Voltaire (1933)

Marie Antoinette (1938)

Norma Shearer plays the semi-historical shallow party girl who comes to a bad end. If you must lose your head you might as well do it in gowns by Adrian. MGM doubled the size of Versailles with a budget of 1.8 million dollars, stopping just short of filming the whole thing in Technicolor — reportedly Shearer’s sumptuous fur coat was dyed blue to match her eyes.

St Louis Blues (1958)

It’s actually the fictional biography of W. C. Handy the Grandfather of Blues, a talented composer who translated the voice of his people into timeless music, a scholar and savvy business man who in real life was among the first to publish and record the music of Black Americans. But like most Hollywood musical biopics, what ends up on screen ignores truth in favor of a scripted drama that has no other purpose than to string together a parade of top vocal talent of the day interpreting the man’s works.

Nat “King” Cole was breaking down racial barriers with his hit television show, shy demeanor, and a mellow silky voice that melts your spine in the most pleasing way. A movie vehicle for the star based around an internationally recognized songbook seems like a good idea. So what if it didn’t tell the true story of a Black composer who fought racial prejudice and uncompromisingly presented some of the greatest music ever played.

There’s a decent script here about a young Black man devoted to elevating the music of his people despite the tirades of his overbearing father, a stereotypical minister who represents a self-imposed yoke of deprication and subserviance. Torn between these two extremes the sweet-natured Cole is crippled by a fit of hysterical blindness that reduces him to writing hymns and playing the organ in his father’s church. Like Job he is miraculously healed during an uplifting spiritual sung by Mahalia Jackson (who wouldn’t be?). He eventually confronts the narrow-minded pastor, pursues his destiny as a great composer, and sees his music “legitimized” by a concert at the Eurocentric New York Symphony Hall.

It’s a contrived melodrama to be sure, but it is the first film made for mainstream audiences to feature an all Black cast. Despite a low production budget that always plays it “safe”, St Louis Blues boasts such an embarrassment of riches: Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson, Ruby Dee, Pearl Bailey, Billy Preston as a boy, and Cab Calloway who gets to play a scheming jealous club owner as a nice change of pace from his wiggly-jiggly Hi-Dee-Ho band leader. But the movie belongs to the commanding presence of Eartha Kitt.

As Gogo Germaine, a no-nonsense sweet-voiced Creole chanteuse with an hourglass torso sculpted by costume goddess Edith Head, Kitt drives the plot with single-minded ambition and a cold detachment to the conflicted characters around her. Not only does Gogo Germaine stand in complete defiance to oppressive religion — cutting down the pastor with a lecture on prejudice, she defies the timeline in sleek and modern dresses while scolding a befuddled Ruby Dee who stands in the kitchen wearing old fashioned starched lace — as though a Black from the future has come to chastise the Black of the past! It’s a boldly anachronistic performance for it’s setting, but also for Hollywood, showing a career-driven woman who won’t be derailed by love (manipulative boyfriend Cab Calloway), society (Juano Hernandez’ disapproving pastor), or sentimentality (the blind Nat “King” Cole).

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Suppose you were so boring that when Hollywood decided to make the movie of your life they had to add extra characters that never really existed just so you could be more interesting…?

Set to the music of Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By does exactly that. It opens with a very long rendition of Showboat, then jumps back to Kern’s days struggling to sell a tune in London. Almost immediately he does. After a brief and idyllic courtship starting with an unlikely breaking and entry to borrow the use of a piano, Kern marries his English rose and quickly ascends to Broadway. Then…, well…, we have another 60 minutes or so left in the film for a follies-esque presentation of his greatest hits strung together by a subplot of a young actress and family friend (played by Lucille Bremmer, a singing and dancing Bette Davis type) who learns the hard way she must make her own stardom to be successful…. Never mind this woman never existed, nor her father who is supposedly Kern’s manager and mentor.
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