Friday, December 22, 2017

Reet, Petite and Gone! (Louis Jordan Productions, Astor Pictures, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round Charles and I ran a couple of items featuring the great singer-bandleader-alto saxophonist-songwriter Louis Jordan, both downloaded from archive.org: a clip from the short film Caldonia (1945) of Jordan performing the title song (the biggest hit he ever had and one that’s been covered by innumerable artists,  from Woody Herman to B. B. King — alas, for tax reasons his manager, Berle Adams, decided to credit Jordan’s then-wife, the appropriately named Fleecie Moore, with writing the song, so when they broke up she, not he, got the royalties) and the full-length (67 minutes, anyway) feature Reet, Petite and Gone! Jordan’s involvement in film was one of the many innovations he pioneered, including the shuffle beat he had his drummers play that became the basis of rock ’n’ roll, the novelty talking songs that became one of the roots of rap, the use of a prominent electric guitar and a lot of the other elements that became fundamental aspects of rock (though in a late-in-life interview Jordan bitterly complained, “Rock ’n’ roll is just rhythm-and-blues played by white people”). Jordan’s first film was the 1945 short Caldonia, directed by William Forest Crouch and produced by Berle Adams, who made it at a time when Jordan’s record label, Decca, was caught in a bind due to World War II-era price controls. The U.S. branch of Decca Records, founded in 1934, had specialized in low-cost records — they sold their main blue-label pop records for 35¢ per two-song 78 rpm single while the other majors, Columbia, Brunswick and RCA Victor, asked 75¢. Decca was immediately successful partly because of their low price and partly because they had the biggest musical star of the period, Bing Crosby. Then the U.S. got involved in World War II, inflation pushed up the cost of manufacturing everything and the record business was particularly hard-hit because shellac, an essential ingredient in the mixture from which 78’s were pressed (it was generally a mixture of shellac and clay, and the exact proportion of those ingredients was tricky — a higher percentage of shellac made the record sound better but also made it more brittle and fragile), was a scarce material imported from the Far East, which meant it had to be shipped during the middle of a war zone. (For a time, many record stores would allow you to buy a new record only if you brought in an old one in trade, so the old one could be ground up and reused in new pressings.) 

As a result, Decca could no longer sustain the 35¢ price for their new records — but according to the U.S. Office of Price Administration (OPA), they weren’t allowed to raise the price. Eventually they worked their way around the problem by starting a new sub-label, the “Decca Personality Series” (which makes one wonder who was making their records before — earthworms? Aardvarks? Space aliens?), for which they could charge 50¢ per record since it was legally a “new” product, but in the meantime the folks at Decca stopped releasing anything. Louis Jordan had just recorded “Caldonia” and Jordan and manager Adams both smelled the potential of an enormous hit — especially when they got word the white bandleader Woody Herman had already covered the song for the 50¢ Columbia label — but how could they get Decca to release the Jordan record? Adams hit on the idea of putting out a film based on Caldonia, a 20-minute short that was shot on the strangulation budget typical of “race” productions (films with entirely Black casts aimed at Black audiences) but whose writers, William Forest Crouch, Mickey Goldsen and John McGee, made a virtue of budget necessity by cleverly making their financial limitations the main issue of the plot. Famous bandleader Louis Jordan is on his way to Hollywood to make a film when a shady Harlem promoter, Felix Paradise (Richard Huey), waylays him and convinces him to make a film for him in Harlem instead. Only Felix hits a run of stunningly bad luck on the numbers (and, later, on a horse-race bet as well), so every number Jordan sings in Caldonia is set in a tackier place than its predecessor, with the band wearing sillier and sillier costumes (they do one song in Pagliacci-style clown outfits because that’s all Felix’s warehouse has available). Alas, though the opening of this film — Jordan singing “Caldonia” and kicking his legs up in the air like a particularly excited baby as he intones the deathless line, “What makes yo’ big head so hard?” — is available on archive.org, the whole movie isn’t.  

