I ain’t together                                                                                                 Keeps raining all the time...                                                                                                  —Stormy Weather, by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, 1933

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.  It is a story which otherwise has yet to be told and which no American is prepared to hear.              —James Baldwin extract from Notes of a Native Son, 1955

Following Vincente Minnelli’s earlier all-black MGM musical release in the same year, CABIN IN THE SKY (1943), these are probably the two most successful and best-remembered examples of race films in America, starring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in his first and only starring role of his career at age 65, who more than holds his own against a young 26-year old Lena Horne, with her polished image of beauty, sophistication, and refinement, yet any hint of desire for her has been stripped of all sexuality, remaining PG safe and non-threatening, bringing elegance and stature to the picture. Aesthetically complex and historically significant, conveying a repertoire of black performance that simply couldn’t be framed in words, this backstage musical from Hollywood’s Golden Age is a rarity, featuring some of the best black entertainers in the business, with highlights including Ada Brown with Fats Waller on the piano singing “That Ain’t Right,” Ada Brown and Fats Waller - That Ain't Right from Stormy Weather (Upscaled to 4k) YouTube (3:01), Cab Calloway in a zoot suit singing and leading the band in a number entitled “Geechy Joe,” Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (3:24), the matchless elegance of the Nicholas Brothers jumping on tabletops before doing gravity defying and anatomically challenging splits down the stairs, described by Fred Astaire as “the greatest movie musical number [I] had ever seen,” Cab Calloway & Nicholas Brothers - Jumpin' Jive YouTube (4:47), and Lena Horne singing the jazzy “Diga Diga Doo,” Lena Horne - Diga Diga Doo (1943) YouTube (2:14), featuring unbelievably wild chorus-line costumes.  She sings a more restrained duet with Bill, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby,” Lena Horne - I Can't Give You Anything But Love (1943) YouTube (2:55), a song initially introduced by Adelaide Hall in 1928, which was also featured in Cassavetes’ films Shadows (1959) and Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), before Horne’s distinctive rendition of “Stormy Weather” is performed in a lengthy sequence, Lena Horne - Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (4:11), as Katherine Dunham and her dancers improvise a modern ballet under the storm clouds.  Some of the dialogue is a bit hokey, as are the scenes with Uncle Bill telling stories to children around his knees, reminiscent of Uncle Remus in Disney’s long-censored SONG OF THE SOUTH (1946), with overt references to Southern plantations and the legacy of slavery, where the pigeon-holing or typecasting of blacks into musical and dance roles can be traced back to minstrel and Antebellum-era stereotypes, including “pickaninny,” Little Black Sambo imagery from a dance sequence, The Cakewalk 1943 YouTube (2:48), showcasing an array of crude blackface masks, leading into the pre-Civil War minstrel song “Camptown Races,” with Antebellum plantation motifs in the décor, including costume allusions to Southern Belles.  A little known aspect of the Cakewalk is that it originated on plantations to mock whites, where the winner would receive a cake, becoming a staple in minstrel shows and black communities since slavery days.  The American black experience has been shoved to the side or used as the butt of jokes since BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), which was not only a massive blockbuster but it was the benchmark for how blackness would be portrayed in mainstream films.  Despite an all-black cast, there is a blackfaced Stepin Fetchit-style comedy act by Flournoy Miller and Johnny Lee that reeks of racist derision, rarely seen outside of black variety shows, the only non-musical number in the film, where it’s hard to miss, taking a nostalgic backward glance at the vanishing era of black performance, recreating the vaudeville and minstrel-inspired performances of the black stage, showing the evolution from the 1910’s to the early 1940’s.  Mostly these are musical sketches in a manner typical of 1930’s musicals, with stereotype scenes of tap dancing, shuffling, and blackface in settings like a Mississippi riverboat, a Beale Street blues and jazz joint, and a variety theater, yet it is the always optimistic, unfailing enthusiasm of Bill Robinson and Dooley Wilson, the piano player from CASABLANCA (1942), that keeps the spirit of the film uplifting.  With non-stop musical numbers, this film provides the kind of energy and pizzazz that Broadway shows hope to match.  Made under the $5,000 target, the maximum allowed during the war years, the otherwise unnoteworthy director and entire crew were white, where run-ins with the director (Horne described his style on the set as cold) may have cost Horne future roles, yet they translated the Cotton Club nightclub revue to the screen more successfully than any other cinematic attempt.  Andrew Stone’s earliest directing efforts were extravagant musical productions, turning down a contract with MGM and declaring himself independent from the Hollywood system, later going on to make the forgettable SONG OF NORWAY (1970).

