Rhapsody in teal: “King of Jazz” (1930)

By Scott Ross

For those who disparage Paul Whiteman as a band-leader, this celebration of him unfortunately supports the view that he was to jazz as Lawrence Welk was to Tin Pan Alley. There are far too many numbers in this filmed revue that embrace the long-winded and syrupy, and even the (somewhat foreshortened) “Rhapsody in Blue” contains grandiose kitsch distractions such as a giant piano in which Whiteman and his band appear, and irritating shots of the dancer Jacques Cartier pretending to play the piece’s distinctive clarinet part.

For a movie with “jazz” in the title there’s almost no jazz, even in the liberal period definition of the word. The segments that come closest are those showcasing The Rhythm Boys — particularly the “Happy Feet” number and especially their singer, Bing Crosby, who in the next year would be launched as a major star on radio and in the movies. Another way in which Crosby is appreciated is in a comparison of the songs he performs and those assigned to the tenor John Boles, whose rigid formality and vocal sexlessness, typical of male singers of the time, illustrate why a baritone like Crosby (as well as Russ Columbo, who preceded him) was so refreshing, and so necessary. Not that Crosby was, strictly speaking, a jazz singer. But his vocals swing, and in a way almost nothing else in King of Jazz does.

Whiteman was reportedly very aware both of his position as a white band leader and of the lack of black musicians in his orchestra (although he employed black arrangers like Fletcher Henderson) and wanted to integrate it but was persuaded, not without reason, that even if his audience accepted an interracial band, the black musicians would, whatever Whiteman’s own good intentions, continually face housing problems on the road, whether in the south, the north or the west. Whiteman, enormously popular during the 1920s, has in recent years been used as a negative icon by the symbol-minded (“A white man is crowned king of jazz. White-man. Get it?”) which seems to me as unhelpful as those of his contemporaries who continuously sought to “prove” that no black man could have created, or perfected, anything as harmonically complex as jazz despite the evidence that there were few Caucasian musicians then who had mastered the rudiments of jazz as countless black musicians from Bunk Johnson to Louis Armstrong had. While I am sympathetic to Whiteman, King of Jazz can be faulted for some strikingly insensitive moments, such as Cartier clad head to toe in shiny black as a “Voodoo Dancer” and an over-produced finale promoting the “melting pot” theory, but without a single non-European among its seemingly hundreds of participants. Indeed, the sole black face in the picture belongs to “Snowdrop,” an adorable, smiling little girl Whiteman dandles on his knee at the end of the “Bench in the Park” number.

The people who put the picture together — its director (John Murray Anderson), writers (Charles MacArthur and Harry Ruskin), producer (Carl Laemmle, Jr.), songwriters (Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) and art director (Herman Rosse) — went through a reported $2 million of Universal’s money to film, in vaguely nauseating two-strip Technicolor, a super-revue, and worked on it so long that by the time it opened, audiences had turned decisively, and with good reason, against the talkie revue and King of Jazz became a fast flop. (Its opening after the market crash of ’29 can’t have helped either.) I find hard to imagine that it could have succeeded in any case, what with the greenish cast of the color process (“Rhapsody in Blue” becomes, in the jazz critic Gary Giddins’ phrase, a rhapsody in teal), the preponderance of lugubrious ballads, the over-length and the almost fatal lack of oomph. The comedy bits are both too brief and too much variations on a single note (non-marital sex) to really register but at least they’re faintly amusing, which is more than can be said for the alleged humor of William Kent and Jack White. The only really good comedy spot, although it is somewhat overly broad, is the trombonist Wilbur Hall’s astonishing “Pop Goes the Weasel” bit. (Nearly everyone in King of Jazz overdoes it, projecting to an unseen theater balcony. That living Kewpie doll Jeanie Lang is the worst offender along those lines.) Some of the dance numbers, like the slightly risqué rag-doll contortionist routine “Ragamuffin Romeo” performed by Marion Stadler and Don Rose, are more bizarre than entertaining — I kept worrying about Stadler sustaining concussions from letting her head be bounced around — and the rubber-legged dancer Al Norman is one of those acts one doesn’t know whether to be amazed by, or to laugh at. He certainly seems pleased enough with himself.

^{Calling Dr. Pretorius: Whiteman introduces his orchestra, in miniature.}

I admit that Anderson had a flair for effective staging, and framing, and that King of Jazz looks better than most early musical movies, what with his special camera effects that anticipate Busby Berkeley (that impossibly long dress train in the otherwise unbearably fey “Bridal Veil” number) and even Ernest Thesiger’s miniaturization sequence in The Bride of Frankenstein five years later. I also enjoyed the brief glimpses of the guitarist Eddie Lang and the violinist Joe Venuti, although Bix Beiderbecke, alas, had left the Whiteman band before filming on this picture began. But as far as Whiteman’s music is concerned, I get more from listening to his period recordings — and indeed even from the 1970s British revival The New Paul Whiteman Orchestra, to whose records I was introduced a few years ago by Eliot M. Camarena and which I in turn recommend to you without reservation — than I did from King of Jazz.

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Matters of trivia: 1) Whiteman, knowing how poor most live recording for movie musicals was, insisted on pre-recording all of his orchestra’s numbers, making King of Jazz, so we are told, the first feature to use a largely pre-recorded soundtrack. The lip-syncing by the performers to their playbacks is remarkably good. 2) The movie begins with a Walter Lantz cartoon depicting Whiteman in Africa, complete with ravenous lion whose savage breast is soothed by Paul’s music and all-too-typically bigoted representations of black natives. I mention this, not because it was the first Technicolor cartoon but to note that, as was the case with every other animation unit at every studio of the time, Lantz is aping Disney’s (or in any case, Ub Iwerks’) style throughout. This is especially ironic given that when Walt had his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character taken from him, it was assigned to Lantz. (Oswald even makes a cameo appearance in the Whiteman cartoon.) Disney, it need hardly be added, had the last laugh when, after the loss of Oswald, he and Iwerks created Mickey Mouse, and never looked back.

Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross