The cycle of gangster movies launched by Warner Bros. in the early 1930s often included scenes in speakeasies with anonymous musicians in the background. Anatole Litvak's “Blues in the Night" (1941) and Jack Webb's “Pete Kelly's Blues" (1955), which were released this month by Warners on DVD, reversed the perspective. These are Warner gangster pictures told from the band's point of view: Idealistic white jazz players, determined to play their music despite rude audiences and mob interference, win the day with inadvertent or vengeful help from mob apparatchiks, thereby saving them from the arms of the law. It isn't clear what saves them from other mobsters.
Everyone interested in the subject has seen, or should see, the generally available “Round Midnight" (1986), by Bertrand Tavernier, and “Bird" (1988), by Clint Eastwood, also released by Warner in the same package -- two films that situate jazz in the world of its black innovators. The earlier films, though, are rarely seen, as is a forthcoming Criterion Collection release from Britain: the 1949 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wartime drama “The Small Back Room," which isn't about jazz but has a jazz twist.
The films by Webb and Litvak had to confront -- as did all of the myriad jazz-related pictures made in the studio era -- the embarrassing fact that they were obliged to dramatize black music as represented by white film actors. “Blues in the Night" handles it by having the band thrown in jail, where, in a segregated cell, the uncredited Ernie Whitman announces that everyone's got the misery, and to prove it, the uncredited William Gillespie moans “Blues in the Night" -- written by those sons of the blues, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
Everyone interested in the subject has seen, or should see, the generally available “Round Midnight" (1986), by Bertrand Tavernier, and “Bird" (1988), by Clint Eastwood, also released by Warner in the same package -- two films that situate jazz in the world of its black innovators. The earlier films, though, are rarely seen, as is a forthcoming Criterion Collection release from Britain: the 1949 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger wartime drama “The Small Back Room," which isn't about jazz but has a jazz twist.
The films by Webb and Litvak had to confront -- as did all of the myriad jazz-related pictures made in the studio era -- the embarrassing fact that they were obliged to dramatize black music as represented by white film actors. “Blues in the Night" handles it by having the band thrown in jail, where, in a segregated cell, the uncredited Ernie Whitman announces that everyone's got the misery, and to prove it, the uncredited William Gillespie moans “Blues in the Night" -- written by those sons of the blues, Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
