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The Front Row
DVD of the Week: A Song Is Born
November 30, 2011
By: Richard Brody
Click Here to read this review on its original webpage and see the video clip
Howard Hawks’ 1948 musical comedy “A Song Is Born,” which I discuss in
the clip above, is a remake of his 1941 non-musical comedy “Ball of Fire.” He told
Peter Bogdanovich (who published the interview in “Who the Devil Made It”—the title
of which was derived from a remark by Hawks) that he had recommended the remake to
the producer Samuel Goldwyn but had no intention of directing it, until Goldwyn made
him a lucrative offer to do so. Hawks derided the results—claiming that Goldwyn got
in the way of his best plans, and expressing displeasure with his two lead actors,
Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, who took the roles that, in the original, had been
played by Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck—and said that he never bothered to view
the rushes or the finished film. (He made the same complaints to Joseph McBride,
in the book “Hawks on Hawks.”) Nonetheless, “A Song Is Born” is an improvement on
“Ball of Fire,” which is one of Hawks’ most dutiful, least-inspired directorial efforts,
due to its overstuffed script and actors who couldn’t speed it up to the wondrously
ludicrous pace with which Hawks had torn through the overwritten screenplay of “His
Girl Friday.” (Kaye, with his neurotic agility, is much better than Cooper as a quizzical
professor with latent ardor; Mayo is monotonous but truly brassy, and, though Stanwyck,
a vastly more nuanced performer and charismatic presence, movingly portrayed a victim
of circumstances who belonged in the professor’s world, Mayo brings—likely unintentionally—an
air of sleazy venality that Stanwyck lacked; Veronica Lake would have been the ideal
pairing with Kaye.) The best scenes in “Ball of Fire” were musical—Gene Krupa’s “Drum
Boogie” number, involving matchsticks, and the nostalgic crooning of “Genevieve”—and
Hawks’ transformation of the story, turning lexicographical discussion into musical
performance, expanded on those welcome interludes. The remake featured a host of
jazz musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, and (as a classical musician
whom they drolly teach to play jazz on the fly) Benny Goodman, who is briefly visible
in this clip, which also shows an excerpt from the film’s very long (nearly seventeen-minute-long)
opening set piece, which I consider Hawks’ most radical and greatest.
P.S. The cast features black and white performers acting and playing music together.
Hawks told McBride that the studio wanted him to keep them far apart on the basis
of race but that he’d have none of it, and, indeed, the movie shows them mingling
freely. But there’s a strange double turn to the racial politics in the scene excerpted
above. Later in the performance of the exotic mating chant, two black window-washers
(played by the comical and musical duo Buck and Bubbles) enter the room unnoticed—and,
in response to the “primitive” music emanating from the professors’ scholarly lair,
they do an ever-so-slight juke and shuffle. But, a few moments later, when they enter
into conversation with the professors, the sordidness of that stereotype is reversed,
as Hawks, in the film’s first scene, flagrantly defies the studio’s segregationist
orders: in the midst of the character’s comical introductions, John W. Bubbles (John
Sublett, one of the greatest of tap dancers, from whom Fred Astaire took lessons)
and the white actor Hugh Herbert, standing front and center, shake hands.