Hardcore Phonography

I’m twenty minutes into the surviving soundtrack of CLOSE HARMONY, “watching” it with my eyes closed and attempting to visualise the long-lost pictures.

Now read on…

CHARLES “BUDDY” ROGERS: But I’m gonna amount to something, so that…

NANCY CARROLL: Yes?

CBR: So that…

NC: Yes?

CBR: So that…

NC: So that what?

I’m visualizing the needle skipping on the soundtrack. Nancy Carroll and I are both agog with anticipation.

CBR: So that you’ll marry me.

After what one imagines has just happened during the preceding several seconds of wordless audio hiss, one feels she may HAVE to.

CBR: Say yes!

NC: Oh, you brute!

Having the actual sound here is helpful, since Nancy’s line reading is playful and ironic, which may not come across in the transcription. But if you recall what Buddy is like in any of his other talkies, you would probably surmise that she MUST be being playful and ironic. Buddy is about as threatening as hay.

Another silence, broken by strange murmurs and coughs. Either they’re kissing again, or we’ve faded out. Or both. And you know what THAT means.

SUDDEN LOUD JAZZ! A full minute of instrumental, during which I try hard to imagine Sam Raimi thrill-cam shots swooping over a shiny dance floor, but my brain remains trapped in a soundproof booth, watching static action from too far away. Then Buddy starts reedily singing that he’s “All A-twitter, About a Girl!” The man’s savage sexual passion is simply overwhelming. It’s a pleasant number, though.

Wet-sounding applause, then we suddenly cut to slightly crackling silence. Perhaps we are observing the next scene, whatever it is, from a fireplace? Then a bunch of characters say hello. They might be standing in the fireplace, I suppose, if it’s a big Charles Foster Kane job.

Buddy is going to talk to his new boss, Max Mindel, about a contract. This chat is preceded by another ten seconds of silence, so I’m assuming Mindel has a huge, Mussolini/Harry Cohn type office for Buddy to cross. Perhaps accessed through a fireplace, like the secret Nazi room in THE LAST CRUSADE. Mindel offers a forty-eight week contract. Another looong pause as Buddy reads the damn thing. Either that or he’s looking tenderly into Max Mindel’s eyes. Or making a birdhouse.

There follows a wordy contract negotiation scene not as enjoyable as the one in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, despite the presence of a dialect comedian. Harry Green as Max Mindel is croaking through the thickest set of lisps plus Russian-Jewish accent you ever heard, or didn’t hear. The upshot is, Mindel, who is unrequitedly in love with Nancy, realises that hiring Buddy will allow him to marry the girl, so Mindel rebels against the plan. “If you don’t get married before you earn a thousand dollars a week from me, then all your children will die bachelors!”

Buddy leaves, in real time, so that his conference with Nancy outside takes ten seconds of crackle to arrive at. Easy to imagine him scrunching through the autumn leaves that lie thickly upon the anteroom floor. Nancy, learning the negotiations were a bust, goes to talk to Mindel, and oddly enough it takes her only two seconds to reach him. Presumably she knows a shortcut. Perhaps she slides down a firepole. Anyway, the negotiations go on, but fall apart again when Mindel learns his board have booked a new act. Hard to tell what the act is called — it sounds like “Barnum a& Bindle.”

SUDDEN LOUD JAZZ!

To be continued…

Unsound on Disc

So, I’m listening to the surviving soundtrack of lost film CLOSE HARMONY (but I would rather do THE TERROR or RETURN OF THE TERROR, whose Vitaphone discs I believe survive, if anyone can help) and I’m trying to mentally reconstruct the image track using audio clues.

Now read on…

Lots of creaking. Possibly musical instruments are being transported. Or possibly Charles “Buddy” Rogers is attempting to act. CLANG! “My trombone,” he explains, stressing the first syllable. Lots of hesitations in the dialogue, which I think would work well if you could see them carrying the “big horn” and the “awful big dru-um.” Buddy’s singsong Kansan accent makes drum a two-syllable word.

A soft background hum — we may now be in a car. I wonder if they’re attempting rear projection.

We learn that Nancy Carroll’s character is a successful nightclub singer. Buddy invites her to hear his band at the warehouse where he will now be storing all his band’s instruments.

The car noise fades out. New scene? loud jazz! Terrible singing — I guess it’s Nancy. “I want to go places and do things, with you.” Fiona suggests, “Could one of the things you do please not be singing?” Applause, sounding like a forest fire breaking out in a crisp packet.

Backstage dialogue: “Looks like you is in a pow’ful hurry tonight.” Some kind of accent there — Hungarian? Gusztáv Pártos is in the cast. But this is a woman. I think it’s the maid from the Tom & Jerry cartoons, the one who exists only from the shins down. I picture her mighty shins towering over little Nancy Carroll in that dressing room, giantess legs reaching way far up beyond the natural limits of such a tiny room’s ceiling.

Knock knock. “It’s me, Maxie Mindel. Are you decent?” “Oh no, wait a minute!” So we’ve been missing a nude scene as well as giant shins.

Harry Green, who made most of the films of his career in 1929 and 1930 before anybody found out, is Max Mindel, who says “I know I’m not good to look at,” and yearns for Nancy. A sympathetic schnook. I picture him peering round one of the maid’s enormous legs and making googoo eyes at Nancy. Nancy decides to recommend Buddy’s warehouse band to Max as an act for his nightclub, the Babylon.

Everything goes quiet. Then — LOUD JAZZ! And a perhaps optimistic attempt to play dialogue at the same time. Green/Mindel seems to be one of the speakers. I’m trying to get a visual image of a band playing in a warehouse (perhaps sitting on crates) but all I seem able to visualise is a sound guy frantically twiddling his knobs.

