OVP: Blues in the Night (1941)

Film: Blues in the Night (1941)

Stars: Richard Whorf, Priscilla Lane, Lloyd Nolan, Betty Field, Jack Carson, Elia Kazan

Director: Anatole Litvak

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"Blues in the Night")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We hit Day #4 of our look at Oscar-nominated music today with our biggest pull back in time, to the early 1940's and the Best Original Song nominee Blues in the Night.  After decades of watching hundreds of different films, it's a little weird for me to find something like Blues in the Night, which is perhaps in a genre by itself.  The movie has a number of different songs, so it definitely comes by our conversation honestly, but it's dark, oftentimes morose, in its treatment of its cast, and it has the complete trappings of a different genre; Blues in the Night might be the only Golden Age "film noir musical" I have ever seen, and was such a weird experience I don't entirely know what I think of it.  I'll try to sort through it this morning with you.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about a jazz ensemble, created somewhat on the fly between pianist Jigger Pine (Whorf), clarinetist Nickie Haroyen (Kazan, and yes, it's that Elia Kazan in his pre-director days), and the husband-and-wife team of trumpeter Leo Powell (Carson) & his good-hearted wife Character (Lane).  The group start to have success, but are brought to the next level when they meet gangster Del Davis (Nolan), who has them singing at his club, which he runs like a murderous tyrant.  Del has an on-again-off-again flame named Kay (Field), who is trying to get back at Del, and does so through romantic entanglements first with married Leo, and then (after Character announces she's pregnant) she goes after Jigger, who is obsessed with her.  She brings Jigger down, though, as he quits the band amid an alcohol-fueled binge with Kay, and the band suffers more heartache when Character's newborn baby dies.  They eventually find themselves when Jigger catches wise to Kay (who is then brutally killed by another paramour who wants to end both of their lives in a vehicular murder-suicide), and they go back to playing a happier, truer form of jazz.

The film is tonally bizarre.  Lane's Character is sugar-sweet, so much so that you'd be able to confuse her with Ginger Rogers in Swing Time, and completely at odds with Field's bitter, broken-down femme fatale, to the point where it's clear they're in different movies.  This almost works because it's so weird.  I spend a great deal of my time watching old movies, and I don't know that I've ever seem a film that feels so "experimental," of this era, particularly not from a studio as tried-and-true as Warner Brothers.  I don't mind experimental, and I liked the twists on the formatting, but it doesn't quite jive properly.  Maybe if Lane was recast it might work (or if Field's character wasn't so lost in the film's final moments), but as they are the whole reason to watch this movie (the men add little), the fact that they aren't matching the inconsistent tone of the film makes this a failed-but-fascinating experiment.

That being said, the nominated song is good.  The song would become a pop standard in the years that followed, covered by everyone from Dinah Shore to Artie Shaw to Shirley Bassey, but in the actual confines of the film it's in arguably the strangest scene of an odd movie.  Essentially the whole band is in jail, and several black men in a neighboring cell start singing this rich, melancholy ballad, and the band decides that this is the kind of music they should be making.  I'm docking a few points because the  music doesn't really match what they end up creating, and also because the scene feels so juxtaposed to the rest of the movie (I should also knock them down a peg or too for cultural appropriation, but it's 1941 & I have to grade on a curve here), but it's a good song, and well-performed in the movie.