Caldonia was such a success Berle Adams decided to keep producing “race” films starring Jordan, while also signing contracts for him to appear in mainstream musicals like Follow the Boys, Swing Parade of 1946 and Meet Miss Bobby Sox alongside white performers. Jordan’s first feature was Beware (1946), directed by Bud Pollard — a white indie guy who in the mid-1930’s had made an ultra-obscure feature called The Horror which he repurposed in the 1940’s for religious groups, cutting it to four reels and offering it as an educational anti-alcoholism film called John the Drunkard — which centered around Louis Jordan’s alma mater being threatened with closure by its founder’s scapegrace grandson, who embezzled the college’s endowment and then announced it was broke. For Adams’ next Jordan feature, he brought William Forest Crouch back as director — according to imdb.com, Crouch mainly filmed “Soundies” (three-minute short films of famous musical performers doing their songs that were played on a coin-operated sort of video jukebox called a “Panoram” — in the 1980’s I bought a couple of videotapes collecting “Soundies” and would show them for friends, announcing, “This is what MTV would have looked like if it had existed in the 1940’s”) and this film, Reet, Petite and Gone!, is his only feature. Unfortunately, they also used Don Malkames as cinematographer, and while somehow during the “Caldonia” song from Jordan’s short-film debut he had actually lit Jordan to look like a normal African-American male, on both Beware and Reet, Petite and Gone! he gave Jordan bizarre lighting that made it look like he had a permanent three-day shadow on his cheeks. Reet, Petite and Gone! is basically a feature for Jordan and also the heavy-set light-skinned Black singer June Richmond, who in 1937 had been hired by Jimmy Dorsey — she was the first Black singer to perform with a white band, anticipating Billie Holiday with Artie Shaw by six months — who was basically known as a blues belter, a throwback to the great 1920’s Black blues queens like Ma Rainey, Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith. 

It’s mostly a showcase for Jordan performing — its imdb.com page lists no fewer than 14 songs — but it has a plot that seems cobbled together from quite a number of sources, as if the writers (director Crouch and Irwin Winehouse) dumped a lot of movie clichés into a paper shredder, reassembled the pieces as they came out and filmed that. In 1944 Columbia had made the musical Cover Girl, co-starring Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, which contained a long and important flashback scene in which Hayworth played her own mother, so Crouch and Winehouse copied that device for Reet, Petite and Gone! Through most of the film Louis Jordan plays “Louis Jarvis,” sensationally successful jazz/rhythm-and-blues bandleader, but early on there’s a cut to a sequence in which Jordan, in heavy age makeup and possibly with a different voice dubbed in to deliver the dialogue, plays Louis Jarvis’s grandfather Schuyler. Somehow, despite the severe limitations on African-Americans in 1917, Schuyler not only had a successful musical career but amassed a major fortune as a businessman which he stashed, like W. C. Fields, in various bank accounts across the country. The only people who know where Schuyler’s fortune is are his attorney, Henry Talbot (Lorenzo Tucker), and Talbot’s secretary, Rusty (Vanita Smythe). Alas, the two of them are in cahoots to rip off the fortune for themselves. We get a flashback of Schuyler Jordan leading a band in 1917 (though the music they play sounds nothing like anything recorded that early) and discovering the fabulously talented singer Lovey Linn (Bea Carter). Against the opposition of his producer, Schuyler Jordan gets Lovey Linn into his new musical show. He also starts dating her off-stage and the two seem altar-bound when a misunderstanding the writers aren’t terribly clear about breaks them up. Both marry other people, and Schuyler gives birth to Louis Jarvis’s father while Lovey brings into the world a daughter, Honey Carter (also Bea Griffith). Crouch and Winehouse rip off the central plot device of Sigmund Romberg’s operetta Maytime (though it wasn’t used in the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie) that the older people aren’t going to get together but their offspring will. 