The band breaks up for the night — mass rhubarbing as they all say goodbye. This takes about ten seconds, which is a lot of rhubarb. Nancy tells Buddy she’s got him a try-out at the Babylon. “How can I ever thank you? Gosh!” Then someone laughs a sinister laugh, very far off in the distance. I think it might be jack Oakie but you can tell only so much from a distant laugh. Does this sinister chuckler herald doom for Buddy?

Then there’s an abrupt, high-pitched wail, like Sterling Holloway falling from a tree. But then Buddy goes right back to thanking Nancy as if nothing had occurred. Perhaps it was a dream sequence? A sort of mental association: when Nancy hears the word “Gosh!” she pictures an effete man becoming deforested. It could happen that way, for some people. You never know with women.

Buddy is tongue-tied. “What’s so scary about me?” asks Nancy. “Your face,” says Buddy, the best line of the film so far. I wonder if they used makeup to make Nancy’s face look scary, or if Cromwell just lit her below as he does to Dorothy McGuire in THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE. Hollywood’s idea of “plain” — walking around with a torch shining up your chin as if about to tell a ghost story.

There then follows twenty seconds of crackly near-silence, broken only by muffled breaths and the occasional vague click. Then Nancy says, “I’m beginning to gather your meaning, Mr. West!” We need little imagination to retroactively paint in the preceding action.

To be continued…

 

Sound on Disc

John Cromwell was first shipped out to Hollywood when sound came in, and it was felt that men with stage experience were needed to help the dumb actors talk. Of course, these new boys knew nothing of film technique — so Cromwell was paired up with A. Edward Sutherland (the former Mr. Louise Brooks) on the theory that Sutherland knew film grammar and Cromwell knew acting. Sutherland, in fact, was probably perfectly capable of handling his actors himself, whereas within a couple of films Cromwell had surpassed his partner in composition and camera movement. You either have the gift or you don’t.

CLOSE HARMONY (1929), the first Cromwell-Sutherland film, is now missing presumed lost. Nevertheless, I have not failed you, dear Shadowplayer. Am I not the man who, when devoting a year of his life to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, managed to review Hitch’s lost film, THE MOUNTAIN EAGLE, using the power of a woman’s dream? So, learning that the soundtrack of CLOSE HARMONY still survives on disc, I obtained a digital copy and sat down to enjoy it in audio form, applying my imagination to the problem of the missing mise-en-scene.

Of course, a film soundtrack, stripped of imagery, does not automatically become a coherent radio play. Not even a Kevin Smith film guarantees that. So the action of this movie takes a fair bit of mental reconstruction, and is perhaps more fraught with ambiguity than would have appeared at the time to audiences who could actually see it.

We begin with jaunty jazz music — the credits sequence, no doubt. Sutherland & Cromwell’s names would have appeared somewhere in here, along with stars Charles “Buddy” Rogers (a star from silents, notably WINGS) and Nancy Carroll (who also starred for the duo in THE DANCE OF LIFE) and the ingratiating Jack Oakie, already a veteran. Without titles, the tune seems to go on a long time and gets awfully repetitive — maybe it also covers the opening action? Suddenly voices break in — a conductor talking to his band — we’re present at a rehearsal! The light, pleasant voice sounds like Rogers as we hear him in talkies such as FOLLOW THRU and TAKE A CHANCE. Then a snooty lady breaks in and starts berating him: “Who gave you license to turn my house into a dance hall?” So we’re not in a theatre, as I had assumed, but somebody’s home. Rogers has apparently broken in and set up an orchestra in dead of night. The homeowner is understandably upset. But then she says, inscrutably, “Remember, you got a date. A business date with ME, Saturday.” We are three minutes in and this film seems more inscrutable than INLAND EMPIRE.

What seems to be a new scene begins with a slow, repetitive thunking sound. It’s either a ticking clock or a depressed man walking downstairs. This goes on for around forty seconds, making me suspect that possibly the image track was doing most of the heavy lifting here. It’s interrupted by the call of a cuckoo, so either it was a ticking clock or the staircase has led our downhearted protagonist out into a Viennese wood. I prefer the latter option, since as far as I can tell we haven’t had any exteriors yet, and I’m prone to claustrophobia.

No sooner has the songbird fallen silent than a fight breaks out, characterised by the sound of crashing furniture. What this stuff is doing out here in the woods I can’t say, so maybe we are inside after all. After ten seconds of this Donnybrook, Rogers’ voice rings out pleasantly with the words “Evening, Mrs. Prosser, hope I didn’t disturb you.” So that possibly we were not listening to a fight. I’m not even certain this is a different scene from the first one.

Mrs. Prosser, the same woman from before, snaps at Rogers some more, and I’m forming the impression that maybe he’s trying to sneak out of his rented accommodation. Then she starts yelling “Police! Police!” which either means I’m right, or the story has taken a surprisingly dark turn. This suspicion may be supported by the fact that her voice, though undimmed in emotion, suddenly gets much quieter. It’s possible that this signals the film cutting to a long shot, but I’m leaning towards the suspicion that the dastardly Rogers has zapped Mrs. Prosser with a shrink ray. No buddy, he.

Now an Irish-American policeman starts yacking and negotiates an agreement on the rent. Many exciting dramatic possibilities — shrink rays in the Vienna woods! — collapse into a bland singularity.

Then a well-spoken girl shows up — Nancy, I think — and pays the $35 Buddy owes. I’m assuming this is the girlfriend to the rescue, but the narrative takes a more intriguing turn when the supporting cast evaporate and Buddy remarks “You don’t even know me!” This is solid storytelling — the problem has been removed, but a mystery has taken its place. And I’d rather grapple with a mysterious Nancy Carroll than a problematic $35, even if I can’t see either one.

To be continued…