In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
One of the benefits of exploring the Criterion Collection without a predetermined focus is that you come across some amazing films that you wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. The amazingly good films are always gratifying, of course, while you can often learn something from the amazingly bad as well. But nearest to my heart are the amazingly weird films, of which King of Jazz is a prime example. And yet if you consider it in the context in which it was made it makes its own kind of sense, and coming to understand that provides a real education into the history of film and even more so the business of film.
When we go to the movies today, we expect to see a feature film, maybe with a few ads for other films before or after (or, in the U.K., ads for other products like cigarettes). At a festival, you might also see a short film paired thematically with the main feature, but overall filmgoing is a pretty uniform experience. That was definitely not the case in the early days of the movies. Instead, you paid an admission fee to watch what was essentially a variety show including both live-action and animated short films, live performances, and maybe giveaways and audience singalongs as well.
If you think of John Murray Anderson’s King of Jazz as the filmed version of one of those early entertainment programs, held loosely together by the persona of the popular bandleader Paul Whiteman, it starts to make more sense. This film is much more “something for everyone” than “coherent whole made up of only necessary parts” and that gives you permission to like what you like and leave what you don’t without holding it to an inappropriate standard.
The second thing to know about King of Jazz is that it was made using two-strip Technicolor, a process that gives you reds and greens but no blues, so nothing looks realistic in any modern sense of the word. Skin tones are overly pink, like vintage hand-tinted photographs, with male as well as female characters apparently wearing an excess of rouge. Green is frequently featured in costumes, to contrast with the skin tones, and within the limitations of the technology costume designer Herman Rosse, who also served as art director, achieved sometimes spectacular results.
The third thing you need to know is tipped off by the title, which claims that the very white (and aptly named) bandleader Paul Whiteman is the king of jazz. Improvisation, which I think of as the defining characteristic of jazz, is nowhere to be found in this film. Instead you get large-scale productions of popular tunes, all very performed with a high degree of technical proficiency and, as the lead character in Young Man with a Horn was once cautioned, without anyone dropping any big gobs on the floor. To be fair, Whiteman was commonly billed as “the king of jazz” in his day and was an innovator within his own interpretation of what constituted jazz. His most notable achievement in that regard may be his commissioning of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and performing at the 1924 premiere alongside Gershwin.
So what do you get with King of Jazz? Too much to list here, but overall a real smorgasbord of entertainment, including cartoons, vaudeville acts (ever see someone play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” on a bicycle pump?), Busby Berkeley-like dance numbers, comedy acts, and lots and lots of musical numbers, mostly packaged in staged contexts and introduced by title cards. Remember, the point of a smorgasbord is not to eat everything but to pick and choose from the variety on offer, so revel in the range of the performances and don’t feel bad if you don’t like them all. And also keep in mind that films like this one do us all a favor by capturing performances that might otherwise be lost to time, both by stars like Bing Crosby (in his movie debut), Laura La Plante, and Walter Brennan, and by performers like the Thomas Atkins Sextette whose work would otherwise simply be lost to history. The movies were well on the way to killing vaudeville by 1930, but films like this one preserve at least some of the performances for posterity. | Sarah Boslaugh
Spine #: 915
Technical details: 98 min.; color; screen ratio 1.33:1; English.
Edition reviewed: DVD (2 discs)
Extras: audio commentary by critic Gary Giddins, critic Gene Seymour, and bandleader Vince Giordano; 2017 introduction to the film by Giddens (he calls it “an ice cream sundae of a movie”); interview with singer/pianist Michael Feinstein; 4 making-of video essays by authors and archivists James Layton and David Pierce; deleted scenes; alternate title sequence; short film “All Americans” (1929) including a version of the “Melting Pot” number also featured in King of Jazz; 1933 short film “I Know Everybody and Everybody’s Racket” featuring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra; two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (somewhat a precursor of Mickey Mouse) featuring music and animation from King of Jazz; booklet with an essay by Farran Smith Nehme.
Fun Fact: The name “Technicolor” comes from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the company’s founders, Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock, studied and later taught. The Technicolor film process was introduced in 1916, had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, and remained in use until the 1970s. It seems fitting that the last film using it was Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), a giallo in which saturated color plays a key role, until the process was revived in the 1990s for mainstream films like The Thin Red Line, Toy Story 2, and Pearl Harbor.
Parting Thought: Despite featuring many popular stars of the day, King of Jazz was an expensive flop for Universal in 1930. Is that a judgment on its quality or simply a reflection of the fact that the market for movie musicals was saturated at the time and audiences were tiring of the genre?