Starting her career as a singer and dancer in nightclubs during the 30’s, Lena Horne moved into films in the late 30’s with her first appearance in The Duke Is Tops (1938), but it was Walter White, director of the NAACP, who helped Lena Horne get a Hollywood contract with MGM in 1942, quickly becoming one of the top black performers in America, on loan from MGM for this picture with 20th Century Fox, which was a hit at the box office, despite the fact less than half of Fox’s theaters booked the movie, generating a press release that reads “Celebrating the magnificent contribution of the colored race to the world of entertainment during the past twenty-five years.”  While the story is purely secondary, organized around a series of disconnected musical numbers, the character of tap performer Bill Robinson is loosely based on Robinson’s own life, told in flashbacks with Bill reminiscing about his career and storied romance with singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne), running into obstacles along the way, but it’s the incredible musical numbers that stand the test of time, featuring artists playing themselves who were diminished or excluded altogether from Hollywood pictures.  What’s truly remarkable is the seemingly unlimited range of artistic talent on display, liberated from the straightjacket of playing stereotypes in smaller roles that Hollywood films confined them to, where this is one of the few mainstream films at the time where blacks were portrayed as real people.  Unfortunately, this was the final film of Fats Waller, who died from pneumonia just 5 months after the opening, and also the final film of Bill Robinson, who tragically died penniless despite being the highest paid black entertainer during the first half of the 20th century.  The film blindly ignores the reality of segregation in America during the 1940’s, though the same could be said for all musicals of the era, where white vaudeville performers like Fred Astaire could expand on their vaudeville acts and play more noteworthy characters in films, while black performers like Bill Robinson and the Nicholas Brothers were not afforded the same opportunities, as films would showcase their talent, but only in small increments, having little overall impact on the storyline.  In that vein, black musical director and composer William Grant Still quit the film over the studio’s perpetuation of exploitive aspects of the all-black revue, having been led to believe this would be an opportunity to showcase black cultural achievement, but his original compositions were increasingly discarded for more stereotypical musical numbers reflective of the Jim Crow era, while Clarence Robinson, the first black choreographer employed by the Cotton Club, famous for their plantation motifs, designed several of the film’s dance sequences.  While an argument could also be made that Lena Horne might have been a major screen star like Judy Garland, but she was denied similar opportunities.  Even though she had just signed a studio contract, this was the pinnacle of her Hollywood movie career, as she was sparsely used afterwards outside of small support roles and cameos in musicals, with studios refusing to allow her to play opposite a white leading man, relegated to specialty numbers in more opulent musicals built around somebody else, typically cutting her songs out of the picture for screenings in the South (CABIN IN THE SKY deleted a scene at the initial release as it was sung while taking a bubble bath), so she was left in limbo, severely underutilized, as the studios simply didn’t know what to do with her, viewed as a “liability,” or a poor investment, yet like Garland, the studios mismanaged their careers with disastrous results, both left embittered by the experience.  Horne was not only encouraged to “pass” as Spanish by nightclub owners but also mistaken for a “Latin-American” by film audiences.  She appeared in only one non-musical picture throughout her entire career, coming at the age of 51, playing a Hispanic brothel madam in DEATH OF A GUNFIGHTER (1969).  However simplistic the film’s storyline may seem, its very existence, mirroring the times in which it was made, brings to light some complex social issues that remain relevant today, with the film added to the Library of Congress Film Registry in 2001, Complete National Film Registry Listing. 

