As I reported last week, Sara and I had a delightful experience taking a short course on Hollywood Film Musicals at Chautauqua. The instructor was Phil Atteberry, a recently retired English teacher at Pitt’s Regional campuses in Titusville and Bradford. I first encountered Phil thirty years ago at Allegheny Jazz Society events in Meadville and at Conneaut Lake, where he was helping Bill Garts sell records at the society booth. At that time Bill hosted a Saturday evening radio program on WQLN (Erie) called “Saturday Swing Session”, which we enjoyed each summer weekend when we were at our cottage at Conneaut Lake. When Bill died, Phil succeeded him as host and we continued to enjoy the program. Eventually modern technology made it possible for us to tune in all year around, via the Internet. I began communicating with Phil recently with comments on the program; last summer I was rewarded by his visiting me at Chautauqua for a very enjoyable “porch chat”. I was quite pleased this summer to learn that he was at the Institution teaching a course the same week we would be there. If anything, our positive expectations for the course were greatly exceeded.
The first session was dedicated to Al Jolson and the way his performance in “The Jazz Singer” (1927) introduced talking pictures. The movie begins like a typical silent movie, with actors moving robotically and with subtitles recording their dialogue. Suddenly Jolson is on stage, singing “Dirty Hands, Dirty Face”, and you can hear his magnificent baritone voice, perfectly synchronized with the image on the screen. That kicked off a revolution in movies, as predicted by Jolson’s famous quote “You ain’t heard nothing, yet!” Immediately all the studios switched to “talkies”, many of which included (often irrelevant) musical numbers. Years later, when Jolson’s career had waned, it was abruptly resurrected by his cameo performance of “Swanee” in the film “Rhapsody in Blue”, followed by two bio-pics featuring Larry Parks lip-synching to Jolson’s singing.
The second session focused on the career of composer Harry Warren and the impact of his music on over 300 films. His first film was “42nd Street” in 1932, in conjunction with Director Busby Berkeley. It, too, included a watershed event, the introduction of dynamic camera work and massive musical spectacles. This time it began with Ruby Keeler singing and dancing while being photographed by a stationary camera. At some point the curtain behind her opens and the audience sees a massive set filled with dozens of performers at ground level and in three stories of windows, and moveable cameras zooming in and out and panning from side to side. This set the stage for the plethora of Warner Brothers hit musicals in the 1930s, many of them featuring Harry Warren songs. Warren ultimately rang the bell with “Chattanooga Choo Choo”, the first single record to sell one million copies (including one I bought), introduced in the 1941 film “Sun Valley Serenade”.
Simultaneously RKO launched its own series of blockbusters starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Astaire desired to transfer the best features of his long experience on Broadway to the motion picture screen. He insisted the routines be filmed continuously with no cutting or editing, and that they be an integral part of the plot. To illustrate this, Phil showed a long clip which began with Fred seeing an attractive girl he had never seen before and ended with the two of them dancing romantically together. The series of RKO musicals now memorialized as “Fred and Ginger” has become a classical part of the heritage of Hollywood. Astaire’s elegant, loose-limbed dancing style coupled with an excellent technical vocal approach provided him with a seldom matched legacy.
In contrast with Fred Astaire’s background on Broadway, Gene Kelly’s early days were spent as a student and dance instructor in his family’s dance studio in Squirrel Hill; he was a serious devotee of ballet and classical dance. After a brief career on Broadway, he too gravitated to Hollywood. There his goal was to popularize ballet with the general public. This led to the magnificent ballet sequences, “American in Paris” in the movie of the same name, and “Broadway Melody” in “Singing in the Rain”. Phil analyzed the thirteen minutes long “Broadway Melody” sequence, dissecting it into five components, as an allegory for the triumph of art over a passion for fame and luxury. The contrast between this ballet and Kelly’s carefree dancing with Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds (an eighteen-year old he taught to dance) in this film is a remarkable tribute to his expertise and versatility.
The final session dealt with Judy Garland, arguably the all-time greatest female performer in Hollywood musicals. I have fond memories of teen-aged Judy as Mickey Rooney’s girl-friend in the Andy Hardy series, as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz”, and as an attractive young woman in numerous M-G-M musicals in the 1940s, like “Meet Me in St. Louis”. As it turns out, her cheerful, upbeat personality was an example of a remarkable acting skill. The combination of an obsessive mother, the exploitation of child actors by M-G-M, and massive overwork produced an impossibly unpleasant environment that culminated in addiction and a very early end to what, on film, appeared to be a happy life.
Sara and I both thoroughly enjoyed every session, and gained a new perspective on this very interesting genre. Phil is obviously a great teacher with a large amount of knowledge about his subject. We were very impressed with his Power Point presentation, especially the way he seamlessly inserted film clips into it. We hope that his retirement from the rigor of a formal class schedule will make it possible for him to increase his less formal contact with folks with niche interests, like this Chautauqua class.