They also steal from Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances the gimmick of a young man having to get married immediately — that day — to claim an inheritance: Schuyler Jordan croaks before Honey and her friend June (June Richmond) can make it to New York City to see him (their hand-to-mouth existence recalls My Sister Eileen) but not before he dictates a will that specifies that in order to receive his inheritance, Louis Jarvis must marry a woman whose measurements are specified in its text. So Jordan, who’s producing a new musical for himself, invites all the most attractive Black women in New York to audition for his show, but requires them to show up in bathing suits so his producer and manager, Sam Adams (Milton Woods), can measure them to see if they come up to the template specified in Schuyler’s will — or, rather, in what they think is Schuyler’s will, since corrupt attorney Talbot has forged one changing the measurements from Honey Carter’s to his secretary Rusty’s. The idea is that Louis Jarvis will be forced to marry Rusty to get the money to produce his show, then Louis will divorce her but she and Talbot will hold out for a large settlement. Talbot even calls up the $10,000 backer Jordan lined up on his own and gets him to cancel his investment in the show. Fortunately, there’s a deus ex machina in the form of a Black police officer who somehow got hold of the real will and exposes Talbot and Rusty as frauds; he arrests them and Louis Jarvis marries Honey Carter, gets his granddad’s money and his show goes on as scheduled. Reet, Petite and Gone! is a great showcase for Louis Jordan (though the extant print is so splicey that some of both the film’s dialogue and Jordan’s lyrics get chopped up and rendered almost incomprehensible; fortunately, the greatest song in the movie, the classic “Let the Good Times Roll,” is splice-free) even though it’s not much as a film. Jordan and June Richmond are both excellent performers, and Jordan shows real acting talent; as Charles pointed out, he’s the only person in the movie who has true star charisma. Unfortunately, as far as the rest of the cast is concerned, this is one of those “race” movies that will have you wondering, “Where were all the Black people who could act?” 

Crouch’s direction of Jordan’s songs is livelier than Bud Pollard’s in Beware, but there’s nothing as far off the beaten path for Jordan musically as his remarkable cover of Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning, Heartache” (one of those odd records that, like Jordan’s cover of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” and his own “Why’d Ya Do It, Baby?”, shows off that for all his association with jive and novelty songs, Jordan was also a quite capable ballad singer) in Beware. June Richmond gets two songs, a surprisingly sensitive slow ballad called “I’ve Changed Completely” (from her loud, raucous, exciting records with bandleaders Jimmy Dorsey and Andy Kirk, this is not the sort of singing someone would expect from her!) and a more typical piece of material for her, “You Got Me Where You Want Me.” The show’s musical highlights are the opening song, “Texas and Pacific” (which Charles pointed out was actually closer to country music than R&B — but then Blacks had been investigating country music since Leadbelly covered Jimmie Rodgers’ “Daddy and Home” in 1935), “Let the Good Times Role,” “Reet, Petite and Gone,” “That Chick’s Too Young to Fry” (one of Jordan’s most engaging novelties and one whose warning not to cruise underage girls recent U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama Roy Moore should have heeded), “The Green Grass Grew All Around” (an old nursery-rhyme folk song that seemed to be there just to prove Jordan could swing anything) and a quite interesting blues called “The Blues Ain’t Nothin’” that at first I thought might have been an “answer” record to Duke Ellington’s “The Blues” from Black, Brown and Beige, but according to imdb.com it was actually composed by Ida Cox, one of the great Black blues queens of the 1920’s and both a friend and a fierce competitor to Bessie Smith. (In 1934 Cox attempted a comeback by billing herself as “The Sepia Mae West,” and Bessie Smith was passing the club where she show that on the marquee. She angrily growled, “Who the fuck is this ‘Sepia Mae West’?” and insisted on going into the club — and was stunned to find it was Cox, her old friend from the TOBA Black vaudeville circuit, whose official name was “Theatre Owners’ Booking Association” but which was so miserable for performers they joked the name really stood for “Tough on Black Asses.”) It’s a song that deserves to be better known.