Looking terrific in a 4k restoration, comprised almost entirely of set pieces, Bill Robinson and Army buddy Gabe Tucker (Dooley Wilson) are returning soldiers from France after WWI, celebrating in a New York City nightclub.  Paris was an ambassador of jazz in Europe, offering a freer, more accepting environment to black soldiers, where we hear the first song from Lena Horne, accompanied on piano by her manager Chick Bailey (Emmett “Babe” Wallace), always seen as a foil standing between Bill and Lena, Stormy Weather (1943) -- (Movie Clip) No Two Ways About Love YouTube (3:51).  Heading to Memphis afterwards on a riverboat, Bill, now dressed in rags, seen laying on a bale of cotton, gets the dancing itch when he hears music from a group calling themselves “minstrel boys,” complete with crude racial caricature, and ends up doing a tap “sand dance,” Stormy Weather (1943) -- (Movie Clip) Linda Brown - TCM  YouTube (3:20).  The presence of Fats Waller is a time capsule infusing life into an American jazz standard, capturing the essence of Beale Street in his signature song, Ain't Misbehavin' (Stormy Weather, 1943) [Digitally Enhanced] YouTube (2:46).  What connects this film to audiences is the authenticity of the music and dance, which even caught the attention of Malcolm X, “I loved the tough guys, the action, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and I loved all that dancing and carrying on in such films as Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky.”  The song “Stormy Weather” was initially written for a musical revue at the Cotton Club in 1933, starring Ethel Waters accompanied by Duke Ellington, quickly emerging as a nightclub standard, yet in the hands of different singers like Waters or Lena Horne, the song takes on an entirely new meaning, as it does here, an example of how modernism can transport movie audiences to new heights, as the song is accompanied by a fantasy ballet sequence from the Katherine Dunham dance troupe.  The abstract ballet has a dreamlike quality following Horne’s vocal, which is sung in front of a window showing a rainy street scene outside, with the camera following her gaze out the window, segueing into a symphonic jazz orchestration, as it predates contemporary ballet dance movement and was an early test of mixing various genres of dance, yet anticipates the centerpiece ballet sequence in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s THE RED SHOES (1948), The Red Shoes (1948) - Ballet Sequence - YouTube (15:25), along with the unprecedented 17-minute dream sequence ballet from Vincente Minnelli’s AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951), "An American In Paris" Ballet with George Gershwin's ... - Vimeo (23:05).  In the 1930’s, Dunham traveled to the Caribbean to do anthropological studies on various cultures for two years, including Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, and most importantly Haiti, which would become one of her main sources of inspiration, using what she learned to revolutionize white European dance movements, instead incorporating African and Caribbean elements of traditional folk and ethnic dances, as well as rituals, into modern dance and beyond, believing it was important to know the “life surrounding the dances.”  The breathtaking originality that Dunham provides, an articulation of innovative black modernism, literally transcends the suffocating minstrel dance aesthetics that confines the rest of the picture, where her stated goal was to “take our dance out of the burlesque,” which is precisely what the film does, showcasing a more cultured sophistication as it reaches the finale, yet she suffered the same Jim Crow indignities of not having a place to sleep or a restaurant to visit while on tour.  In a departure from the norm, exhibiting astonishing range, the film was considered revolutionary for its time, interspersing traditional tap dance between Dunham’s experimental reverie and the high-flying acrobatics of the Nicholas Brothers, where the final sequence becomes a 17-minute-long revue featuring different performances without any driving narrative or plot, yet the jaw-dropping artistry onscreen is unparalleled, Stormy Weather (1943) YouTube (7:58).

[FULL MOVIE] Stormy Weather (1943) | Classic Musical in 4K  digitally restored to 4k, YouTube (1:17:40)

The Duke Is Tops

Ralph Cooper

Lena Horne

Phil Moore

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)