Soundies: The Ultimate Collection

Soundies: The Ultimate Collection
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1940-46 / 1.33:1
Starring Dorothy Dandridge, Hoagy Carmichael
Directed by Josef Berne, William Forest Crouch, Reginald Le Borg

In 1940, The Mills Novelty Company introduced their newest brainchild—a vending machine that served up Duke Ellington instead of  Coca-Cola. It was called the Panoram and resembled a jukebox the size of a two-door Frigidaire. A movie screen sat at the top of the cabinet and inside was a projector equipped with eight tune-filled films running approximately three minutes each—ten cents would get you one viewing of one film. You want to see another? Ten cents, please. These mini-musicals were called “Soundies” and they would prove so popular that the Mills Company couldn’t keep up with the demand.

Mills turned to independent studios to help produce the shorts and managed to keep the Panorams percolating. In 1941 they started their own little dream factory called Minoco Productions. Minoco and the other independents would produce over 1,800 Soundies between 1940 and 1946 until TV shows like Your Hit Parade began to lure music fans back to their living rooms.

Soundies: The Ultimate Collection, a new Blu ray release from Kino Lorber, is a smartly produced chronicle of the brief but highly profitable era when Soundies were king. The set consists of 200 shorts spread over four discs along with a booklet of essays from notable experts including film historian Susan Delson. The collection is a tribute to the power and influence of music and the movies and, as Delson writes about the Soundies themselves, “A real-time pop culture portrait of the United States.”

The music in this set speaks for itself—these are Soundies after all—and though the artists are lip-synching and dancing to prerecorded tracks, the energy level can be as exhilarating as a live performance. The films feature established performers like Ellington and Count Basie whose stage shows had already made them celebrities, while up and comers like Doris Day and Ricardo Montalbon boast the easy confidence of seasoned troupers.

Clownish anarchists like Spike Jones thrived in the Soundies universe—his Hellzapoppin’ approach to The Great American Songbook was a perfect use of the Panoram where fans could actually see Jones’s knock-about routines. Other acts, though musically superb, were clearly uneasy under studio lights—then, as now, the camera was an equal opportunity career-killer.  

Many of these films were directed with real flair—they could have fit neatly within any feature-length musical. Others are so crudely staged they made the living room radio seem more visually appealing. Whether artfully crafted or not, Soundies were tailored to the American experience in very specific ways, whether it was a night spent on the town or huddling in a foxhole. To tell those stories, Kino’s producers have categorized the individual performances to place them in historical context.

The opening chapter, Starting From Swing, is dedicated to the classic  jazz bands led by Ellington, Basie and Gene Krupa. Ellington begins the festivities with Jam Session, a convivial “the joint is jumpin'” shindig directed by the Russian-born Josef Berne.

Other chapters concentrate on the communal aspects of music in Powered by Dance and We’ll Drink to That. The King’s Men give the 18th Century a hotfoot in The Chool Song while Spike Jones and the City Slickers dismantle Click! Clink! We’ll Have Another Drink. Both shorts were directed by Reginald Le Borg, one of the few Soundies filmmakers to have a substantial career in feature films (some of the thrillers he made for Universal, including Weird Woman and The Mummy’s Ghost, remain horror movie perennials).

Spike Jones might have needed a whoopie cushion to get our attention but sometimes a performer need only step in front of the camera for an audience to gasp; 19 year-old Dorothy Dandridge’s dazzling presence in shorts like A Zoot Suit (with a A Reet Pleat) and Swing for Your Supper would redefine star power in the Hollywood hierarchy. She also appeared in some of the most discordant Soundies of the era—a painful bit of cinema history covered in the chapter called Outrageously Incorrect, and Sometimes Subversive. 

Heard over  the radio, Hoagy Carmichael’s Lazybones was a lovely melody with inherently racist lyrics; “As long as there’s a watermelon on the vine, Everything is fine.” But the Soundies version, directed by Dudley Murphy, and starring Carmichael and Dandridge, paints a vivid picture of racial intolerance.

Dandridge plays Carmichael’s pretty maid—the kind of typecasting to be expected for a black actress of the era—while her partner in servitude, played by dancer Peter Ray, reinforces one of history’s ugliest stereotypes with his pantomime of a shuffling waiter.

Carmichael has the dubious honor of appearing twice in this category with Hong Kong Blues which infantilizes two charming Asian actresses while at the same time amplifying their sexuality. One of those women was Me Chee whose real name was Machiko Takaoka. The same week she filmed Hong Kong Blues, Roosevelt signed the War Relocation Authority, an order that sent people of Japanese ancestry to detainment camps. Machiko would be incarcerated later that same year in the Manzanar War Relocation Center near Independence, California. She was released the following year in April of 1943.

Going to War, Home Front, and City Life are chapters concerned with life both in and out of the army. But racial animus infected the movies and music of the 1940’s so throughly that even films meant to unite the country were compromised; one of those Soundies is The Sportsman Quartet’s We’ll Slap the Japs (Right into the Laps of the Nazis) in which bigotry is just another tool in wartime propaganda.

There was a flip side to the ugliness—The Four Ginger Snaps’ version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home turns Patrick Gilmore’s Civil War standard into a syncopated joyride while A Zoot Suit, directed by Berne and performed by Dandridge and Paul White, is a joyous hymn to flamboyant fashion—each short is blessedly free of racial condescension. As Delson points out, Soundies had their inclusive side; in Musical Evolutions we’re treated to a smorgasbord of ethnic styles, everything from Latin rhythms, hillbilly yodeling, to a middle eastern melody revamped by Marian Lawrence and her Dancers in Swinging in a Harem.

The territory covered in Women, Sexuality, and Gender still resonates; in Gracie Barrie’s Stone Cold Dead in the Market a wife’s revenge is set to a cheery calypso rhythm; “I lick ‘im wit’ thee pot and thee fryin’ pan/And if I kill him, he had it coming.” In Ma He’s Making Eyes at Me, members of Ted Fio Rito’s band parade in drag, perhaps inspired by the French comedy Fanfare d’amour about cross-dressing jazz musicians (which in turn inspired Wilder’s Some Like It Hot).

Barrie and Fio Rito are just two of the dozens of forgotten and underrepresented artists who are given another chance to shine, from Lynn Allbritton whose fiery piano belies her cool as a cucumber presence, to Harry “the Hipster” Gibson who predicted rock and roll with his frenzied keyboard work on Opus 12 EEE.

The set wraps with a chapter featuring the Soundies of Dorothy Dandridge and Gale Storm. Dandridge’s dominance of the form remains unparalleled but Storm (who enjoyed a successful television career in the 1950’s) was as omnipresent as her black counterpart. While Dandridge could smolder at the drop of a hat, Storm’s girl-next-door appeal was almost unbearably wholesome—a Bobbysoxer painted by Norman Rockwell.

The image quality of these films is a mixed bag but it’s a small miracle that so many of them look as good as they do. And some of them, particularly the Soundies found in their original 35mm form, are close to immaculate.

The extras include introductions from Delson, along with Ina Archer, a media conservationist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The production of such a formidable collection was a daunting undertaking—kudos to Delson, Archer, and producer Bret Wood, archivist Mark Cantor, and essayist Ellen C. Scott (Associate Professor in the Department of Film at UCLA) for their exceptional work. 

A special bonus for those with Max (formerly HBO Max), Soundies are streaming (a novelty the Mills Company never dreamed of).